Handmade Clarinet Science Project
A staple of the symphony orchestra and klezmer combo alike, the clarinet provides plenty of opportunity to enhance a student’s understanding of sound and the process of simple engineering. A handmade clarinet need not be an elaborate or expensive affair -- Australian musician Linsey Pollak fashioned one out of a carrot -- and it can be the basis for science projects geared to students ranging from elementary-age pupils to college-level researchers.
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Elementary Grades: Pitch Variances
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A simple acoustic project for primary grades involves creating a clarinet-type woodwind instrument out of straws and cardboard. Students can work individually or in teams to glue a series of straws cut at different lengths to a piece of cardboard; the result will resemble a pan flute. Once the glue dries, the students can play this proto-woodwind, noting how the length of the straws affects the pitch of the resulting sound.
Middle School: Effect on Lung Capacity
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In Selah, Washington, the school district highlighted a seventh-grader’s science project covering whether wind-instrument players had greater lung capacity than non-players. The project involved testing musicians and non-musicians on a pulmonary function machine, which measures capacity in liters. The student’s hypothesis was that wind players had a higher lung capacity, but her study of 30 students proved otherwise. In this project’s findings, the non-players had a slightly higher capacity than the players. Upper-elementary and middle-school students can adopt a similar hypothesis to test -- for instance, whether wind players could hold a sung note longer than non-players.
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High School: Material and Tone Quality
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Clarinets, both handmade and manufactured, are constructed from diverse materials, ranging from expensive aged African blackwood and polished brass to the everyday polymer found in the black plastic instruments used by many beginning music students. Students may create a project to assess whether the material of a clarinet affects the quality of tone.
As professional woodwind player Bret Pimentel noted in his website, “scientists have believed for years that a woodwind instrument’s material has virtually no effect on the kind of sound the instrument produces.” Students of music may conduct double-blind tests with volunteer participants -- playing clarinets of varying material to music experts and casual listeners -- and record what instrument was considered to have the finest tone.
College: Reed Harmonics
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A project in sound physics involves clarinets and other woodwinds. The length of the clarinet contributes to the way sound waves travel from the reed end of the instrument and back; the longer the shaft, the lower the tones. The familiar “squeak” of the misplayed clarinet is a result of the reed’s oscillation when the air pressure forced on it is too light or too heavy. A project in reed harmonics could chart the way differing air pressure acts upon the reed and how the reed converts steady power into acoustic power. This project can include a graph charting the flow pressure as the clarinet is played from soft to hard pressure from the musician.
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References
- The Music Tips: How to Make a Clarinet From a Carrot?
- ArtsEdge: Woodwind Instruments and Pitch
- Selah School District: Effect of Playing a Wind Instrument on Lung Capacity of Seventh Graders
- Bret Pimentel, Woodwinds: Does Material Affect Tone Quality in Woodwind Instruments/Why Scientists and Musicians Just Can’t Seem to Agree
- University of New South Wales: Clarinet Acoustics -- An Introduction
Resources
- Photo Credit Thomas Northcut/Photodisc/Getty Images
