1. Sound Basics: Propagation, Amplitude, Frequency and Timbre By Ximena De Ario

2. Introduction Hey guys! My name is Ximena De Ario and Im from Mexico. I have a Bachelors degree in Communications and audio was always my favorite topic and music my passion. A little bit about me, I used to be in a metal band when I was younger no judging! and have loved performing and making music ever since. Today Im going to give you a quick and broad overview of the 4 basic sound properties: Propagation, amplitude, frequency and timbre. 3. Propagation First things first, propagation. Propagation is sound moving through a medium via a sound wave. The medium can be anything: air, water and even plasma. Remember that phrase from Alien, In space no one can hear you scream? well, its true. Space is a vacuum, so sound doesnt propagate. In the air, sound moves in longitudinal waves but often well see them depicted as transverse waves in an oscilloscope on our DAW. Sound travels at 1 mile per five seconds in the air, but this can depend on pressure, temperature and altitude. 4. Propagation 5. Amplitude Like I mentioned before, sound moves in waves. A wave has certain properties and one of them is amplitude, which is graphically how tall the wave is. In reality its the size of the vibration and it affects how loud a sound is. We shouldnt confuse amplitude and loudness though! Amplitude is something that can be measured while loudness is just how we perceive it. Speaking of measurements, amplitude is measured in decibels. Measuring amplitude in the air is normally done with dBSPL or Decibels of Sound Pressure Level, while in the digital domain we use dBFS or Full scale. 6. Frequency Frequency is kind of self explanatory in a way. The number of cycles per second or how frequent the cycles are. High frequency sounds have more cycles than low frequency ones. Just like amplitude, frequency is often confused with pitch. But once more, pitch is just the human perception of frequency, as opposed to being something measurable. By the way, frequency is measured in Hertz (Hz) and the range of human hearing is between 20Hz to 20KHz. 7. Amplitude and Frequency 8. Timbre Timbre is also called tone color or tone quality. Its what makes a particular sound different from others. To make it easier to grasp, its what makes us differentiate between a piano and a harmonica playing the same note. Since sound waves are complex, different overlapping harmonics reach our ears and hence we can tell which is which. 9. Conclusion Those are the four basic properties of sound and while they are all part of the complexity of the phenomenon, they are independent and that makes meddling with sound a lot more fun. 10. Video 11. Reflection I definitely embraced the concepts a lot more after making this presentation and video since I had to go over it time and time again. In any case, I had a lot of fun making it and hopefully you enjoyed it too. Thank you for watching my video assignment guys! I hope you found it interesting and enjoyed my shenanigans. Have a great day! Peace! :)