Explore Sound and Your Own Bagpipe

Hi, I'm 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. 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 bagpipe 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 did not 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. 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 this video, why don't you explore some of the musical instruments you might have around you and see if you can find what is doing the vibrate. 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.