Seeing Sound!

To help kids in Valley County learn about the environment around them I am organizing after school programs for Donnelley Elementary school. The best way to engage in learning about the world around us is to use our five senses: sight, taste, touch, smell and SOUND! Sound is a form of energy. Think of the waves created by throwing a rock into a lake. Sound makes three-dimensional waves like a rock does when it hits the water. Different sized rocks make different waves. What do the waves of different pitches look like and how do they travel? Cymatics is the study of sound waves and their visual representations. A tonoscope is a device that shows how the energy of sound causes vibrations. Check out this tonoscope video!

Why is it important to understand sound? The sounds generated from traffic and people often conflict with the sounds of other animals, especially birds. Birds use unique calls to find each other. Birds that live in the canopy of a forest even have a call that is a different pitch than those birds that live near the forest floor. There is not a lot of noise pollution in Valley County. Thankfully, we can still hear them and birds can hear each other. The American Dipper or Water Ouzel is one of my favorite birds!  I love seeing them dancing and bobbing around while I'm paddling down rivers. I wonder if their calls are influenced by the sound of rivers?