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Barry_Cotter comments on Open Thread, July 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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How exactly is sound additive? I'm having a festival near home (maybe some 2 kilometers away) and I know no individual has the capacity to shout at a volume that reaches my house. But when the 80k people that are watching do it, then it reaches my house. So, how does that happen?
Not a real answer.
Sound is measured in Bels. This is a logarithimic scale. 2 Bels is 10 times as loud as 1, 3 ten times as loud as 2, etcetera. Since sound is a wave I expect the intensity to diminish at constant*(inverse square of distance).
Arbitralily say each individual emits 1 unit of sound.
80,000/(2,000^2) = 0.02 Magnitude of arbitrary unit is 0.02 at 2km 80,000 / (1000^2) = 0.08 Magnitude of arbitrary unit is 0.08 at 1km
Basically it's an example of an inverse square law. No real understanding of physics was used in this comment.
This was more specific than I imagined, thank you. The basis intuition should be that dropping two rocks on a pond makes two waves that collapse onto each other and form one bigger wave, right?