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Marching Band Sound Check: Pitch, Wavelength and Drum Energy

Grade 8 sound wave practice: use a marching band's tuning notes, timing test and bass drum data to relate wavelength, frequency, amplitude and energy.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-PS4-1

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
11 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 8
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use wave speed = frequency × wavelength to find missing values for sound waves.
Students use drum data to describe how the energy of a sound wave grows with its amplitude.

How to use

Review frequency, wavelength and amplitude first, then let students work through the tables. Calculators help with question 2; discuss question 8 before the open response.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-PS4-1

Use math to describe how a wave's amplitude relates to the energy it carries, and read wavelength and frequency.

Preview

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Name Date

Marching Band Sound Check: Pitch, Wavelength and Drum Energy

Use sound data from a football field to model frequency, wavelength, amplitude and energy.

Part 1: Tuning notes and the timing test

Read the notes from the sound check. Use paragraphs 1–3 and Table 1 for questions 1–5.

Sound Check on the Football Field

1Before the first home game, the Ashgrove Middle School marching band holds a sound check on the empty football field. Band director Ms. Imogen Haverford asked Tavish Oyelowo, an eighth grader who plays trumpet, to collect data with a sound app on a tablet. Sound is a mechanical wave. A vibrating object, such as a drumhead or the air inside a trumpet, pushes and pulls on the air next to it. Each bit of air passes the push along to the next bit, so the wave travels outward while the air itself mostly moves back and forth in place.

2The app shows the frequency of a sound, the number of vibrations each second, measured in hertz (Hz). Listeners hear frequency as pitch. Four players each tuned to a note called A, and Tavish recorded the frequency of each one. On that warm evening the speed of sound in the air was about 343 m/s. Tavish used the wave equation, wave speed = frequency × wavelength, to work out the wavelength of each note, and he started to fill in Table 1.

3Next, Tavish carried the tablet to the far end of the field, 100 m from the band. On Ms. Haverford's signal, the tuba player and the piccolo player played one short, sharp note at the same instant, a very low note and a very high one. A second tablet beside the players sent a signal when the notes started. Tavish's app showed that both notes arrived 0.29 s later. They repeated the test three times, and the low and high notes always arrived together.

4Last, Tavish tested the bass drum. The drummer hit the drum softly, then harder, then harder still, while a phone filmed the center of the drumhead in slow motion against a millimeter scale. From the video, Tavish measured how far the drumhead moved out from its resting position, which is the amplitude of its vibration. A microphone 10 m away measured the sound energy reaching it each second, shown in the app's energy units. The app also showed the frequency of the drum's sound for each hit. His results are in Table 2.