Growing up, I thought adults who said “nor’easter” were bad at saying “northeaster”. I was wrong.

Just about all nor’easters—a sort of winter tropical storm, for those not from New England—count as blizzards. But a blizzard is more than a bad snowstorm. It’s a winter storm with high winds and enough snow in the air to keep visibility fairly low for at least three hours. Since light bounces off snowflakes, the more snow in the air, the closer something has to be for most its light to get to you without being bounced all over the place first. Whether that snow came from the clouds or it was picked up from the ground by wind doesn’t come into play in defining the storm.

Snow muffles sounds just as it bounces light, but for a different reason. The coordinated vibration of molecules that forms a sound jiggles water molecules in the snow around and becomes random vibrations (heat). (Also, winter storms tend to have funny temperature distributions that refract sound upwards and away from our ears.) During a blizzard, with howling winds and sound-absorbing snow everywhere, you can only hear really loud stuff from afar—loud stuff like thundersnow.

But sounds dissipate with distance even without snow. Some of the coordinated vibration of a sound wave always turns into heat as sound travels through the air. Higher frequencies are especially susceptible: They start with more rapid vibrations at the outset, so it’s easy for those to get out of sync and become random noise. Also, it takes more energy to sustain more rapid vibrations, so the sound runs out of energy sooner. This means treble dissipates too quickly to be heard from a great distance. The farther you are from something, as a result, the lower-pitch it tends to sound. (Side note: This is also why people who live upstairs from you always tend so sound like they’re stomping and grunting rather than squeaking.) (Second side note: This is tangentially related to something I talked about for the Museum of Science [24:17 in that video is the question and then my answer], where you can tell the angle of a lightning bolt from the sound of the thunder.)

What’s true for natural processes is also true for natural processes that humans have a hand in—there’s nothing to be gained in separating us from nature, after all. So if you’re far from an outdoor concert, you’ll hear more bass drums, low voices, and low guitar chords. And if you’re close to a tank when it fires out of the big barrel, you’ll hear a wide spectrum of noises. But if you’re a ways away, you’ll mainly hear a boom. Hopefully you’re far away in the right direction.