How exactly does an echo happen...

Obviously, sound is reflected by a surface.
By what mechanism does this happen exactly?
Rather than link me to some wiki on reflection, could you describe it artistically to me?  If I were to imagine the sound being reflected, what would I be imagining?

>>1

You'd imagine tennis balls bouncing off the wall.

imageine a dark space, in the middle of this space is a little speck of light, suddenly, a wave of light start rolling from the speck, spreading like a ripple from a drop of water, the ring spreads further, suddenly there is an unseen wall, when the ring hits this unseen wall, it will be deflected, basically creating a part of a ring(the part the hits the wall) which instead of going outwards is now going inwards, but still spreading. where as the rest of the ring (that which did not hit the wall) will continue to spread outwards

Imagine you have a still bucket of water, then you drop a rock in the center; a wave spreads out and eventually hits the side.  Now the wave doesn't just die, you've got a bunch of water smashed up against the side of the bucket that needs to go somewhere, so it reflects back in the direction in which it came.  Try it, I'm sure you can find a bucket, a rock and some water.  Sound is essentially similar, but in three dimensions, and sound waves are Longitudinal whereas water waves are a combination of transverse and longitudinal waves.

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niggers

What if you bounced a duck off a wall?

>>6
The duck is too soft and you would only have about a 40% elastic collision.  I recommend babies; they bounce good.

Drop a small object (say some pill) into a glass (or a bowl) of water. A wave will extend from the spot where the object hit the surface, hit the walls of the glass, then be reflected. The wave loses amplitude all the time (which you wouldn't notice of course, would it not be reflected to you) thereby resulting in a weaker sound reflected to you. Ahh, just drop the pill into the glass.

Sound is air bouncing into other air molecules making them move and bounde into another molecule and so on and so forth. When it hits something with more resistance it bounces in the other direction instead of transferring kinetic energy.

Okay, imagine someone sounds a horn about a meter behind you.
In front of you is a hard solid wall. Open space everywhere else.
Now when that horn sounds, the sound waves from it can either travel directly to you (which you would hear as the "original sound"). Or it could travel to the wall and reflect off back to you. In the second case, the sound has to travel a greater distance and will thus get to you slower. If it gets to you slow enough (more than 1/10 sec than 1st sound), you will hear this second sound as an echo.