Home-made+Musical+Instruments

[] [] (watch the utube video The Bullroarer) [] [] []

[] (math and musical instruments)

Materials and Equipment To do this science fair project, you will need the following materials and equipment:
 * Box of plastic or paper drinking straws (paper straws work best)
 * Scissors
 * Piano, electronic keyboard, or other musical instrument that can produce a scale of notes for comparison
 * Lab notebook

Experimental Procedure >> || **Figure 7.** Forming the "reed" end of a straw oboe. ||
 * 1) Do your background research and make sure that you understand the terms, concepts and questions above.
 * 2) To make and play a single straw "oboe," follow these steps:
 * 3) Flatten about 2 cm at one end of a drinking straw (the middle straw in Figure 7, below). You can use your teeth or pinch it between your fingers to flatten it.
 * [[image:http://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentoring/project_ideas/Phys_img019.gif align="center" caption="Forming the 'reed' end of a straw 'oboe.' "]] ||
 * 1) Use scissors to make small, angular cuts, as shown in the rightmost straw in Figure 7, on each side of the flattened end.
 * 2) Insert the reed end of the straw into your mouth. Position the reed flaps just inside your lips and apply very light pressure with your lips.
 * 3) Blow through the straw. The reeds should vibrate and produce a tone. You may need to move the straw around slightly to locate the best position for creating your musical note.
 * 4) You can cut portions off the non-flattened end of the straw to create tones of different pitches.
 * 5) Next, you will make a series of eight straw "oboes" to play the eight notes of a scale by varying their lengths. For a scale starting with C, these eight notes correspond to the white keys on the piano: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. Refer to Figure 4 in the Introduction for an illustration and to Table 1, also in the Introduction, for the correct ratios between the frequencies of these notes.
 * 6) Start with the lowest and highest notes, which are one octave apart. From your background research, you should know how to make two straw "oboes" that will produce notes one octave apart. Note: it will help if you match your lowest note to a note on the piano. That way you can check your "oboe" scale with the piano when you are finished.
 * 7) Calculate the straw lengths needed to build six more "oboes" to fill in the rest of the notes in the scale. There is a reference in the Bibliography ((b) Nave, 2006) that has a calculator for determining the frequencies (fundamental, and second through fifth harmonics) produced by a column of a given length. You may find this calculator useful as you work out the correct lengths for your straw "oboes."
 * 8) Compare the scale you made with the scale on the piano. Do all your notes sound right?