Sound

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sonar, or sound navigation and ranging, uses reflected sound waves to map and detect seafloor features, marine organisms, and other obstacles.

Noise-canceling headphones use a microphone to identify external sounds, which are then used to produce an out-of-sync version of those sounds to cancel them in your ears.

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.

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.

The decibel scale measures sound intensity, with hearing damage occurring after prolonged exposure to sounds above 85 decibels—equivalent to a noisy lawnmower.

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.