What we learned in kindergarten music class about sound….
A vibration happens when something is set in motion. A guitar string vibrates when you pluck it. If you look carefully, you can see the string moving back and forth really fast, moving the air around it. The vibration travels through the air to your ears and you can hear it as sound! You can even feel the vibration if you are holding the guitar. When the string stops moving, the vibration stops, and so does the sound.
We tested this out by taking turns holding the guitar and plucking the strings. We also tried other instruments, ones that you blow into, shake, scrape, hit, pluck, and strum. We tried shaking a thunder tube. The spring shook, causing the drum to vibrate.The sound echoed around inside, createing a really cool thunder sound! When we grabbed the spring, it stopped moving and the sound stopped immedietly. We also saw how sound travels through the air. We hit a drum and watched beads inside of an ocean drum nearby move, without even touching it! When the drumming stoppped, the beads stopped moving. We call these vibrations sympathetic vibrations.
We noticed that when we plucked the thicker strings of the guitar, the sound was lower and when we plucked the thinner strings of the guitar, the sound was higher. High sounds happen when the vibration is moving fast . Vibrations or sound waves move fast through instruments that are small, short, skinny, or that have tight strings or tight drum heads. Low sounds happen when the vibration is moving slow . Sound waves move slowly through long tubes, across loose drum heads, and through thick strings. Through experimentation with different instruments in our classroom, we came to the conclusion that bigger instruments sound lower and smaller instruments sound higher. We call the high and low sounds pitch. We even lined the boomwhackers up by size and played them in order so we could hear the pitch get higher and lower. We listened to the ago-go bell from Africa. It has a high and low bell. We also listened to the small, high sopranino recorder and the big, low tenor recorder. We had so much fun studying sound in music class.5