Making a voicebox

I didn’t really know what a voicebox was beyond knowing that Ned on South Park used one.

But it’s half-term week, so Grace and I tried to make our own out of straws, tape and a balloon. And it sort of worked!

Here’s how it worked…

We started about playing with straws. You know how if you cut the end of a drinking straw into a reed, you can make it into an instrument?

By experimenting with different lengths of straw, we changed the note made by the straw. (You’d be surprised how much time we spent playing with this 🙂 )

Joining a couple of straws together made it even longer, and the pitch even lower.

Taking that idea to an extreme, we daisy-chained a bunch of straws together to make the note so low it was just a vibration.

We put a balloon over the end of the reed, and blew it up through the straw. This gave us a bag of air that would blow steadily through the reed.

making a voicebox

This was our basic voice box, creating a constant buzz through the end of the straw that we could shape into sounds in our mouth.

It was fun. Big thanks to sciencetoymaker.org for the idea.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2012 at 10:22 am and is filed under kids, misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Making a voicebox”

  1. A week off for half-term « dale lane says:
    Sunday 19th February 2012 at 12:32 am

    […] activities in the week. I’ve blogged about two of the most interesting ones already – making a voice box out of a balloon and straws, and making an evaporograph from a sandwich bag, rubber bands and a […]