Thanks for educating us. As a non-physics person, I just learned the reason why sound will travel faster in air and solid as compared to liquid. However, I really use to think that molecules of solids are more tightly packed than liquid. SO, it seems I've been wrong all this while?
First of all I hope you are well, thank you very much for your visit to my article, to answer your interesting question or concern let me quote the following paragraph of my article:
Clearly we can see how the speed of sound is different in the three material media mentioned above, therefore, the sound has a higher propagation speed in solids (from 14.7 to 17.6 times more than in air, for example glass), if we move to liquids, in this case water, the sound has a propagation speed of 3.79 times more than in air, my dear friend this comes to express that in the air sound waves or sound rays propagate more slowly than in solids or liquids.
In Figure 3 of this article we can observe the above, that is, in solids, due to the approximation of its component particles, sound travels with greater speed, and when these particles are separated, the sound waves decrease their propagation speed, this explains how in the example described above on air, water and glass, the speed of sound propagation in water is lower than in glass, and in air sound travels even slower than in the previous two media.
When sound waves propagate from a source of sound emission to a certain receiver they may encounter different material media other than air and this makes us begin to know other types of phenomena such as absorption, reflection, refraction, among others, but we will continue to expand on this in future presentations.
The following is an illustrative representation of the propagation of sound in the above-mentioned media.
I hope I have clarified your interesting question. Greetings.