The  book that we are reading for the week (title to be revealed soon!) is all about listening. For our first day, we immersed ourselves in learning about sounds and how people hear. With the help of a few science books, we enjoyed the following super simple sound experiments.

Straw Pan Pipes

From the Usborne Book of Science Experiments, we made this straw “pan pipes” that showed us how sound is affected by the size of the tube that it passes through. Blowing across the tops of the straw, we heard the sound go high as the “pipes” became smaller.

Balloon Vibration

My husband is a science kind of guy, so he made a variation on the experiment described in the Usborne book. Instead of holding the balloon in front of a speaker, we just held the balloon with our hands and made soft and loud noises to it to feel it throb. This is a good way to demonstrate how the ear drum vibrates when we hear a sound.

Bottle Orchestra

Called a bottle orchestra, this experiment is similar to the straw pan pipes. The less water there is in the bottle, the lower the sound is when you blow across the top. We did this a few weeks back as a random activity.

 

These are great activities that are very easy to do when you are talking or reading about music and sound-making in general.