Besides the speed of sound, what else changes when the transmitting medium changes? Say from Oxygen to Hydrogen. I'm pretty sure the loudness does not change, but I think you would HEAR a change in pitch, because I think the wavelength changes when the transmitting medium changes. I don't think speed changes anything you hear. The main question is…. Can you hear a difference if you change the transmitting medium?
[Physics] Besides the speed of sound, what else changes when the transmitting medium changes
acoustics
Related Solutions
Slip and stick
The friction between your shoes and the floor is quite non-linear. As you put your foot down, your shoe comes under elastic strain as your foot moves forward but friction holds the bottom in place. This is the stick phase. As your foot moves forward, the strain becomes too big, and the friction between floor and shoe can't overcome it anymore.
The bottom of the shoe starts to move. The dynamic friction now is lower than the static friction before, which means the acceleration is rather large. However, the strain also dissipates quickly as the shoe flexes back to its original form. This slip phase is therefore also time-limited.
So, when you hear a high-pitched squeak, you're hearing your shoe stick and slip several thousand times per second, moving micrometers at a time.
Water definitely affects the static and dynamic friction, so that explains why it can matter. But note that there's no simple rule about the exact change in friction, and therefore adding water may also prevent squeaky noises in other situations (when it acts as a lubricant)
Because the frequency of a sound wave is defined as "the number of waves per second."
If you had a sound source emitting, say, 200 waves per second, and your ear (inside a different medium) received only 150 waves per second, the remaining waves 50 waves per second would have to pile up somewhere — presumably, at the interface between the two media.
After, say, a minute of playing the sound, there would already be 60 × 50 = 3,000 delayed waves piled up at the interface, waiting for their turn to enter the new medium. If you stopped the sound at that point, it would still take 20 more seconds for all those piled-up waves to get into the new medium, at 150 waves per second. Thus, your ear, inside the different medium, would continue to hear the sound for 20 more seconds after it had already stopped.
We don't observe sound piling up at the boundaries of different media like that. (It would be kind of convenient if it did, since we could use such an effect for easy sound recording, without having to bother with microphones and record discs / digital storage. But alas, it just doesn't happen.) Thus, it appears that, in the real world, the frequency of sound doesn't change between media.
Besides, imagine that you switched the media around: now the sound source would be emitting 150 waves per second, inside the "low-frequency" medium, and your ear would receive 200 waves per second inside the "high-frequency" medium. Where would the extra 50 waves per second come from? The future? Or would they just magically appear from nowhere?
All that said, there are physical processes that can change the frequency of sound, or at least introduce some new frequencies. For example, there are materials that can interact with a sound wave and change its shape, distorting it so that an originally pure single-frequency sound wave acquires overtones at higher frequencies.
These are not, however, the same kinds of continuous shifts as you'd observe with wavelength, when moving from one medium to another with a different speed of sound. Rather, the overtones introduced this way are generally multiples (or simple fractions) of the original frequency: you can easily obtain overtones at two or three or four times the original frequency, but not at, say, 1.018 times the original frequency. This is because they're not really changing the rate at which the waves cycle, but rather the shape of each individual wave (which can be viewed as converting some of each original wave into new waves with two/three/etc. times the original frequency).
Best Answer
The short answer is yes. Sound waves are greatly affected by the medium in which they travel, not just in terms of speed, but also in terms of loudness and tonal quality. Just think of the variation in loudness and sound quality of different acoustic guitars which may use the same strings, but the sound is greatly affected by the different media in which it travels, including the wood, sound cavities, even the varnish on the instrument.
By considering 'sound' as the result of the propagation of pressure waves through a mechanical medium such as any solid, liquid or gas, the 'speed of sound' can be shown to be a function of the elastic and inertial properties of the medium, such that:
$v=\sqrt{\frac{elastic~property}{inertial~property}}$
For example, the speed of sound through a gas with Bulk Modulus (elastic property) $B$ and volume density (inertial property) $\rho$, is given by:
$v=\sqrt{\frac{B}{\rho}}$
The speed of sound also depends on the temperature of the medium.
Now, the 'loudness' and 'pitch' of a sound are psychological phenomena which generally correlate to the physical phenomena of intensity and frequency, however there are some subtle differences, some of which relate to physiology of the ear drum.
The wavelength of sound changes with the medium, because it is proportional to the wave speed.
$v=f\lambda$
The frequency however is generally independent of the medium, although it can vary with the relative velocity of the sound source with respect to the observer, due to the Doppler Effect.
The 'pitch' heard relates to the perception of frequency of a sound vibration. It is dependent upon the physiology of the ear drum such as age. The relation between (perceived) pitch and frequency is not linear.
Also, the ear perceives sound not just in terms of loudness and pitch, but also tone quality (timbre) which is affected by the medium.
The intensity of a sound wave (power per unit area) is the rate at which the energy transported by the wave transfers through a unit area $A$ and is generally proportional to the volume density of the medium, so the more dense the medium, the more power per unit area (wave intensity).
The 'loudness' of a sound is not only a function of wave intensity, but of physiological conditions within the ear drum which affect the frequency response of loudness perception. This is typically characterised in the 'Equal Loudness Curve'.
The perception of sound qualities other than loudness and pitch are often referred to as 'timbre'. This encompasses effects of the sound 'envelope' (attach-decay-sustain-release) as well as spectral differences (relative weighting of harmonic content, combination tones and resonant characteristics) as well as temporal relationships such as reverberation. Timbre is heavily affected by different sound medium,
In summary, you can hear a difference if you change the sound transmission medium. Firstly in terms of loudness (eg: an acoustic guitar will) and secondly in terms of perceived pitch (which is affected by loudness) as well as timbre (tone quality) which, although somewhat subtle and difficult to detect through scientific measurement, is nonetheless perceptible and measurable by the human ear and through advanced digital signal processing techniques.