A friend asked this on facebook and I gave my best shot to answer it, but I was hoping someone with more experience may be able to provide a better answer:
"So, maybe someone knows someone with a good physics background can enlighten me, underwater sound travels 4 times as fast so our voices are distorted, can we not develop a sound processor to lower the frequency of our voice so it travels coherently underwater? If this were to work could we use it on unborns to accelerate the rate at which they understand language?"
(I have re order my OP so that these comments make more sense)
"Giving more thought to the first question, I think I understand what you are talking about better now.
I quite obviously don't have any physics background so hopefully someone better comes along and answers the question. Also, please excuse extremely laymen's terms.
There's a couple of issues here, although I am not say it's impossible.
1) Sound looses energy when changing materials (From liquid to solid or from low density to high density)
2)Viscosity effects sound absorption.
3)Sound scattering/reverberation
So here is the deal, in this case - using a transmitter to processes our voice to lower it's frequency so that it becomes audible for an unborn fetus to hear in the womb.
First is the obvious and that is the skin, muscle, organs and placenta each vary in densities, and even some vary in state of matter, vastly reducing the energy of the sound.
Secondly the viscosity of the placenta - it being rich in various minerals and is not just made up of water means that it has a high absorbtion of upper frequencies (which are the most important for audible speech)
Third is something the processor unit may be able to fix, however, reverberation, I'll let this quote sum up what I am trying to say: "For an acoustic signal to be detected easily, it must exceed the reverberation level as well as the background noise level"
-All that said means that processing the voice is only one small part of the total equation."
"...I really wanted to give an answer to this so I did a little (just a little) research, and what it seems is that speech and language are very complex thought processes that require multiple parts of the brain to understand and speak, as well as write. The cerebral cortex is only part of the whole, as speech also includes subcortical parts of the brain such as putamen.
Meaning that -maybe- only in the latest stages of pregnancy it might be possible, however, a lot - A LOT of first language learning requires the uses of other senses such as sight (and - believe it or not - smell), so it may not have much of an impact to start teaching as the childs brain hasn't developed well enough to process the complexities of speech, that coupled without the addition of the other sense."
Underwater Vocal Processing
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- KVRAF
- 2295 posts since 18 Oct, 2010 from Japan
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i should stay out of this,
water borne sound is frequency dependent (like an allpass filter). the high frequencies travel faster than the lower. over nontrivial distances this would be a nontrivial decorrelation.
that said, it's been done, schoolmate of mine holds a patent for it.
re: the unborn, this is where that "trivial distances" thing comes in handy. i really hate to see westerners throwing technology at issues that don't warrant it. tell your friend to take a look at teenagers and young people and ask himself, if young people tried to communicate with adults, would adults be capable of recognising it?
the problem here is the adult is more interested in inventing machines than in communicating with young people, because they might find out that the beneficial transference isn't in the direction they assumed.
what if an unborn person communicated but the adult was indoctrinated into a belief system that inhibited their awareness of the medium of communication? you know, i'm jus' saying, stranger things have happened
water borne sound is frequency dependent (like an allpass filter). the high frequencies travel faster than the lower. over nontrivial distances this would be a nontrivial decorrelation.
that said, it's been done, schoolmate of mine holds a patent for it.
re: the unborn, this is where that "trivial distances" thing comes in handy. i really hate to see westerners throwing technology at issues that don't warrant it. tell your friend to take a look at teenagers and young people and ask himself, if young people tried to communicate with adults, would adults be capable of recognising it?
the problem here is the adult is more interested in inventing machines than in communicating with young people, because they might find out that the beneficial transference isn't in the direction they assumed.
what if an unborn person communicated but the adult was indoctrinated into a belief system that inhibited their awareness of the medium of communication? you know, i'm jus' saying, stranger things have happened
you come and go, you come and go. amitabha neither a follower nor a leader be tagore "where roads are made i lose my way" where there is certainty, consideration is absent.
