Science fair projects about sound and music

What to expect

Sound is something shaking back and forth very fast. Pluck a rubber band and you can see it blur: the shaking pushes on the air, and the air carries it to your ear. That's the hard part of a sound project, because ears can tell loud from quiet but can't give you a number. So these projects measure what the sound does instead. Salt sprinkled on a plastic-wrap drum hops when a sound shakes it, so you measure how far away a bang can be and still make it jump. A ticking timer fades as you walk away, so you measure the distance where it disappears, with a wrap round it or a paper cone at your ear. And a spoon hung on a string rings in your ears for a few seconds, which a timer can count.

The ear is the instrument in three of them, never the thing being tested, so the same person listens every time, with their eyes shut, in the same quiet room. Nothing goes inside an ear, and nothing is banged right beside one. The Shoebox Guitar in the Workshop is the idea behind all of this, a tighter band sounding higher, and it's a good thing to build and play, but making a guitar isn't a test on its own. These are: each one changes one thing and measures what happens, three times at every level, with a tape measure or a timer.

Counted from the projects on this page: 5 about how things move; 3 using kitchen things, 2 using paper, tape and toys. Every one is free with what most houses have. Testing takes 1 day. None needs a grown-up to do a step, only to be nearby.