Hands-on demonstrations for Project Listen Up: Education outreach

Midshipmen from the General Science Major will be getting involved in an ASA education outreach effort by presenting a number of acoustical demonstrations geared to promote a hands-on learning experience for middle- and high-school age girl scouts. The demos are designed to visualize certain sound wave effects that will be explained by the Midshipmen (role models) who hands-off the controls of the apparatus to the students who will be free to participate and make their own scientific discoveries. The demonstrations will be (1) sympathetic vibrations of matched xylophone bars or matched tuning forks mounted in quarter-wave resonant open-ended boxes, (2) tuning fork excitation of standing waves in a sound resonance tube with a variable water column, (3) small inexpensive speaker placed in a hole in a baffle or inside a megaphone generating enhanced sound by eliminating destructive interference effects, (4) interference from two separated loud speaker sources measured vs microphone location, and transverse wave visualizations using a (5) torsion wave machine and (6) a small ripple tank. The traveling and standing wave patterns in (5) and the reflection, refraction, interference, and scattering effects in (6) are helpful wave visualizations and aid in the understanding of longitudinal sound wave effects.