Measure the level of various sounds around your house, neighborhood, or workplace and make a table
Describe the thing you measured how it was measured (examples: piano rock song at 5 ft, at 10 ft, microwave ding at 2 ft, at 4 ft, toilet flush or sink drip at 4 ft, 8 ft, a child whistling from 100 ft, 400 ft, etc.). Try to isolate just that one thing you are measuring by reducing as much background noise as possible. Measure at least 5 things at two levels or distances for a total of 10 LEVEL measurements. If the tool you use gives you the option, choose C-weighted for the level measurements. We’ll talk near the end of the course about what A-weighting does (spoiler: it mimics the human ear response/filter). For now, just know that A-weighting is kind of like filtering the sound through someone’s ear before measuring it, whereas C-weighting is unfiltered.
Additionally, for part 2 measure the frequency of 3 items using the spectrum analyzer (examples: a musical instrument playing a note, the hum of the lights in the basement, the seatbelt reminder tone, the fundamental frequency of the first note of your favorite song, the sound of the hand signal at the crosswalk/traffic light, the whistle of your spouse’s or room-mate’s nose when they snore) and make a table. Try to make it something tonal that you measure so you can pick out a single tone. White noise spectrum, remember, is equal level per frequency so it won’t have any one particular frequency that jumps out or gives it a pitch. Try to measure sounds that are tonal or have a pitch for this part. Find and use 3 distinct sounds/frequencies.
Calculate the wavelength for the lowest frequency you’ve measured for those three sounds. If there are multiple peaks on the spectrum, use the fundamental or lowest frequency. Again, it might fluctuate a little so you may have to pick the frequency that it seems to hover around.
Please don’t use the same or very similar frequency as the one listed in the example.
For what you’ll turn in – Make 2 tables, not a wooden table but a spreadsheet table, of the things you measured. I’ve decided to help you out a little and just made the tables already. See below.
Table 1 should include a row for each of the 5 things of which you measured the “level” with a column for each of the two ways or distances you measured that thing.
Table 2 should include (1) a row for a short description or name of each thing you measured, (2) a column for the respective frequency of that thing and (3) a column for the wavelength of that frequency. For wavelength you can express this using either meters, cm, mm, etc (with the 343 m/sec reference for the speed of sound) or expressed in feet, inches, etc (using the correlated 1125 ft/sec reference for the speed of sound). Just be consistent. That is, if you choose the metric system, stick with that for all of them. That would be my recommendation. (4) Calculate and fill out the columns for period in seconds and milliseconds for each frequency. You may have to round a little but go out pretty far. So if the period of a sound, as an example, is 0.0003927729 seconds, then round to the 100,000th place (0.00039).
