v. perked, perkÂ·ing, perks. v.intr. 1. To stick up or jut out: dogs' ears that perk. 2. To carry oneself in a lively and jaunty manner.
However instead of crests and troughs, longitudinal waves have compressions and rarefactions. Definition 1: Compression. A compression is a region in a longitudinal wave where the particles are closest together. A rarefaction is a region in a longitudinal wave where the particles are furthest apart. As seen in Figure 1, there are regions where the medium is compressed and other regions where the medium is spread out in a longitudinal wave. The region where the medium is compressed is known as a compression and the region where the medium is spread out is known as a rarefaction.
A compressed sound file sacrifices some loss in quality (hence the term âlossyâ) as a tradeoff for a smaller footprint or file size. MP3 audio files are a perfect example. A 20MB wave file can be converted to MP3 format, resulting in a file thatâs just a few megabytes in size.