... whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you! - Echo, what is it?

renzoarg (68)in #science • 7 years ago

In the sense that I interpret as the antipodean for "common", I've always considered that there's a hint of sanity in, once in a while, talking to oneself.

I believe it is like playing alone, as an adult; but, not only alone: alone, bored and permanently tired. The thing is that we grow up and start wearing a dress shirt instead of T-shirts, drink coffee instead of hot chocolate, we count mentally instead of with out fingers and... attempting to attach ourselves to the smallest piece of innocence we may find around, we end up diving into it, very, very deep.

Talking is as beautiful as, depending on the reverberation (that silence that is very needed to make two sounds be two, and not one), wrong. Yes, I also am annoyed by technicalities, but -believe me- they pay better than poetic licencing; and being a grown up, money matters in life.
The problem revolves around: Sometimes you're not talking alone, you're talking to yourself, the beauty about this technicality is that for this to happen we need something everyone knows that exists.
When you are the sender and the receiver of a sound that has several other sounds as background we find: The echo.

Briefly said: Eco is the repetition of a sound by the reflection of its sound waves.

There is a prettier, more complex way to state that previous sentence.
In the shape of a song.
There's an Ancient Greek myth, that place full of sex, gods and long haircuts, Echo was a very beautiful woman, friendly. A woman only pronounced the most beautiful words that ever existed, words that were never pronounced before. (This was highly subjective, since she had a voice that sugar coated whatever she said).
The thing is, Zeus -downgrading as a common mortal pleb- fell for the charms of this woman... Hera, Queen of gods, 1st Lady of the Olympus and logically... Zeus' wife, found out that He was cheating on her and punished Echo by condemning her into never being able to start a conversation. From that moment she was only able to repeat the last word that wsa spoken to her. She was bound to always to replicate, Echo decided to outcast herself from people.

Lets go back to reverberation. Yes, we already know that Nymphs are seductive, just like sirens and do make us strand ourselves from our main path.

If we want echo to be able to perform its magic we need a certain distance, this depends wether if the sound is human voice or not. When it is not, we can work with 17 meters (~55.77 ft), a tree falls, it makes a noise, you hear it, reject that zen proverb... and hear it again.
But when we talk about a human voice, the distance for echo to exist goes up to, at least, 34 meters (111.74 ft... I'm loving how weird the numbers are; converted into that measuring system that only 3 countries in the world use!) to clearly hear the reflection of it.

In a second a certain amount of syllables may be heard. Sound, in that second, would travel 340 meters (do the math yourself now). We need at least 34 meters so that sounds do not overlap and mix, this is a decimal of a second.
So: that is the distance and time that we need to "talk to ourselves", or to Echo.

Of course, you need a large surface to do this, and it will not work in your house if you are not a rather rich person. What you "can" do... Is attempting perform the experiment using the elevator shaft. do not worry, nobody will call you childish... If they can't see you.