episode description
Aubrey and Andre are on a mission to find a theme song for A.J.’s barking cat, Newton, but they can’t find a track that strikes the right chord. They decide to make it themselves with the help of 10-year-old Kid Investigator Exum. They stumble upon a set of plastic tubes, each of which makes a beautiful sound when struck with a mallet—but how?
featured in this episode
meet our kid investigator
Exum L. (he/him)
- from Washington, DC
- 10-years-old
- favorite school subject: science and math
meet our expert
Stephon Alexander (he/him)
- Professor of Physics at Brown University
- fun fact: "Waves and vibration are a big part of sound and the way the universe works.”
education standards
next generation science standards
- 1-PS4-4 Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer: Plan and conduct investigations to provide evidence that vibrating materials can make sound and that sound can make materials vibrate.
- 1-PS4-4 Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer: Use tools and materials to design and build a device that uses light or sound to solve the problem of communicating over a distance.
- 4-PS3-2 Energy: Make observations to provide evidence that energy can be transferred from place to place by sound, light, heat, and electric currents.
vocabulary
matter:
anything that has mass and takes up space
atoms:
the smallest unit of matter
energy:
the ability to do work
sound waves:
a pattern caused by energy that carries sound from an origin (like an instrument) through a medium (like air or water) to your ear
frequency:
the rate at which something occurs in a particular period of time; in sound, the number of sound waves produced in one second
vibrate:
to move back and forth rapidly
wavelength:
the distance between the peaks of two consecutive waves
pitch:
the degree of highness or lowness of a tone governed by a sound wave’s frequency