Experiment with Sound

Today in Grade 9 we went outside. I’ve been waiting for a nice day, and we sure lucked out today. The snow is almost all melted, and we were ok with no coats.

The task today was all about data collection and graphing. Each group had a bottle (with straight sides) full of water, and a device with a frequency measuring app. The one I’ve always used is apparently not in any app store anymore, but there are a bunch of free apps that work. Students had been tasked with learning how to make a noice by blowing over a bottle’s opening for homework. Some had success! Today we are looking for the relationship between the height of the air column and the frequency of sound produced when blowing over the mouth of the bottle.

We started with an almost full bottle, measured the height of the water, measured the height of the air, measured the frequency, then repeated to fill in a data table.

We got partway through making graphs and answering follow up questions, and will need to keep working on the analysis tomorrow. It was such a nice day for an outdoor experiment!

Some keen students want to try to play a song. We’ll have to do some tuning tomorrow to see what’s possible.