Activity Overview
The glasses in this neat experiment make musical tones because of the vibrations made on the glass by your moving finger. The sounds that you hear depends both on the size and shape of the glass as well as the amount of water that there is in each glass. The more water in the glass, the lower the tone of the musical sound is while the tone gets higher when the water content is less.
Materials Needed
- Long stemmed wine glasses
- Water
How to Do It
- Fill your longstemmed wine glasses with varied amounts of water.
- Hold the base of the wine glass firmly with one hand.
- Dip your index finger into the water and press that finger onto the rim of your glass.
- Slowly and steadily move your finger around and around the rim of one of the glasses.
- This will take some patience and varying of pressure but you should be able to make a ringing sounds come from the glass.
- Once you are able to master getting a sound from the one glass, Try your hand at getting a sound out of the other glasses and make note of the different tones that you hear in relation to the amount of water in each of the glasses.
