Auditory Exercises

Charles Kinbote

Tomorrow, in my AP Psych class, some other students and I are going to be doing a presentation on the auditory sense. General stuff like the anatomy of the ear, transduction, sound waves, etc. We also need to come up with an activity to present that somehow involves hearing. I don't want to do something silly like clapping at varying distances and seeing if they can hear it - I want to do something interesting. Do any of you have any good ideas or resources for doing this?

To give you an idea of what I mean, we are also going to have three computers running that "Virtual Barbershop" thing and cycling students in and out to illustrate the basic premises of how the brain assigns direction to sounds. Anything like this, that plays with or tricks perceptions, would be ideal.

Dark Moon

How about a quick lesson on phase? Take two tuning forks of the same pitch and place them parallel to the front of the class, but at various distances apart for each striking. At certain distances apart some students will observe constructive interference (the tone gets louder) while others will experience destructive interference (the tone gets quieter). Simple and easy.

Tarantio

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/22/fun-auditory-illusio.html

How about some auditory illusions? Edit: Looks like you've already got the first one of those. Well, maybe the other three will help.

It'd be really cool if anyone in your group could do some overtone singing. We did some of that in our last choir concert, it's an interesting thing to hear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone_singing

Charles Kinbote

that stuff is definitely good (and pretty entertaining), but the classroom will only have three computers and in order to get everyone to hear the Barbershop we'll probably have to reserve them for that. So I'm generally looking for anything I can do without any technological aid, though I am not so sure that is possible.

Thanks anyway.

edit: also, Dark's was pretty cool and I'd like to try that but I may or may not be able to get my hands on tuning forks by tomorrow

Specularity

They'll probably have a couple tuning forks at your school's music department, if you can run down there to ask to borrow them. Otherwise I haven't got any suggestions -- not my field, sorry! But good luck!

Tarantio

http://asa.aip.org/demo27.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

There's another one- illusion of a continually ascending or descending scale. And it should only only require one set of speakers, so you can just do it on one computer.

If you do get tuning forks or something similar, there's something in one of my physics classrooms right now that you can try: two large identical tuning forks, except one has some tape wrapped around each of the prongs. This is to make them a little different from each other, so that when struck next to each other, they "beat;" the slightly different sound waves combine to make a slower pattern of when they are most in phase and most out of phase. It's more of a physics thing than a psychology thing, but it could be helpful, I guess.