Explore a visual and auditory guide to wave properties and waveforms to learn how every sound imaginable can be created by combining multiple vibrations of air.

View a collection of sound animations, which depict how a source of sound waves pushes against particles to carry energy away without matter being displaced.

Interacting sound waves can create regions where the pressure from each wave combines, allowing objects to levitate in place against gravity or be manipulated for touch-free construction.

Try out an online tone generator, which produces sounds of specific frequencies to help tune instruments, test your hearing, and generate beats by overlapping tones.

We hear because soundwaves are converted into electrochemical signals in our ears

This science teacher video systematically walks through the biology of the outer, middle, and inner ear. The explanation starts with the auricle, an external part that funnels sound through the auditory canal, and the tympanic membrane (the ear drum), which vibrates when sounds hit it. Beyond that, as the video details, is the eustachian tube, which is connected to the back of our throats and allows air to pass in and out to equalize ear pressure.

When struck, objects vibrate at unique rates called resonant frequencies, which makes tapping wood sound different from tapping metal, but providing objects with sound at their resonant frequency can cause them to shatter.

By igniting flammable gas in a tube filled with holes and playing music into it, the fire will take the shape of the sound waves, enabling the visualization of audio.

Listen to the 'sounds' of the universe with this sonification library, where astronomers have transformed certain astronomical data sets into audio for broader engagement.

Wave-particle duality—a simple overview

Our notion of reality is built on everyday experiences. But wave-particle duality is so strange that we are forced to re-examine our common conceptions. Wave-particle duality refers to the fundamental…

Visualize the components of fireworks

This article provides animated diagrams depicting how different parts of fireworks function. The elements work together through timed mechanisms to produce desired effects.

Visualizing a synaesthetic soundscape

Artist Michal Levy has chromesthesia, a subtype of synesthesia in which sounds and music trigger involuntary associations with and sensations of color. This condition gives Levy a unique artistic perspective and ability to interact with and interpret music. In this short animation, Levy tries to capture her audiovisual experience of 'Giant Steps," considered a landmark composition in jazz history by musician John Coltrane.

Light waves can interfere and cancel each other out

When light waves travel past one another, their peaks and valleys combine, just as overlapping ripples in water can combine to form a larger ripple. When the peak of a light wave meets the valley of another of the same wavelength and brightness, the waves combine to produce no light.

Probability waves govern particles like electrons in the quantum space

Just as waves are extended objects whose heights change across space, quantum waves dictate that the probability of an object existing in different locations across space varies. Like water waves, the probability waves can combine, changing the heights—and therefore probabilities—in different locations.

A sound's pitch will seem to change if the listener or the source moves toward or away from the other because motion changes the time it takes each successive sound wave to reach the listener.

Tone Transfer recreates any piece of audio into instrumental recreations

Using machine learning models and Differentiable Digital Signal Processing, this tool can transform any 15-second sound clip into a flute, saxophone, trumpet, or violin reproduction. Researchers behind the open-source experiment hope the technology will enable musical creation through creative sound combinations.

Type out a tone and play it back with this fun game

Compose an original piece of music from your phone or desktop with this simple, super fun interface: Just start typing, discover the various sounds associated with each key or letter, and then press play. Go back, tweak, delete, and revise to your...

Variations in rapidly expanding gas and mechanical elements produce fireworks sounds

Chemical compounds designed to vibrate rapidly when ignited produce whistling, screeching sounds, while crackles and pops are created by small star pellets inside the firework, which explode one after another quickly. Fluttering and chirping sounds are produced by spinning elements that rotate rapidly as the firework ascends.

The four types of seismic waves—vibrations that carry energy generated by geological events, such as earthquakes—are categorized as body or surface waves.

The three smallest bones in the human body—the malleus, incus, and stapes—amplify the vibrations of sound waves by almost 20 times to help enable hearing.

With sufficiently sensitive hearing and powerful equipment, if a source of music traveled past someone at twice the speed of sound, they would hear the music backward.

Objects that move faster than the speed of sound—Mach 1—create shockwaves called sonic booms by building up and forcing sound waves to combine as they lag behind the object.

Fireworks make a loud booming sound after explosion due to air expanding faster than the speed of sound.

View 3D renderings of atomic orbitals created with quantum mechanics

Scientists use the Schrödinger equation to determine how a system governed by a wavefunction—an equation that predicts the probability of certain outcomes—evolves with time. Computers can animate atomic structure and behavior by depicting the wavefunction as a fluid that guides a particle, like water moving a speck of dust.

Listen to samples of 'sounds' produced in the sun's interior, created from the sonification of internal vibrations detected by the Parker Solar Probe.

View the quantum mechanical depiction of electrons as waves around the atomic nucleus

Unlike Bohr's fixed paths, the quantum model describes electrons as exhibiting behavior resembling standing waves—waves that have fixed points at the end while vibrating, like a plucked guitar string. Rather than determining their exact positions, only the probabilities of electrons being in a specific region can be determined.

Listen to the pair of colliding black holes detected by LIGO

As ripples in spacetime, gravitational waves do not produce sound, which is the perception of specific vibrations in matter (e.g., vocal cords vibrating air molecules). The "chirp" of gravitational waves comes instead from converting the spacetime ripples into sound waves that the human ear can hear.

The features that make our voices unique

Human voices are about as unique as fingerprints: similar instruments but with endless variations. We each produce sound in the same physiological way, but when we talk we’re dropping clues about who we are, what we do, and where we’re from.

A person's voice sounds different when breathing helium, sulfur hexafluoride, or gases other than air because the speed of sound varies with the properties of the material through which it travels.