Tenth Grade, Music Science Projects (13 results)
While everyone else is paying attention to what they see, maybe you're focusing on what you can hear. Explore the physics of sound, musical instruments, and even how people respond when they hear music.
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This is a great project for a musician who is interested in the physics of stringed instruments. If you've ever played an acoustic guitar, you may have noticed that picking a single string can make one or more of the other (unpicked) strings vibrate. When this happens, it's called sympathetic vibration. What intervals lead to the strongest sympathetic vibrations? Find out for yourself with this project.
Here's an interesting way to get some music into your science fair project. What predictions would you make about people with relative pitch?
The renowned pianist Vladimir Horowitz once said, "The most important thing is to transform the piano from a percussive instrument into a singing instrument." In this project, you will learn how you can make piano strings sing using sympathetic vibrations. Find out which notes make another one sing the longest by measuring their sound intensities using a smartphone equipped with a sensor app.
Does listening to classical music help or hinder concentration and performance on cognitive tasks? You'll need help from a teacher to design two short, age-appropriate worksheet tests for this experiment. The tests should be of equal difficulty. You'll also need the cooperation of several additional classroom teachers in order to test enough students (at least 50-100, see the Science Buddies resource: How Many Participants Do I Need?). Half the students will take test A while listening to…
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This is a rockin' project for guitarists with an interest in the physics behind the music. Have you ever wondered why the pitch of the note changes when you fret the string? You can find out for yourself with this project on the fundamental physics of stringed instruments.
In this project you'll learn how to make a piezoelectric pickup for acoustic guitar using inexpensive components. You can then connect your acoustic guitar to an amplifier, and record your own music. If you are interested in electronics and like playing acoustic guitar, this could be the perfect project for you.
In this project, you'll investigate the physics of standing waves on guitar strings. You'll learn about the different modes (i.e., patterns) of vibration that can be produced on a string, and you'll figure out how to produce the various modes by lightly touching the string at just the right place while you pick the string. This technique is called playing harmonics on the string. By the way, we chose a guitar for this project, but you can do the experiments using any stringed instrument, with…
Beats are a pattern of oscillating sound intensity (i.e., the volume of the pattern grows and fades with a regular cycle). They occur when two tones of almost equal frequency interfere. People can perceive beat frequencies below about 7 Hz. Figure out how to create sound files to play pure tones on your computer. Create files with a pure tone of one frequency in the left channel, and a pure tone of a different frequency in the right channel. Systematically explore different frequency…
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The banjo's roots trace all the way over to Africa. The unique sound that a banjo makes depends, in part, on the resonator. The purpose of the resonator is to amplify and project the sound that is made by strumming and plucking the strings. In this music science fair project, you will experiment with a resonator on a banjo and see if you can hear the difference in sound.
Helmholtz resonance, or air cavity resonance, refers to the resonance of air in a container with a small opening, like a plastic bottle or the devices shown in Figure 1. The resonant frequency of the air depends on the volume of the air in the container and the geometry of the opening (its length and cross-sectional area). The Helmholtz frequency is not the same as the natural frequency of an air column in a cylinder, where the opening is the same size and shape as the rest of the cylinder. …
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