Sound Nature

Very simply, sound is the vibration of any substance. The substance can be air, water, wood, or any other material, and in fact the only place in which

sound cannot travel is a vacuum. When these substances vibrate, or rapidly move

back and forth, they produce sound. As described in the How We Perceive Sound:

The Ear section, our ears gather these vibrations and allow us to interpret

them. To be a little more accurate in our definition of sound, however, we must

realize that the vibrations that produce sound are not the result of an entire

volume moving back and forth at once. If that were the case, the entire

atmosphere would need to shift for any sound to be made at all! Instead, the

vibrations occur among the individual molecules of the substance, and the

vibrations move through the substance in sound waves. As sound waves travel

through the material, each molecule hits another and returns to its original

position. The result is that regions of the medium become alternately more

dense, when they are called condensations, and less dense, when they are called

rarefactions.