Using music to explore sound

Sandy Jackson is a science teacher at King’s School, Auckland. In this video, Sandy encourages us to ask students what they notice – this helps students use more than just their sense of sight while observing and exploring. Sandy also shows us three musical items and some of the observations we can make while using them.

Science notes

Musical instruments all make vibrations. Each instrument has features that allow them to make different sounds.

Sound is a form of energy. The larger the vibration, the louder the sound. When Sandy places the music box onto the empty plastic box, the size of the vibration (the amplitude) changes – the bigger vibration causes larger soundwaves that tramsit more energy. The empty plastic box amplifies the sound.

We can use multiple senses to hear, feel and even see vibrations from some instruments.

Questions for consideration

How can using the word ‘notice’ encourage students to use multiple senses to make observations?
What types of exploration can be made using Sandy’s music maker with strings and corks?
What musical items can you use or make to observe/explore how their features allow these items to make sounds?

Transcript

Sandy Jackson

Normally when we talk about observations, students will talk about what they see.

But maybe using the word ‘notice’ when they’re talking about observations – so you can notice more than just seeing. You can notice things like you can hear things, you can feel things and so on.

Talking about hearing things, music, making music, making sound is a really good way of showing how we can hear things, how we hear things differently.

Really useful music maker. Solid piece of wood, few screws, two nylon strings, different thicknesses. And we can see that we can make different sounds with those.

So that’s making a nice one. Not quite in the middle. If it’s right in the middle, it they’re equal, you’ll get the same note. You can hear different notes with the different strings.

So we can go a bit further then. We can move the corks in different directions and now we’re making observations.

What we can see here, the strings are different lengths.

What we can feel is they’re actually different tensions. This one’s a bit tighter than that one. That one’s a bit tighter than that one there.

And then what can we hear? Shorter, higher. Longer, lower. Easy way to show different sounds, observations for what you can hear.

And of course, then you can take that, and you can look at instruments that children know – violins, guitars, ukuleles, even a harp. You can see the length of the different strings making different sounds.

If we talk about other music makers, we will look at our music box, and when we are looking at the music box, we can actually see all the parts working to make the sound.

And so we’ve got the pins, which are lifting the teeth of the comb and you can see that moving and you can hear it as well. Great observation there.

Other observations – the teeth – they’re all different lengths, something you should make. The position of the pins on that barrel, all different places lifting up the different teeth.

Remember of course, when you place your music box onto our empty box, you’re going to hear it much better.

Last music maker – interesting one from Memphis, Tennessee – is a train whistle. Memphis, Tennessee.

What we’ve got here is something when you blow it, makes a whistle sound like a train.

Observations with that – you don’t, not just hearing one note, you’re hearing more.

And if you look at the end of it, you’ll see there are actually four openings through which the air is going through, and each one of those makes a different note.

Acknowledgements

The Science Learning Hub Pokapū Akoranga Pūtaiao acknowledges the contribution of Sandy Jackson, King’s School, Auckland, and the New Zealand Association of Primary Science Educators (NZAPSE) in making this video.