Relationship between pitch and physical properties of an object.
A lab in which students to demonstrate the quantitative relationship between the tone produced by a certain type of object (e.g., tubes with open or closed ends, tuning forks, bottles) and its length.
By the end of this session, students will be able to:
Decide which data to collect, including which variables to vary, which variables to control, and which variables to measure
Decide how to use equipment to make measurements including the amount of data to collect to obtain desirable uncertainty in measured values
Reflect throughout the process by plotting as data are collected and evaluating the methods and data
Draw inferences from analyses conducted
Present conclusions, claims, and outcomes as arguments that are supported by and follow coherently from experimental data
Experimentation Goals
These experimentation goals are most strongly represented in the explicit learning goals described above:
Student Decision Making
In this lab, students have the opportunity to:
Discovery
Determine results previously known to:
Duration
1 session of 2 hours
Equipment Required
Implementation Tips
Poster tubes are great. Thumping them on a carpeted floor is particularly good.
Advise students to keep track of the SAME frequency peak in different trials: sometimes a different frequency has the biggest peak for different lengths (the highest peak was the fundamental for one tube length but for another tube length, the highest peak is the first harmonic).
On the acoustics of tuning forks | American Journal of Physics | AIP Publishing
How This Fits in Your Course
This lab comes late in the third quarter of the intro lab sequence, so students are very experienced with experimentation-focused labs and need relatively little instruction. There is no prerequisite physics knowledge. The activity is enriched if they understand fourier transforms in a general sense, but it's fine if they don't.
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Rachel Scherr
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