Why do certain materials make more noise than others?

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For example, glass and metal dishes create so much noise that the gods would hear it, but plastic masks a lot of noise when I put dishes away.

In: Engineering

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

When an object is struck, its material absorbs the energy of the strike. Hard materials don’t give like soft materials do, so more of the energy is reflected back out of the material. That reflected energy is vibrational, so your ears pick it up and you hear it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Typically it’s a matter of the material’s elasticity. The more elastic it is (that is, the more it tends to bounce back to its original state when deformed, like metals and glass which dont’ like to be deformed) they’ll create more noise (which is just vibrations in the air) as a result of being struck.

Soft plastics, like tupperware, typically have a more muffled sound on impact than say a crystal wine glass, or a metal bowl.

Some materials are so elastic they’ll generate resonating sound just by rubbing them. Search youtube for “aluminum rod sings” for an example of this.

Anonymous 0 Comments

https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia_of_music/C/C.html

On an 88 key piano, middle C has a frequency of 261.621Hz (cycles per second) based on a reference frequency 440Hz for the A above middle C.

From C4 to C5 it is double the frequency, from C4 to C3 it’s half the frequency. There is a pic in the link above.

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ELI5: Basically, I would imagine some objects sound louder than others depending on how many times the sound waves are able to bounce off a certain material (glass, plastic, etc).

How this is determined I have no idea how. I’m actually just guessing.

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According to this link: https://pages.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html

Speed of Sound = 345 m/s = 1130 ft/s = 770 miles/hr