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Question

Does the frequency of sound wave changes with the medium

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Solution

Frequency of sound wave doesn't change with the medium.

Because the frequency of a sound wave is defined as "the number of waves per second."

If you had a sound source emitting, say, 200 waves per second, and your ear (inside a different medium) received only 150 waves per second, the remaining waves 50 waves per second would have to pile up somewhere — presumably, at the interface between the two media.

After, say, a minute of playing the sound, there would already be 60 × 50 = 3,000 delayed waves piled up at the interface, waiting for their turn to enter the new medium. If you stopped the sound at that point, it would still take 20 more seconds for all those piled-up waves to get into the new medium, at 150 waves per second. Thus, your ear, inside the different medium, would continue to hear the sound for 20 more seconds after it had already stopped.

We don't observe sound piling up at the boundaries of different media like that. (It would be kind of convenient if it did, since we could use such an effect for easy sound recording, without having to bother with microphones and record discs / digital storage. But alas, it just doesn't happen.) Thus, it appears that, in the real world, the frequency of sound doesn't change between media.


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