Respiratory sounds
specific sound generated by the movement of air through the respiratory system
Respiratory sounds, also known as lung sounds or breath sounds, are the specific sounds generated by the movement of air through the respiratory system. These may be easily audible or identified through auscultation of the respiratory system through the lung fields with a stethoscope as well as from the spectral characteristics of lung sounds. These include normal breath sounds and added sounds such as crackles, wheezes, pleural friction rubs, stertor, and stridor.
Description and classification of the sounds usually involve auscultation of the inspiratory and expiratory phases of the breath cycle, noting both the pitch (typically described as low (≤200 Hz), medium or high (≥400 Hz)) and intensity (soft, medium, loud or very loud) of the sounds heard.
Normal breath sounds
Normal breath sounds are classified as vesicular, bronchovesicular, bronchial or tracheal based on the anatomical location of auscultation. Normal breath sounds can also be identified by patterns of sound duration and the quality of the sound as described in the table below:
Abnormal breath sounds
Common types of abnormal breath sounds include the following:
Continued
Rales: Small clicking, bubbling, or rattling sounds in the lungs. They are heard when a person inhales. They are believed to occur when air opens alveoli. Rales can also be described as moist, dry, fine, and coarse.
Rhonchi are coarse rattling respiratory sounds, usually caused by secretions in bronchial airways.
“Respiratory sounds” enters the record as specific sound generated by the movement of air through the respiratory system. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Respiratory, sounds and specific can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q779038. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Respiratory sounds” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.