Unit Overview
This unit invites students to explore the phenomenon of sound and how it becomes music. Anchored in the question "How are sounds combined to create music?", students investigate vibrations, pitch, volume, and the science of hearing through hands-on experiments, models, and digital tools.
Over ten lessons, students move from striking beakers filled with water to tuning them to play a song. Along the way, they examine how sound is produced and travels, how we perceive it, and how technology, like signal generators and spectrograms, is used in music creation. The unit culminates in students applying their understanding of frequency and vibration to compose music using everyday materials.
These ten lessons can be taught as a full unit, used in smaller learning sequences, or adapted as standalone lessons. This flexible structure allows educators to tailor the experience to their classroom needs and goals.
With strong connections to real-world applications and careers in sound, this unit empowers students to see science in music and music in science.
Why does striking a beaker with different amounts of water produce different sounds?
Investigative Phenomenon: Hitting a beaker with different amounts of water causes changes to sounds.
Students explore how pitch and volume vary through hands-on investigation. Their observations and questions launch the unit’s deeper exploration into the science of sound.
Lesson 2
Why does striking a beaker with different amounts of water produce different pitches?
Investigative Phenomenon: A wooden splint makes sounds with different pitches when it vibrates.
Students investigate how vibration speed affects pitch by observing a wooden splint. They apply this understanding to begin building a model that explains why beakers with different water levels produce different pitches.
Lesson 3
What role does music play in students’ lives? How are all people able to enjoy music? How is sound produced?
Investigative Phenomenon: How do members of the deaf community enjoy music?
Students explore how sound is produced through vibrations by observing and feeling sounds from voices, instruments, and objects. This helps them understand how all people can experience music and adds evidence to their sound models.
Lesson 4
How does the amplitude of the signal change the volume of sound that is produced?
Investigative Phenomenon: The online Signal Generator produces a visual representation of sound.
Students use a signal generator to explore how electronic signals control speaker vibrations. They discover that increasing amplitude makes the speaker move more, producing louder sounds. This helps them understand how volume relates to the energy and strength of vibrations.
Lesson 5
How does the frequency of a signal relate to the pitch of sound produced?
Investigative Phenomenon: The frequencies humans can hear is different based on their age.
Using a signal generator, students investigate how changing frequency affects pitch. They design hearing tests to explore how humans perceive different frequencies, discovering that higher frequencies create higher-pitched sounds and require more energy to produce.
Lesson 6
How does sound travel from the source of vibrations to our ears?
Investigative Phenomenon: Music from a car’s speakers moves a person’s hair.
Students use simulations and real-world examples to explore how sound travels through vibrating air particles. They learn that these vibrations move from a source, like a speaker, through the air to reach our ears, explaining how we hear sound and how objects nearby can vibrate too.
Lesson 7
How are the lips creating different pitch sounds from a trumpet?
Investigative Phenomenon: Lips vibrating in a trumpet produces different sounds.
Students explore how faster lip vibrations result in higher pitches. They revise their models to explain how beakers produce different sounds, connecting this to how electrical signals move a speaker and change air particle motion.
Lesson 8
How do sound engineers record and edit music?
Investigative Phenomenon: An oscilloscope allows us to record and visualize sound.
Students explore how an oscilloscope records, visualizes, and edits sounds. They learn to distinguish between pure and complex tones and take on the role of sound engineers, recording and editing music to create novel compositions.
Lesson 9
How can we visualize sounds with multiple frequencies?
Investigative Phenomenon: A sound can be made of multiple frequencies.
Students use the Spectrogram to explore and visualize the pitch and volume of different sounds. They learn how frequency relates to musical notes while playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb." This lesson deepens their understanding of sound and its frequencies.
Lesson 10
How can we use our understanding of sound to play a song using the beakers?
Investigative Phenomenon: Tuning beakers to play specific musical notes.
Students tune their beakers to specific notes (A5, B5, G5, and D6) using the Spectrogram to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with only the beakers. They identify the correct water levels to produce the desired frequencies and explore the range of notes each beaker can produce by measuring the highest and lowest frequencies and matching them to notes using the Spectrogram.
This final lesson wraps up the Science of Sound unit, and student understanding is assessed through an exit ticket.