Sound Wave activities and resources

Goldie feeling vibrations (from music coming out of the speakers) pass through a balloon

Some sound wave resources: 

Video about a wave machine that makes the biggest (manmade) waves in the world

Animations that show how sound is a pressure wave. When you see the waves so often simplified visually into sine waves, it's easy to forget what kind of waves they really are!

This video explains harmonics and overtones, two things I have always struggled to understand. Maybe if I were a violinist I'd have gotten it earlier!

This virtual oscilloscope is really cool

This is amazing: scientists using standing waves to levitate objects (called acoustic levitation).

And here are some beautiful patterns made with resonance

This video shows the ever-popular trick of breaking a glass with sound. You can see the waves forming in the glass in some of our pictures here,

This lady does overtone singing—or in other words, singing two notes at once! It is eerie and beautiful and amazing. I can't believe she can do this!!

Here's a video about some high amplitude sound research going on at BYU

Here are some wave activities we did as part of our Water Unit

We also investigated interference effects and other wave properties of light (part of our Light Unit)

This site will tell you how to make a string telephone. Except it never works very well, in my experience.

These pictures show an activity did where we investigated the sound-absorbing properties of different materials. (Something like this.) We stuffed various materials into containers and then listened to which were the most "muffling."