hello I am jared. welcome to fun science demos. and today
we are going to talk about sound. there happens to be a lot of science in sound.
now, if you looked closely at the top of the balloon when i was stretching it out, and the air
was coming out, you would have noticed that it was moving back and forth really quickly. and through
science we have discovered that if something is going to make a sound it needs to vibrate. now we can
explore sound and the way things vibrate by taking a closer look at musical instruments, because
all musical instruments have something vibrating in order to make the sounds. and today we are going
to make our own musical instrument, we call the balloon bagpipe. now to make our balloon bagpipe,
we need a balloon, something to hold the air, and a tube or a pipe that allows that air to travel
through it and vibrate. now making our balloon bagpipe is pretty simple. i am going to start by
blowing up my balloon and then attach it to the end of one of these pipes or tubes. here we go.
so we have our balloon all blown up and ready to go. now, any size of balloon could
work, but the bigger the balloon the easier it is to attach it to the tube or the pipe
and the more material i will have at the end of my balloon, because this is the part of the balloon
that is going to do the vibrating. so i have my balloon all blown up and attached to the top
of my tube or my pipe, now i have to get something vibrating in order to make a sound, and to do that
i need to stretch my balloon sideways. so i have a nice tight film on the top of the pipe, and now
i am going to let some of the air rush through this part of the balloon, and you should see this part
start to vibrate, and you are going to hear a really cool sound from our musical instrument, the balloon
bagpipe. here we go. so we have zoomed in - watch right here and look for the vibration. here we go.
ah.
now the cool part about this balloon bagpipe is that if i can press down on this balloon and make
the air move faster i can make it louder, but to do that i have to hold it like a traditional bagpipe
with the balloon under my arm, so i can use my arm to leverage against my body and really squeeze the
air out. so we are going to see what kind of sound we can get out of our balloon bagpipe. here we go.
so let us try this again, but i wonder what would happen if we use a different size tube?
this actually happens to be from a vacuum cleaner. we are going to attach our balloon
and see what kind of sound we get, and also look for the vibrations. here we go.
the sound actually seems a little bit higher pitched.
now, if you wanted to build your own balloon bag pipe at home you may not have some of those harder
pipes or tubes. you might have something like this: a cardboard paper towel tube, and a cardboard
toilet paper tube, but the problem with these is if i try to attach a balloon, the top is too flimsy
and it is not going to work. but it is the perfect chance for me to bring in some design, and try
to build something on my own. so i need to make the top more sturdy, and to do that i figured out that
i could cut the tops off of different bottles. when i hold it up it actually fits perfectly and if
it didn't fit, i could always slice the tube so i could shrink the diameter and it could fit. i could
use anything, i could use a piece of paper and roll that paper up, i could color that, i could design my
tube and make it colorful, and make it really look like an awesome balloon bagpipe. so let us build
this and see how it sounds. so i attached the bottle top to my cardboard tube with some tape.
i could have colored this, i could have designed it, i could have done anything, and now i have my
balloon attached and it is time to see if this balloon bagpipe can make some noise. here we go.
beautiful. the balloon bagpipe is perfect to explore sound because you can see the vibration
happening right here, but there is also other vibration happening. as this vibrates it gets
the air inside this tube vibrating and moving too. in fact, all musical instruments use air to move
and carry their vibrations. in fact, scientists have discovered that those vibrations move in waves, and
when those waves are faster the pitch is higher, and when the waves are slower the pitch is lower.
there is a lot of science in sound. in fact, why do you not explore some of the musical
instruments you might have around you and see if you can find what is doing the
vibrating, or better yet make your own balloon bagpipe and check out the science of sound.
just do not annoy anybody in the process. thanks for watching.