How do sound waves carry speech from a speaker to a listener’s ear?

Speech is produced when air expelled from the lungs passes through the vocal tract, where movements of the vocal cords and other articulators create variations in air pressure. These variations propagate outward as sound waves, which are mechanical disturbances consisting of alternating regions of high pressure (compressions) and low pressure (rarefactions).1234

As these waves travel through the air, they cause nearby particles to vibrate back and forth in the direction of the wave's movement, effectively passing the disturbance from one particle to the next until it reaches the listener’s ear. Upon reaching the ear, these pressure fluctuations strike the eardrum, which responds to the incoming frequencies. The mechanical vibrations are then transmitted into the inner ear, where the cochlea converts the physical energy of the sound into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain for interpretation.3425