A carillon bell laboratory in an introductory physics of music class

Abstract

The Physics of Music is a lecture and laboratory class which satisfies a quantitative physical science requirement. It is open to students of all majors. Students taking the class may or may not have musical backgrounds, and generally are not majors in the physical sciences. In this laboratory exercise, students record sounds of the bells of the Harris Carillon in the tower of WFU’s Wait Chapel. Using Audacity and other software, students generate frequency spectra of different bells. The prominent presence of minor thirds in the spectrum makes for a useful comparison between spectra of bells and typical concert instruments. In this lab, students identify spectral features of individual bells, find similarities and differences between different bell spectra, and observe the decay of spectral features over time. In this talk, I will describe some of the activities performed by the students in the lab and comment on some of the challenges of performing this laboratory exercise with students of varied musical and scientific backgrounds.