Thank you for using rssforward.com! This service has been made possible by all our customers. In order to provide a sustainable, best of the breed RSS to Email experience, we've chosen to keep this as a paid subscription service. If you are satisfied with your free trial, please sign-up today. Subscriptions without a plan would soon be removed. Thank you!

Bounded waves

Speech is what separates humans most decisively from animals. No other species can master syntax, and even though chimpanzees can learn a vocabulary of hand signs, there is an unmistakable difference between a human infant and a baby chimp: starting from birth, the human experiments with the production of complex speech sounds.

Since speech sounds are instinctive for us, we seldom think about them consciously. How do we do control sound waves so skillfully? Mostly we do it by changing the shape of a connected set of hollow cavities in our chest, throat, and head. Somehow by moving the boundaries of this space in and out, we can produce all the vowel sounds. Up until now, we have been studying only those properties of waves that can be understood as if they existed in an infinite, open space. In this chapter we address what happens when a wave is confined within a certain space, or when a wave pattern encounters the boundary between two different media, as when a light wave moving through air encounters a glass windowpane.

a / A diver photographed this fish, and its reflection, from underwater. The reflection is the one on top, and is formed by light waves that went up to the surface of the water, but were then reflected back down into the water.

Eli Priyatna 17 Jun, 2011

--
Source: http://basistik.blogspot.com/2011/06/bounded-waves.html
~
Manage subscription | Powered by rssforward.com