SOUND EXPERIMENT

We can test this with our toy guitar!

We did three things and guessed what the sound would be like:

1) our fingers only

2) the container and elastic bands

3) the container, bands, stuffed with a tea towel.

Fingers 

We have an elastic band on it’s own – we can hear it, but we have to listen really closely. It also sounds “deeper”. The sound is sent in all directions and “lost” in the large room we are in.

Container

We have our empty container with the strings.

The sound is much louder and clear. As expected you can really hear the different notes clearly.

 The container stuffed

He stuffed a tea towel into the container – assuming it would absorb most of the sound. It DID sound a tiny bit quieter, but not as much as expected. I suspect that this is because our strings are wrapped all around the container and that it is still reflecting a sufficient amount of noise energy. Yes, some is absorbed, but we would have to stuff it with more to make more of a difference.

This is the fun of science – thinking about what you expect, observing what is happening and discussing results and finding explanations. I am now on a mission to find some objects that fully muffle our guitar (I suspect placing our duvet all around our container AND stuff it with something REALLY soft, will achieve the desired result!).

Thanks for havings us and letting us explore Acoustics with this super simple sound experiment