This viewer raises a really interesting question and I’m gonna do my best to channel a Hank Green moment and answer it informally. That being said, believe it or not, I’m actually really bad at math so you probably have to check my numbers. There are two parts.
One is about perception. If a tree falls in the forest, the other has to do with the limits of sound. So while we can only hear up to about 20,000 cycles per second, there is an upper boundary to the highest frequency that air can support.
The molecules simply just don’t go that fast. It’s ridiculously high. I think it’s up in the gigahertz range.
But on the bottom end, there’s really no limit. As I’ve mentioned before, you can keep cutting things in half over and over. So while the boundary of our hearing may be around 20 cycles per second, an octave below that is 10.
An octave below that is 5. Pretty soon you hit one second, two seconds, and four seconds. Each one of those being an octave below the last.
If you start with a frequency of 20 hertz and go about 20 octaves below that, you end up with a frequency of about a week. And while you may not experience that as sound, you definitely experience that as weather.
