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Passing planes and other whoosh sounds

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Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds

#7
I'm just armchair musing here, and I'm definitely no expert on sound waves, but I wonder if they considered the fact that most airliners have more than one engine. Could the effect also be the superposition of multiple engine sounds?

Those have a fixed spatial distance, too, and the effect would (I suppose) change with the lateral angle to the listener during the fly-by. This theory should be pretty easy to falsify, because then the effect would not occur if the plane's path went exactly overhead.

Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds

#8

> it's like the pitch goes down at first, but when the plane has passed us, the pitch goes up again. That's not how Doppler works! Call me a dummy, but this was exactly how I thought Doppler works.

Let's say the mistake is understandable, because it happens to coincide with the observation of a passing jet. ;) I guess that's why Doppler explanations nearly always use an ambulance as their example.

Re: Passing planes and other whoosh sounds

#10
post #7

I'm just armchair musing here, and I'm definitely no expert on sound waves, but I wonder if they considered the fact that most airliners have more than one engine. Could the effect also be the superposition of multiple engine sounds? Those have a fixed spatial distance, too, and the effect would (I suppose) change with the lateral angle to the listener during the fly-by. This theory should be pretty easy to falsify,…

For that, the pressure waves (sound) coming from the engines would have to be somewhat coherent, or correlated in phase. Since what we're hearing is essentially turbulence, that's not going to be the case.
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