Muritai School: Room 6 2019: Exploring sound

We have been spending some time exploring sound - what makes sound? How do we hear sounds and how do sounds get to our ears?

We know we use our ears to hear sound but we also saw sound working when we put some rice over a speaker and turned the music on. The rice jumped around when the music played. We talked about what made the rice jump and some of us thought the vibrations of the music were making it work.

We thought more about what vibrations might look like and to show this we filled a tray with water and dropped marbles into the water. Look at the ripples in the water. When the marble makes a splash it breaks the water surface and pushes the water away like a small wave. When a sound is made it works just the same - the vibration of sound moves away from the sound like a wave.

We discovered that sound can travel through other things too, like string. We had a spoon that had string tied to it. Then we wrapped the string around our fingers and held the string to our ears. When we tapped the spoon onto the metal part of the chair we felt the vibrations from the sound travel from the spoon, through the string and up to our ears - awesome! We thought it sounded like Church bells.

Musical instruments are a sound that we can enjoy but we wanted to see how they make sound. After banging a drum and a cymbal we saw some vibrations and knew this was what made the sound. When it hit the drum hard the vibrations were bigger and made a loud noise. When we hit the drum softly the vibrations were smaller to see and it sounded quieter.