Last week we used palm pipes to give us a sense of how woodwind instruments work. In order to produce a musical note, we would hit one end of the open pipe with our palm. Each pipe created a different sound due to their size. With a woodwind instrument, the fundamental frequency is 1/4. We also learned that because the palm pipe had one end closed when the sound wave was produced that there can only be an odd number of harmonics. The pipe that I was given (#9) produced a much lower note than those of my table mates because it was much larger than theirs. The larger the pal pipe, the lower the sound. This occurs because a longer pipe increases the frequency of the wave, while the shorter pipes have a much lower frequency.
We then struck tuning forks and recorded the sound made with a microphone that was plugged into our lab quests. Our screen showed us a wide variety of frequencies, however the highest frequency was the note that was produced.
Once we recorded the sound waved produced by our tuning fork, our lab quest screen gave us this:
We then clicked "analysis"; "advanced"; "FFR" and finally "sound pressure", giving us a graph like this:
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| (photos taken by Megan Grealish) |
