What follows is a description of a simple experiment developed in a nonmathematical general education science course on sound and light for fine arts students in which a guitar is used with data collection hardware and software to verify the properties of standing waves on a string.
REFERENCES
1.
D. Hall, Musical Acoustics, 3rd ed. (Brooks/Cole, USA, 2002), p. 181.
2.
Logger Pro and the LabPro interface are both by Vernier Software; http://www.vernier.com. Similar hardware and software such as PASCO DataStudio should work as well.
3.
For more on this, see Ref. 1, pp. 407–434 or any standard text on musical acoustics.
4.
Graphs plotted with Graphical Analysis by Vernier Software, see Ref. 2.
5.
D.
Hall
, “Sacrificing a cheap guitar in the name of science
,” Phys. Teach.
27
, 673
–677
(Dec. 1989
) suggests doing this and notes, as the article's title indicates, that it is potentially destructive to the guitar.6.
I. Johnston, Measured Tones: The Interplay Between Physics and Music (IOP Publishing LTD, 2002), p. 75.
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© 2006 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2006
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