Musical Instruments

A number of musical instruments are available, primarily for Physics 21 demonstration purposes, but also useful for other acoustical demonstrations. These include

• A guitar. (You can put a pickup underneath to demonstrate oscillations and how an electric guitar works, or put a magnet underneath and run an oscillating current to demonstrate resonance).
• A cello. This is actually a fairly nice instrument.
• A clarinet. May need new reeds. Takes some experience to get a good sound out of it.
• A trumpet.
• A plastic recorder.
• A kazoo (just for fun).
• A dual glockenspiel. One is given just intonation, the other tempered intonation. The differences are clearly audible.
• Several diapason organ pipes--lead and wood. One has a sliding collar to demonstrate the tuning mechanism. You can blow in to them to achieve quite a reasonable sound.
• A "cut-away" reed organ pipe, which you can pass around to show how the length of the vibrating part of the reed is tuned.

Most of these take a little practice before you can get any sound out at all--plan ahead!