1. The Multi-talented Bottle Orchestra

Make your kitchen come alive with the sound of music - and demonstrate your grasp of physics while you're at it...

You will need:

* 8 empty, clean, glass bottles - all the same shape and size if possible
* water
* a pencil
* some paper
* plenty of puff!


What to do:

1. Line up the bottles and number them 1-8 (write the numbers on pieces of paper in front of them.

2. Pour a small amount of water into the first bottle - filling it to 2 or 3cm.

3. Pour slightly more water into the second bottle...

4. Pour increasing amounts of water into the third, fourth, fifth and all the rest of the bottles in the row.

5. Now try tapping up and down the row of bottles with the pencil - you
should hear something approximating to a musical scale...

6. If you're feeling musical, have a try at tuning your bottles up – adding and removing water to adjust the pitch of the note you get when you tap. Can you make a scale?

7. When you've got a groovy selection of notes in a row, try blowing across the tops of the bottles - pan pipes or what?! This is why we call it multi-talented because you can either hit or blow across the bottles, and the two scales will go in opposite musical directions…


What's going on:

As we know, all sounds are produced by vibrations, which travel through the air to your ears, and finally the brain, where it’s perceived as sound.

The pitch of a sound ie. the 'note' you hear, is determined by these
vibrations.

When you HIT the bottles, you cause the bottle and the water to vibrate. If there's just a little water in the bottle, these vibrations will be faster and the pitch will be higher, and when there's more water, the vibrations will be slower and the pitch lower.

When you BLOW across the bottles, it's the air in the bottle you're making vibrate. When there's a short column of air - ie lots of water taking up most of the room - you'll get a high note, and when there's a larger column of air, you'll get a lower note.

That’s why the scale goes up if you hit your way along the bottles, whereas it'll go down if you blow your way along it...


How to have even MORE fun:

8. Using the numbers in front of the bottles, you can now work out and write down the sequence of notes needed to play some sweet music... Try some old classics (ok slightly premature, but 'Jingle Bells has quite an easy first six notes to get you started!) And then PRACTICE, possibly more than once - most musicians believe this aids performance...

9. Now assemble your friends and family for a recital. Or, if it's not sounding so good, you can assemble them for a fingers-on-the-buzzers game in which they try to guess what tune you're trying to play. Or you can play a two-team game where everyone has to try and play a tune until their team recognises it... (best put a time limit on rounds or you may be there a while!)