After looking at a bunch of instruments and hearing Mrs. Brinza play them, we began to recognize patterns among them:  all the high-pitched sounds came from the shorter things (bars, strings, tuning forks) and all the low-pitched sounds came from the longer things. A  student asked to do the stick-thing again, but this time, change the stick's length in lieu of the amount of force going into it. So that's what we did!

We saw some patterns we were thinking would happen, but wanted more specific data from the sound app (this one now changed the pitch, but kept the volume the same).  And here's what we found:

1.  The number of waves (back and forth motions) we saw increased in the same time period as the pitch got higher, and the converse was true.  Low-pitched sounds had fewer waves in the same time frame.
2.  The amplitude (height of the wave) stayed the same.

This amount of waves per second we defined as frequency...and we figured out that Hertz is the way to measure the number of waves in a second!

We used our stick/table/motion detector set-up to gather some great data the other day, and today we turned to another student investigation idea, using an app!

We used a volume app to see what happens to the waves when the volume increases and here's what we found:

We saw the following:
1. The height of the waves kept increasing as the volume increased.
2.  The number of waves per unit of time stayed the same.

We officially defined this "height" as amplitude, and this reference lets us understand that the volume was changing.  We're wondering what happens when the number of waves changes...we're thinking that's related to pitch since that's the other way we know sounds can change!