Why are wide-mouth bottles hard to make sound from?

Factual Questions
1

It’s fairly easy to blow over the top of an empty open pop bottle or similarly shaped container in order to produce a tone. Maybe that’s the bottle’s fundamental. But try to do it with a Gatorade bottle and it’s almost impossible. And by extension, it’s completely impossible to make a tone while blowing over the top of an open bowl. All I can surmise is that the relatively closed top of a pop bottle somehow makes the container resonate better or louder or somehow reinforces that tone. Any audiophile/acousticians out there able to enlighten me? Thanks.

2

The sound is made by the resonant frequency of the opening coupled to pressure fluctuations within the container (i.e. a Helmholtz resonator) which is partially dependent upon the area of the opening.

Stranger

3

A voluminous bottle with a relatively modest opening is a Helmholtz resonator:

The bit of air in the area of the opening serves as a mass that vibrates back and forth, and the air in the container is a spring; the two together create a spring/mass system that wants to vibrate at a particular resonant frequency.

As the opening gets larger and larger, the situation becomes more like a cylinder that’s closed at one end. These also have a resonant frequency, but the mechanism is different in that it relies on waves within the cylinder, i.e. the mass and the spring in this mass/spring system are one and the same. The problem comes when the width of such a cylinder is large relative to its length - and I’m afraid I don’t know why that is. You can definitely see it in pipe organ pipes - the ratio of diameter to length is fairly consistent across the entire range of pipe sizes.

4

You can get a similar effect sometimes driving a car on the highway with an open window, but the vibration - driven by the car’s volume, is a very low hertz, more like a throbbing.

I would say the OP’s answer is that it’s hard to blow a cosistent stream across a wider opening. Plus with larger containers, the frequency is often subsonic.

I once demonstrated this to a friend’s child, and interestingly demonstrated it was more dependent on volume. Blow on an empty tall thin small bottle. Note the frequency. Take a full 2L bottle, pour out into the small bottle so it’s full. You now have a squat cavity in the 2L same volume. Blow on the 2L and the frequency sounds the same (to our ears).