Standing Waves and Music: Suggested Demonstrations
Summary: Suggestions for demonstrating some of the key properties of standing waves in musical instruments to k-12 students.
Explanations of the concepts for these demonstrations are available in Standing Waves and Musical Instruments and Standing Waves and Wind Instruments.
Here is a handout on Standing Waves that you can copy for your class. If you have trouble with the PDF file, the handout is reproduced as a figure below.
Use water waves in a large container or waves on a tightly-held jumprope or slinky to demonstrate wave reflection and, if possible, waves reinforcing each other. You may even be able to get standing waves in your jumprope or slinky.
Try to arrange for some demonstrationsby musicians: by a string player to demonstrate open and held strings; by a brass and/or woodwind player to demonstrate mouthpiece sound vs. whole-instrument sound; by a percussionist to demonstrate tuned versus untuned drums, and that size affects the sound even of untuned drums.
Have your class try some of the activities in Sound and Music.
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This work is licensed by Catherine Schmidt-Jones under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0).
Last edited by Catherine Schmidt-Jones on Mar 29, 2006 11:45 am US/Central.