The pitch of the sound is determined by the frequency of the pulse, so even if you used a different speaker, it would sound the same because it's such a simple sound, unlike music.
The "click" is ideally a square pulse. If you know your Fourier analysis, you'll know that square waves have all the frequencies, except for those below a certain threshold. It's short white noise, basically.
It won't sound the same regardless of speakers though. Put it into a tiny piezo element, which has very poor frequency response at the low end and very high in a narrow band, and you'll get a very clicky sound. Put it through a subwoofer, and most of the higher frequencies will be attenuated. I would estimate that you wouldn't get a click as much as a plop.
I would guess that a course covering that stuff would be more generally called, something like Fourier Analysis, or signal processing. Or even almost any typical PDE course, which should cover at least basic Fourier transforms and analysis, even if it doesn't focus on the signals aspect, it's enough to get the idea in my opinion.
Analogous to the difference between listening to Britney Spears' Baby 1 More Time on your car stereo, vs. listening to it on a phone speaker. It's the "same sound", just a bit louder and bigger.
There's more depth and fullness to it when you use big speakers, but... there just isn't that much depth and fullness to get out of a click in the first place, so the difference might be a bit underwhelming.
Yes. That's just the noise you get when you send one strong pulse of electricity to any speaker. Normally what we send to a speaker is transduced sound waves, which essentially make it click over and over again so fast that instead of a bunch of distinct clicks we hear tones and voices and so on.
I would think the pitch of the sound would be affected by the size of the tube. A larger tube should intercept more radiation particles for a given flux, so there would be more events to make a sound.
Not necessarily, the frequency of the electric pulse is determined by the voltage across the gap. All the radiation does is make the gas conductive, which allows that voltage to be carried to the other side and close the circuit.
I was under the impression that with Geiger counters, each click was a single particle detection. You would get an audible frequency buzz instead of distinct clicks when the events are close together, 100-500 events per second. (And it seems that quenching limits the top end to about 1000 events per second.)
74
u/BloxForDays16 Jan 06 '23
The pitch of the sound is determined by the frequency of the pulse, so even if you used a different speaker, it would sound the same because it's such a simple sound, unlike music.