Into darkness, my old friend.

I've come to talk with you again.

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains

Within the sound of silence

Sounds move very very fast, faster than a runner or a car, so it goes very very far away.

"Everywhere, all at once. That's why if you put your ear close to speakers it might collect too much and that can hurt your ear"

The music stays there we keep moving

Let's assume the kid knows it's a recording. It's still a valid question.

Like where is the recording coming from when the kid asks Alexa to play a song?

I never thought about it, as I don't have kids, but must be a bit harder explaining a global IT-infrastructure than it was for my grandpa to explaining how a VHS works. On a generalised level, that is.

Oh, and while the king was looking down

The jester stole his thorny crown

The courtroom was adjourned

No verdict was returned

And while Lenin read a book on Marx

A quartet practiced in the park

And we sang dirges in the dark

The day the music died

Heat. Everything ends up as heat.

"Where do you think it goes?"

To retire on a farm upstate, unless my mom lied to me 🤔

It goes out into the world, to be merged alongside all of the other sounds, until it can be recycled as "new" music and you can enjoy it again:-).

Sound is just the vibrations of the air, so as music fades, the air calms. Echoes, reverberance, they are just a result of sound "dampening", and as each sound wave hits a surface that it reflects from the sound waves are also dampened.

So is the question where does music go? Or is it really, "where does silence come from?"

Tell him about the day that music died

it goes into your soul

the music goes back again to be later re streamed to other people that might need it

Oh, dear child, it goes to the same place where you will go when you inevitably die one day: into complete non-existence, save for an echo in others' minds, and after a while not even that.

Sweet dreams!

It diverges into the quantum realm of misheard lyrics.

It gets stuck in my head for 3 to 4 days until something newer comes along and pushes it out.

"Ultimately it increases entropy... let me tell you about the heat death of the universe..."

"No, Mom! I'm still afraid of the False Vacuum monster laying underneath my ground state!"

It goes on until it doesn’t? Seems like there’s a pseudo-scientific philosophical argument that it continues on forever at some quantum level?

It turns into memories and heat.

I'm not a scientist by a long shot, but my understanding is that sound if indeed a wave, carried by a medium (air, water, etc). Upon hitting your eardrum, this wave is converted by your eardrum and your auditory nerve into signals your brain decodes. The remainder of the wave continues though, until it runs out of medium, hits an obstacle (basically another medium) or dissipates. Again, just my layman's understanding!

Everyone knows this duh!

Into your heart!

In your ears