Once a string, for example, is plucked it shakes around and shakes the surrounding air. Next, The air jiggles in all directions at a particular frequency (picture a slinky where one end is constantly shaken). Now anything that this pressure wave hits will also start jiggling, but as it starts moving, friction in the material prevents it from jiggling at a fixed frequency...i.e. the sound becomes dull. As an experiment, strike the table. Initially, you hear a sound, but that sound quickly becomes dull...that's the pressure wave dissipating due to the frictional forces in the table. So where does the energy go? It gets converted to heat! Of course, you can't sense the temperature change because the heat that's generated is so small.
Walter is right. Put more simply: Throw a pebble in a pond. The ripples where the pebble hit are the largest. As it moves out, however, it gets more and more spread, til you can't even tell it's there. The energy is still moving, but it's losing a bit of itself every time it affects something, and it's being affected by everything around it.
Sound is just the motion of molecules of air. Like heat it dissipates as entropy increases.
it depends on the situation but it would be converted into a different type of energy
So what happens to sound after it has been made? What is it converted to?
