DIY Lab Gear: Vibrating String Apparatus [Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge]

Published: October 18, 2007, 1:53 pm

Sometimes I can't seem to find just the right lab equipment I want for a particular experiment so I design it myself. Such was the case recently for a course I developed and teach entitled Science of Sound. This course is a natural science elective and deals with the physics of audio and acoustics. We start with a few very basic concepts such as harmonic motion. One of the laboratory experiments involves vibrating strings. I like this experiment because students can relate to it as most are at least familiar with guitars and other stringed instruments (the guitar players really like this one). I had some difficulty in designing a good experiment though. The basic idea is to verify the equation for the fundamental vibratory frequency: where f is the fundamental frequency, l is the string length, T is the tension, and m-sub-l is the mass per unit length of the string. Read the rest of this post... Read the comments on this post...

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