The Mathematics of Sound

A short tour of a few equations, narrated with spoken math and word-level highlighting.

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Sound waves can be described with surprisingly simple mathematics, and VocaSync reads the equations aloud.

A single tone

A pure tone is a sine wave. We can write it as , where is the amplitude and is the frequency.

Energy

The energy carried by a wave grows with the square of its amplitude. In other words, .

Adding waves

When two tones combine, their amplitudes add together:

Listen as each equation is spoken and highlighted in time with the narration โ€” the whole expression lights up as it is read.