Third time I’m retyping this due to stupidity, so I’m going to make it short.
Why does it sound like soundwaves increase in frequency as you get farther away from their source? I’m not talking about the Doppler effect, though I suspect they may be related. I mean the phenomena that causes a song I hear in my room to sound lower by an estimation of at least a semitone and several BPM slower than the same exact song when heard from my bathroom, 12 feet away.
I asked my physics teacher about this, and he said it’s not something he ever noticed, and that perhaps I was more sensitive to it due to my experience as a turntable deejay where slight shifts in frequency must be closely monitored.
Does the frequency of the sound actually change, and if so, why doesn’t this fuck up radio transmissions?
Is it simply an illusion that has something to do with focus, similar to how things seen out of the corner of your eye appear to move faster than those in your direct line of sight?
And most importantly, am I just being a titchy audiophile who should be concerning himself with more important issues, such as the sanctity of marriage?
When they strike an edge, like a doorway, sound waves are diffracted, or bent. Long waves (lower tones) are diffracted more than shorter waves (higher tones), so you tend to hear the lower range when you are a few rooms away from the source. If your source was unobstructed by walls and furniture, you wouldn’t hear this effect.
Not only diffraction but absorption as well. Low waves are absorbed less by walls which means that you hear more bass relative to treble which could lead you to the impression that it sounds slower.
Both of you answered why a sound might sound lower in picth at distance but the OP said he heard distant sounds at a higher pitch.
I don’t think you are hearing a pitch change. I think you are hearing a different distribution of the sound spectrum that is biased toward higher pitches. My WAG is that the ability to hear low pitches at low volumes may be less than for high pitches but this isn’t my area of expertise.
This can happen with radio, particularly with AM which is subject to varying sound quality with different atmosphere conditions. Much less so with FM because of how the audio signal is encoded in the carrier signal.
