ABSTRACT
"Architecture is frozen music." When Friedrich von Schelling wrote that, he was being poetic. The scientific truth is if there were such things as frozen music, or any kind of sound, it would be pressure. This is usually air pressure, but it can also be pressure in water, wood, or anything else that conducts sound. The eardrum vibrates in response, and the vibration is carried across tiny bones to a canal filled with nerves. Different nerves are sensitive to vibrations at different speeds, so they tell the brain how fast the vibrations are occurring. Those nerve messages—about the speed of the vibrations and how strong they are—are what we hear as sound. A microphone converts sound pressure into electrical voltage. If we connect the microphone to an oscilloscope—a A B device that displays a graph of voltage changes over time— we can see the wave with considerable detail.
