Asine wave is acurve, acontinuous function with thisshape:
This is a picture of a sine wave.
Allwaves can be made byadding up sine waves. The sine wave has apattern that repeats. Thelength of this repeating piece of the sine wave is called thewavelength. The wavelength can be found bymeasuring the length ordistance between onepeak of a sine wave and the next peak. The wavelength can be found in many other ways too.
Waves are found everywhere in thenaturalworld. Examples of waves:
All of thesewaves are the sum total of many signals.
Sine waves have a "length" called awavelength. There are other properties of waves and sine waves, such as theirfrequency,amplitude,phase, andspeed.
Sine waves repeat over time, so this makes them periodic. The time it takes for a part of the sine wave (one cycle) to travel before it repeats itself is called theperiod, represented by the letterT. The frequency of a sine wave is the number of oscillations it makes in one second. This is measured inHertz, which have units of s-1. The frequency can be found by dividing 1/T (this is also called taking thereciprocal).
The amplitude of the wave corresponds to how powerful the signal is. For example, a higher amplitude in a sound wave means it is louder.
