What is Sound

People use sound all the time. We rely on sounds to communicate. Unexpected noises may warn us of danger. The sounds we hear tell us a lot about our surroundings. Many animals also use sound. This is especially true of animals that live in water. Since only the very top of the ocean receives light from the sun, animals have difficulty using their eyes to find their way around in deeper waters.

In fact, both of these pictures are right! Sound is a wave, similar to the ripples on a pond or the ocean waves you might see crashing on a beach. Instead of being a wave on the ocean surface, sound is a wave that travels through air or water.

The water that sound travels through is called a medium. A medium can be anything - a liquid (such as water), a solid (such as the seafloor), or a gas (such as air). Did you know that sound cannot exist if it doesn't have something to travel through? For example, sound cannot travel through outer space because it is a vacuum that contains nothing to carry sound.

Because waves move, you can think of a sound wave moving through water. Imagine a tiny section of the water as a particle. This water particle receives a tiny push, then a pull, as sound travels through it. This causes the water particle to vibrate backward and forward around the spot where it was before the sound wave came through. This spot is called its equilibrium position.

Water waves on the ocean surface are called transverse waves because the particles move up-and-down as the wave moves left-and-right. The particles in a twaveransverse  move perpendicular to the direction in which the wave is traveling. You can see this below in the picture of a pond. If a rock is thrown into the pond, it creates a wave. The water moves up-and-down while the wave moves away from where the rock landed. That is called a transverse wave.