IA Lab Report - Physics
February 2016
Title: The Variation of Frequency from the Singing Wine Glass
Personal Engagement:
When I was around 9 or 10 years old, I have seen a man playing a song -which I cannot recall
now- with wine glasses that contain different levels of water on a Korean TV show. The sound
produced from the wine glasses were so clear and phonogenic, I was extremely amazed and I
have asked my father how they do that. I remember that my father told me that there was science
behind it, it’s hard for me to understand in my current age, then the person who was playing the
song later explained that the note of the sound changes depends on how much water is in the
wine glass. At that time it was just a short interest, but even as I got older and I constantly got to
see the videos of people playing music with wine glasses, I always thought that those were really
cool and amazing, then I wanted to know how the wine glasses actually make the sounds like
that. But I never got to look up for it or actually have a research on it, so when I saw the singing
wine glass on the physics IA topic list, I was really excited and decided to have it as my topic
right away. Also knowing that the singing wine glass would be my topic made me to be really
pay attention in physics class when we learned about resonance, waves and frequencies.
First I thought the variation of the frequency produced by the wine glass depends on the amount
water is related to the open-closed tube resonance, which means that the frequency changes by
the length from the water surface (considered as node) to the opening. But as I did more research
on the topic and as I went through my actual experiment, I realized that the mass of water in
wine glass affects the frequency as well, pretend the volume and thickness of the wine glass . I
designed my experiment to find the change in frequency depends on the amount of water, using
wine glass, and change the water volume for different trials by measuring the amount of water
with the beaker.
Exploration:
Research Question: How does the amount of water affect the frequency of the sound provided by
the wine glass? Do they have a direct relationship, which as the amount of water increases the
frequency of the sound increases? Or do they have an indirect relationship, which as the amount
of water increases the frequency of the sound decreases.
I am looking to figure out the relationship between the amount of water in the wine glass and the
frequency of the sound produced by the singing wine glass. The basic purpose of this experiment
is to find out the trend between the amount of water and the frequency. To start the experiment, I
should first figure out what type of resonance the wine glass makes, and the most reasonable
resonance seemed to be the open-closed tube resonance. Since the wine glass is open at one side
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