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A Look At The Sound Of Music

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A Look at the Sound of Music As a college student, I have seen innumerable people walking by with their headphones in, using music to block out the rest of the world. With the convenience of an iPhone or other smart phone, listening to music has become so casual. With the press of a button, voila! Miley Cyrus is at the tips of your fingertips. It’s become so normalized that these same people seldom think about the science behind that noise in your ear. A disturbance in space results in a periodic wave which propagates through that space, usually transferring energy (“Introduction to Waves”). This transfer of energy can be explained by the conservation of momentum and energy in collisions. Momentum is never lost; kinetic energy may be lost. If kinetic energy is conserved, the collision was elastic; if the kinetic energy was transferred, the collision was inelastic.
Momentum is a vector, defined as p=mv, where momentum equals mass times the velocity at which the mass travels. The rate of change of momentum is that mass’s net force, defined as ∑▒〖F=∆p/∆t〗, where force is equal to change in momentum over a given time interval (“Lecture 12: Momentum”).
Mechanical energy is equal to the sum of kinetic (KE) and potential energy (PE), derived from the law of conservation of energy, which states that the total energy of a closed system is conserved (Tuckerman). Potential energy is energy that is associated with some force, and is thus dependent on its initial position. Potential

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