Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Agenda
-How did class go on Monday?
-Waves on a string lab due
-Debrief and recap sound as a wave
-A few cool videos
-Sound waves and beats

HW for Friday
-Problem set three
-J.E. and F.Q. [I have no idea what this means, it was not referenced in class]

Waves on a string
-Waves on a string lab should be submitted online and you should have gotten a Moodle
e-mail with a link to submit it.
-You will receive feedback from Phil by e-mail within the next week or so.

Monday recap
-The goal of Monday’s class was to complete the sound as a wave lab.
-An important concept was octaves
An octave in physics class is a sound where the frequency is double of the last
frequency
EX. 200Hz
400 Hz
800 Hz
1600 Hz
Each is one octave higher than the last. All music in western civilization is based off of
dividing each octave into eight parts, each one being, of course, a note.

Sound as a Wave
The goal of the sound as a wave lab was to connect what you know about sound to
mechanical waves
-This lab was similar to the slinky lab, but with sound waves
- Sound waves are longitudinal waves despite the fact that on the computer they appear to
be standing waves. This is because the microphone uses a diaphragm to pick up the
sounds.

Learning from this lab

Amplitude –when hitting the same fork with increasing forces make the fork louder and
louder.
Harder hit=more amplitude=louder noise

Frequency –corresponds with pitch

High frequency=high pitch
Interesting point: human hearing is in a range from 20 Hz to 20 kilohertz
Graphs from the lab

What people expected to get

on their graphs:

What some groups

got on their graphs:

This happens when the tuning fork is hit too hard and the sound goes to the next
harmonic (when you hear a much higher pitch than what it should be.) this does decay
eventually though. The graph is showing the two pitches being imposed over each other
as if they were one.

Demo!
This demonstration shows how sound is energy

There is a container with water in it and Phil hits a tuning fork, asking everyone to lean in
close to see the barely visible reaction. When he sticks the fork in the water it splashes
and gets everyone wet. Duh! The sound is energy, agitates the water that splashes
everyone.

Videos!
-The first video is showing a metal plate on top of a speaker. The people in the video
sprinkle a bunch of white sand on the plate and play an ever-increasing pitch on the
speaker. The sand does patterns as it is pushed out of the way by anti-nodes.

-The second video is showing a lot of cotton (maybe Q-tips) vibrating to some sounds

Both videos are on the sound and waves section of the class page on Moodle, in the
waves and sounds link at the bottom of the page. The first video is definitely worth
checking out.

Tuning forks on a box

At this point Phil brings out two identical boxes with identical tuning forks on top.

X2

He uses these to illustrate two points

1) How sound is energy

Phil places them apart and hits one tuning fork, causing the other box to make
noise without ever touching it. This is resonance, and the waves are formed in one box
and go out to the other box where they resonate.

2) He puts a metal tab on one fork and then hits both, causing the sound to pulsate. This
is because the frequency is different and the sound from one is repeatedly synchronizing
and desynchronizing from the other. The pulsation is called beats.

New equation: fbeat=[f2-f1]

Sound waves and beats

Page 3-15

In this lab we calculated the frequencies of two different tuning forks and then the beat
frequency when they were recorded together
This involved using logger pro to get the:
-Number of cycles
-Change in time
-Period
Then you used these to calculate the frequency.
Our group used a green fork and a black fork the calculated frequencies were 320.7 Hz
and 260.57 Hz respectively.