The Sounds We Create

In the second unit of my promptly named class "Light, Sound, and Time", we took a deeper look into sound and how it works. Usually in my projects, I try to become the teacher to tell you about how to do things for yourself but this time I will be showing you what I learned and hope that I can make enough sense. We started out by asking "what is sound?". Just based on prior knowledge and a little help from the past unit, we decided that sound is a wave. Sound is a wave yes, but what else is it? Sound is more than a transfer of vibrations, at least for humans. Take music for example, no matter what it is it has an effect. Whether it's a beautiful melody, a loud guitar solo, or literally nothing. During the unit we talked about music constantly. Through the middle of the unit we talked about the math behind how fast sound is and can be. Believe it or not, but sound is affected by everything in its surroundings. Sound travels fastest through solid matter, slowest through gasses, and can't travel at all in space. We talked about what air is better for sound, how an echo works, and what happens when we are faster than sound (look up the Doppler effect). I know didn't do the full class justice in that explanation, but after the math portion we went back to the beginning and asked what we learned. For this action project we are showing how a normal object uses what we learned.

"D-Bow" CDH, 2021

Remember how I said we talked about music a lot? This was one reason for that. This (image above) is a diddly bow, a single string instrument that I will be using to explain what we have been doing. Below we have a very basic layout of the instrument. 

"D-Bow Layout" CDH, 2021

It was made with a 2x4 piece of wood to act as the neck and body, a tin can as an resonator, a battery as a nut, some screws and nails to keep most of it together and tune the string, and finally a 1.07 mm string to create vibrations in the instrument. For those of you who are more technical, here are the calculations behind my diddly bow: 


At this point you might be wondering how this math relates to how we might make sound but every small change in the instrument can make a drastic change. It makes sound by strumming the string to create vibrations that travel through to the resonator to be amplified and changed. The outcome of the sound can change based on the string tightness, length, thickness, and material. Each type of string can bring different pitches, wavelengths, frequencies, and volumes. And on that note, (Get it? Like a music note? I'm not funny...) here is my diddly bow in action. I will play several different ways to show how you can change the outcome of the sound. 



And with that, I have finished my second action project of this class. We are again, still in corona times and it has gotten freezing as we keep getting more and more snow, but I hope all reading this are doing well. I had a hard time working out the math throughout the unit but in the end it seems I got at least most of it. I liked that we were actually allowed to meet in person again for the creation of the bows, similar to the cameras we made last unit. Well this is me signing off at 1:15am, I hope you learned something, and have a good day, night, or whatever time you are reading this.


-CDH

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