I’m sure someone smarter than I in here can give the specifics, but yeah, they dissepate upward and even though they’re faint, experts say that all sound that has ever occurred is still in the atmosphere! Pretty cool, huh?

Yes they have already come back to haunt us as violent rap music.

@Open_Your_Mind – nice!

The aliens are still working on even louder sounds to send back at US…just you wait.

I don’t know but I think the FBI may have something to do with it.

The sounds are transmitted in waveform through some media (usually air) eventually these dampen out and dissipate. Some electromagnetic waves continue to propagate. The Milton Burle Show is about 50 lightyears away by now.

All the sounds once trapped by Earth’s atmosphere have leaked into space through
the hole in our ozone layer. In space they float around until encountering a black hole
(God’s vacuum cleaner). After being sucked into the black hole they are immediately
transformed into energy sounds which are beyond our technological capabilities to decipher.
It could happen…............maybe LMAO

Great lyrics, man! What’s the chorus??

@SirGoofy doo wa, do wa, do do do do kinda like that…...but not really.
More like MC Hammer’s Can’t Touch This.

As stranger_in_a_strange_land points out, sound waves require a medium in order to propagate. Since most of space (outside of our atmosphere) is a vacuum, there is no medium through which sound can travel.

If you’ve ever been at high altitude you can also detect this phenomena as the perception is that it is harder to hear things.

Radio frequencies, light, and electromagnetic waves vibrate at a much higher frequency, and their transmission properties are affected differently by atmosphere and the Ionosphere.

In general, sound energy is absorbed or dispersed outwardly from the source, and depending on its surroundings you can hear the energy change in echos and reverberation (say, in a parking garage).

@Open_Your_Mind you are aptly named

@SirGoofy that was a good one.

In space no one can watch Scream

The question was referring to SOUND.

Not radio or video signals.

The sound will “dampen out and dissipate.” As @stranger_in_a_strange_land said.
The excited molecules slowly loosing their uniformity of the vibration.

There is no sound in space.

I expect that dampen out and dissipate is as good an answer as any other, but another effect is the interference and cancellation of multiple sound wave interacting.

As for radio waves, while Milton Berle is still out there, the signal strength likely weakens to the point that it is indistinguishable from the cosmic background radiation. Which makes it highly unlikely that SETI will ever find anything, even if it exists.

@Snarp actually energy of sound waves combining has little to no effect on their volume, but the perception of sounds canceling ar interfering with each other (masking) is a perceptual phenomena. That is, to our ears, we perceive sounds blending, or covering up other sounds, but physically, energies combining have no effect on the energy or its tendency to dissipate or move through a space.

They became heat. Seriously. It’s the fate of all sonic energy. This is entropy, as stipulated by the second law of thermodynamics.

@sndfreQ So there’s no actual wave cancellation in sound?

Wave cancelation is a perceptual phenomenon in acoustic energy (sound in air), but electronically, it is possible (as in electrical currents and alternating currents of electrical signals).

At least that’s how I recall from my college years in audio engineering classes.

@sndfreQ I knew it worked electronically, but wasn’t quite up enough on the sound wave physics.

@Snarp: Pure-tone wave cancellation may be possible… but most sounds are so complex, that creating an exact match instantaneously is inconceivable.

Actually, @hearkat is 100 percent right, it can occur, however, it’s in a purely theoretical context, and rarely if ever is possible under most listening conditions.

The waves have to be identical, be exactly 180 degrees out of phase, and have the same amplitude and frequency; the remotest possibility for creating this would be with “pure” sine waves (which are not naturally occurring in nature and not very musical).

Also directionality of sound waves plays into that as well, as higher frequency waves tend to be more directional (their shorter wavelengths the current driver technologies which are mostly horn-based tweeters make for some very limiting constraints.

The listener has to be in a “sweet spot” to hear the phenomenon, and the space that this is happening has to be absolutely free of any room reflections (an anechoic chamber); the actual cancelation of energy can occur, but I suspect that in that process, the energy has to be converted somehow (absorbed?) into heat energy at the nodes (where the standing waves are created at the walls of the room?)...now my physics and memory are getting very foggy…

Under most listening conditions, and with most stereophonic sound, if the stereo image is to be preserved, many many factors can determine accuracy.

I have read all the responses and i have come to a conclusion. this country needs a New Music Revival. someone write one song that includes, r &b, heavy metal, love, oldies, rap, country and big band music. this song should satisfy all the above people.