How Evil Can Sound Get? Shingly Lee and Fiona Wu Shaughnessy Elementary Floor Location : J 119 P

The purpose of our experiment was to find out if different sounds from instruments or voice with different sound waves would shatter glass easier/ at a lower volume. We used voice, violin, flute, clarinet and trumpet. This experiment was adapted from the shocking opera breaking glass legends. We hypothesized that voice would be able to shatter the glass at a lower volume because it is can produce power, pitch and persistency more easily than the other instruments. We set up a stereo system and hooked a microphone onto it. Then we had played the natural frequency of the glass on the instruments/voice into the microphone. We also put a straw in the middle of the wineglass to measure the oscillations that were being produced. We had three experiments, double-checking each time for accuracy. We tried different set-ups, wineglass materials and harmonics. In the end, we still couldn't shatter the glass, but voice had the produced the most vibrations, followed by clarinet, trumpet, violin and finally, flute. We think we couldn?t shatter the glass because the stereo wasn't turned up high enough, afraid that we would've damaged them. Also, it was probably because we couldn't get hold of a proper room. We could've also gotten a function generator to measure the volume, frequency or harmonics that were needed to break the glass. In conclusion, our hypothesis was correct as we had, from research found out that it is definitely possible to shatter glass with sound and from our experiment, voice did vibrate the glass the most. Therefore, voice would be more capable of shattering glass at a lower volume.