1-Making Music with Water

Have you ever tried making music with glasses or bottles filled with water? Experiment with your own special sounds by turning glasses of water into instruments, make some cool music and find out how it works.

İskitler Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School, Ankara, Turkey

What you'll need:

-5 or more drinking glasses or glass bottles

-Water

-Wooden stick such as a pencil

Instructions:

1- Line the glasses up next to each other and fill them with different amounts of water. The first should have just a little water while the last should almost full, the ones in between should have slightly more than the last.

2-Hit the glass with the least amount of water and observe the sound, then hit the glass with the most water, which makes the higher sound?

Instructions:

3-Hit the other glasses and see what noise they make, see if you can get a tune going by hitting the glasses in a certain order.

Experiment

What's happening?

Each of the glasses will have a different tone when hit with the pencil, the glass with the most water will have the lowest tone while the glass with the least water will have the highest. Small vibrations are made when you hit the glass, this creates sound waves which travel through the water. More water means slower vibrations and a deeper tone.

For this you will need:

 a coffee filter paper (ideally, but a sheet of plain kitchen roll or heavy white tissue will work too)

 one or more black felt-tip pens with washable (water-soluble) ink (black works best, but you can try other colours too)

a tall glass jam jar or tumbler (10–15 cm tall is ideal)

a stapler or a paper clip

a thin pencil (or stick of similar thickness)

water

İskitler Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School, Ankara, Turkey

2-Color Chromatography

Cut a strip of the coffee filter, or similar paper, a little longer than the height of your jar and about 20 mm wide. Draw a pencil line across the strip about 10 mm from one end of the paper. Fold over the other end, and staple it into a loop (or hold it in a loop with the paper clip), then put the pencil through the loop. 

Draw a small blob of ink with the felt-tip pen on the pencil line.

It’s best to go over this blob several times to get as much ink on it as you can, but don’t let it get more than about 2 mm in diameter.Rest the pencil across the top of your jar, so that the paper hangs down inside it. The paper should not be touching the bottom or the sides of the jar.

Very carefully add water to the jar until it just touches the bottom of the paper. It must not come up as far as the ink blob. Watch and wait. You should see the water rising up the paper, bringing the ink with it.

After a few minutes, you should begin to see different colours appearing in the moving water front, as the different pigments in the ink separate out. Take the paper out when the water front is at least 1–2 cm below the pencil, since the water front keeps on moving for a while after you have removed it and it shouldn’t be allowed to reach the pencil.

3-Why does an Orange float in water but sink if peeled? 

Supplies Needed

Two Oranges

Two Glasses or Containers (Note: They must be big enough to put an orange into)

Water

İskitler Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School, Ankara, Turkey

Experiment Instructions

Step 1 – Begin with two empty glasses or containers. (Note: They must be big enough to put an orange into)

Step 2 – Fill each container 3/4 of the way full with water.

Step 3 – Slowly and carefully place an orange in one of the containers. What happens to the orange? Does it float or does it sink?