The response of an elastic system to an [[acoustic]] energy impulse describes a wavelet of several cycles of sinusoidal character. At the onset, the wavelet will be rich in all frequencies but the high frequency components are attenuated rapidly by transit through earth materials because of inelastic [[absorption]] and conversion to heat.
Wavelets are generated for each energy mode and the composite particle motion resulting from the [[compression wave|compressional]], [[shear wave|shear]], fluid, and boundary waves becomes the wave train with characteristics of the transmitting source, coupling, and the transmission media. See [[acoustic wave]] and [[wave train display]], also [[Stoneley wave]] and [[tube wave]].

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