To promote their new vibration analyzer, measurement instrumentation company Fluke commissioned some amazing high-speed video of—you guessed it—things vibrating! Putting the fascinating physics of vibrating plates and cylinders aside, you will have to admit that it’s interesting how a cymbal deforms at 1,000 frames per second. (And if that doesn’t do it for you, the shaking basset hound at the end is pretty nice too!)
Posts Tagged ‘demonstrations’
Listen up, kids
The Acoustical Society of America, an international scientific society, has unveiled a new educational website aimed at kids (and their parents and teachers):
Aimed at developing an early interest in “the science of sound”, the Explore Sound site features information on the science of acoustics, online demonstrations, project ideas, and curriculum materials for teachers (including a free series of posters, available on request in any of six languages). The site even details some of the things that we acousticians do for a living, and what could be more interesting than that!
Catch a wave
You may know that the sounds you hear travel through the air as waves, but the invisibility of air makes this concept a tricky one to visualize. For those who like physics demonstrations (and who doesn’t), we recently came across this video of a series of pendulums—and the pendulum is perhaps the most accessible form of wave motion we witness in everyday life.
A pendulum’s length determines its frequency, just as sound waves in air have a frequency that corresponds to pitch. The demonstration superimposes different frequencies to illustrate traveling waves, standing waves, beats, and “random” noise, which are all phenomena that come from mixing different frequencies together.