Hear ye! Hear ye! I'm going to explain to you exactly how sound works, so listen up!

(Just a little sound humor for you.)

Imagine what happens when you drop a stone into a pool of water. Waves ripple out from the spot where the stone entered the water. Those water waves are similar to how sound waves travel through the air.

When you speak or shout, your vocal chords vibrate. These vibrations go out in all directions through the air as waves. When the waves reach our ears, they make our eardrums vibrate too, so we can hear the words.

But to get to our ears, sound waves need to travel through some stuff, like air, that can vibrate. Air is made up of particles, and these are what move to make the sound waves. The vibrating object, like your vocal chords, bumps the air particles next to it. They then bump the particles next to them, and so on.

Most of the sounds we hear travel through the air, but sound waves can also move through water, wood, and metal. You can test this out for yourself. All these things have particles that can vibrate. But if there's no particles, there's nothing to bump into, so sounds can't travel.