So, if I bought a moderately priced oscilliscope like this one would it be something I could take into a classroom, have kids (ages 8-12) make different sounds in front of it, and they would see different size/shape waves move across the screen, so that we could talk about the basic science behind sound waves?
I’m asking because I have to plan a brief course (6 one-hour sessions) for 8-12 year olds that uses oddball instruments to have fun and learn some basic science through the interface between physics and music.
Luckily I do have a local science geek who will help, but he’s not available right now and I have to figure out the budget. In case it helps, here are the musical instruments we will most likely experiment with:
iron and bronze saron from a Javanese gamelan (basically, metal xylophones)
theremin
angklung (pitched bamboo rattlers)
water glass xylophone
kazoo
ocarina
When I look up “oscilloscope” on Amazon, there are a lot of choices but they are described in terms that you’d need to be a sound engineer to understand. Can I have the dumbed down version of what they do, please?
They have a lot of features, but a basic function is to plug something into one channel and plot its voltage as a function of time. So you need some sort of microphone circuit to convert sound waves to a time-varying voltage, and then you could plot that.
ETA the oscilloscope in your link does not have a display anyway, so indeed you may as well just use a laptop + microphone. That will also give you infinitely many options for visualization rather than be limited to a few oscilloscope modes.
You don’t need to purchase an O-scope for what you have in mind. Bring in a laptop or pad computer with a microphone input capability. If it’s a Windows unit call up Windows Media Player and figure out how to have it display the microphone input as a waveform. I don’t know what to do for a Macintosh.
I use WMP and my preferred way to display the MP3 tunes I play is by waveform. It’s boring but you get the idea of voices as waveforms.
Thanks for the answers and information, this is great! I’ve downloaded instructions from one of the linked sites. I’ve got a Mac so I’ll have to see what works well with that.
Plus … I like @kayaker 's idea of a tuning fork, although when I went to Amazon most of what’s available seems to be either surgical (huh?) or chakra-related, so I’m going to have to puzzle through that. However, some of the woo stuff that came up included a singing bowl, which I have! So I can add that to the collection of things the kids get to play with.
Another thing to consider - most scope apps will also do a spectrograph in real time.
A really neat thing to also display - and in particular - because it is breaking the sound into its component frequencies, they can see how sound is more complex than just simple sine waves.
That’s a great point. Seeing the signals with time as the independent axis and without filters will be difficult to interpret for all but the simplest sounds. It might look like a wiggly jumble, cool perhaps, but hard to draw any conclusions. But seeing the components in the frequency domain can better demonstrate the building blocks of sound.
These are good points. One thing you would want a scope to do is to trigger on the input you’re feeding it so that a steady sound produces a fairly steady display. Another thing that would be pretty cool to do is to set the scope up as XY rather than X over time, and put two mics on the inputs, and give each mic to a different kid. Then they could try to harmonize and create Lissajous patterns. I have an analog scope with two inputs plus trigger, and I’d try these things if I was showing kids.
However, if you’re starting with a clean slate, Francis_Vaughn and jnglmassiv are giving excellent advice I think.
a long time ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth and before oscilloscope apps existed, I bought an oscilloscope cheaply and played with it exactly the way you describe. I plugged a microphone into one input and was, indeed, able to see the forms sound waves generate. One of the coolest things was that ordinary whistling produced very good sine waves. As you went up and down the scale you could watch the sine frequency change.
Does this school have either a music class or a science class? You may be able to find tuning forks in one of them. A stringed instrument can produce a pretty clean sine wave if the string is plucked or bowed close to the middle of its length. Plucking elsewhere will add more of the harmonics which could be an interesting demonstration on its own.
I have a singing bowl as well, and did much the same, got it resonating in front of a laptop with a sound analysis app running. My bowl produced a waveform composed of two distinct sine waves, which was pretty neat to see as a real time waveform, and then in the frequency domain, to see two clear and narrow peaks at the frequencies of the sine waves. It was a friends laptop, and several years ago now, so I don’t remember the software package.
Not a school; a local cultural and arts nonprofit that serves kids and adults on an ad hoc basis as best we can. Definitely no science classes; as for music we have koto and Javanese gamelan at the moment.
Sorry, I missed that you’d listed a theremin amongst the instruments available. I’m pretty sure that they also produce a fairly clean sine wave, so you could substitute it for the tuning fork. This has the advantage of being able to vary the frequency (pitch) so in fact it can replace a whole bunch of tuning forks.
If you really want to get a tuning fork or two, the other option is a musical instruments store. They used to be fairly commonly sold to help in tuning instruments to concert pitch, although they may have been replaced by electronic tuners now-a -days. I have an A-440 and an E-329.6 that I bought several years ago.