Sound Waves & Music: Making Your Own Instruments

Journey Of A Sound Wave

From vibrations to music, let’s track the journey of a sound wave:

• Vibrations: When you play a musical instrument, like a guitar or a drum, you make it vibrate. These vibrations create sound waves.
• Travel: The sound waves travel through a medium like air, spreading in all directions.
• Reaching your ears: When sound waves reach our ears, they make our eardrums vibrate, too.
• Brain Interpretation: Our brain interprets these vibrations as sound, allowing us to hear the music.

We define sound based on pitch and tone. Pitch is how high or low a sound is, and tone is like the quality or color of sound. It can be bright or dull.

 

Different Types Of Sound Waves

Different instruments create different types of sound waves based on how they produce vibrations. 

• String Instruments: When you pluck a guitar string or bow a violin string, it vibrates back and forth. 
  • The string’s length, tension, and thickness determine the sound’s pitch and tone.
• Wind Instruments: Wind instruments like trumpets create sound when a musician blows air into them, causing a column of air to vibrate. 
  • The length and shape of the instrument’s tube can determine the pitch and tone of the sound.
• Percussion Instruments: Instruments like drums & xylophones produce vibrations when struck or scraped. 
  • The instrument’s size, shape, and material affect the sound produced.

 

Making Your Own Instruments

Here’s how you can make a few simple musical instruments at home and hear how they produce different sounds

• Rubber Band Guitar: Take an empty tissue box and stretch several rubber bands of different sizes and thicknesses around it lengthwise. Pluck the rubber bands to create different pitches and tones.
• Water Xylophone: Fill glasses or jars with different levels of water. Gently tap each glass with a spoon to produce different musical notes. The glass with more water makes a lower pitch.
• Drum Kit: Use empty containers like coffee cans, oatmeal canisters, or buckets as drums. Use your hands or sticks to tap out rhythms and beats.
• Shaker: Fill a small container, like a spice jar, with rice, beans, or beads. Close the lid tightly and shake it to create rhythmic sounds.

 

Fun Facts

Here are some interesting facts about sound waves and music:

• Sound waves travel about four times faster in water than in air, so you can hear things from far away when swimming underwater.
• The longest pipe organ in the world has pipes over 64 feet tall and can produce incredibly deep sounds.
• The world’s largest xylophone is made of large, elevated wooden blocks that can be walked on to play different notes.
• An erupting volcano produces the loudest natural sound in the world.
• Sound waves cannot travel through space as there is no medium like air in space. 

Review

Let’s quickly recap what we learned about sound waves and music:

• What causes sound waves when you play a musical instrument? Vibrations 
• How do sound waves travel? Medium like Air
• What part of the body vibrates when the sound waves reach our ears? Eardrums
• What term describes how high or low a sound is? Pitch
• What term describes the quality or color of sound? Tone