elastic solid, the value of is usually a vector that gives the current displacement from of the material particles that would be at the point in the absence of vibration. For an electromagnetic wave, the value of can be the electric field vector , or the magnetic field vector , or any related quantity, such as the Poynting vector . In fluid dynamics, the value of could be the velocity vector of the fluid at the point , or any scalar property like pressure, temperature, or density. In a chemical reaction, could be the concentration of some substance in the neighborhood of point of the reaction medium. For any dimension (1, 2, or 3), the wave's domain is then a subset of , such that the function value is defined for any point in . For example, when describing the motion of a drum skin, one can consider to be a disk (circle) on the plane with center at the origin , and let be the vertical displacement of the skin at the point of and at time . Wave families Sometimes one is interested in a single specific wave. More often, however, one needs to understand large set of possible waves; like all the ways that a drum skin can vibrate after being struck once with a drum stick, or all the possible radar echos one could get from an airplane that may be approaching an airport. In some of those situations, one may describe such a family of waves by a function that depends on certain parameters , besides and . Then one can obtain different waves — that is, different functions of and — by choosing different values for those parameters. For example, the sound pressure inside a recorder that is playing a "pure" note is typically a standing wave, that can be written as The parameter defines the amplitude of the wave (that is, the maximum sound pressure in the bore, which is related to the loudness of the note); is the speed of sound; is the length of the bore; and is a positive integer (1,2,3,...) that specifies the number of nodes in the standing wave. (The position should be measured from the mouthpiece, and the time from any moment at which the pressure at the mouthpiece is maximum. The quantity is the wavelength of the emitted note, and is its frequency.) Many general properties