After attending the Embedded Teacher workshop at Carthage College, we had a quick turnaround if we wanted to apply for a zero-gravity flight in November. We were told there would be one teacher to fly in November, and one flying in March. However, Dr. Crosby was working on getting more spots and more funding. I’m not used to things ending up that way, but Dr. Crosby is really skilled in that area! He actually ended up getting two teacher spots on the November flight.
I applied for the fall flight. I was extremely excited about my proposal, as I wanted to see if pitch was affected by gravity. More specifically, I wanted to see if the material making up the musical instruments would be affected by gravity in any way that would alter the tuning of the instruments.
My justification for this was this: as a musician, I know that my instrument goes sharp tuning-wise when the air temperature is warmer, and my instrument plays flat when it is cold. Humidity also has an affect on my instrument’s tuning. If these factors (which actually are causing my instrument to expand or contract in tiny amounts that cause a big difference in tuning) can alter the intonation of an instrument, why wouldn’t gravity possibly have an effect on the molecules making up my instrument? This could be measured using a tuner, an oscilloscope, or a spectrum analyzer. I was beyond excited about exploring this idea, as I felt this was probably something that might not have been studied yet. I really wanted my research to have an impact on the world of science because I badly wanted to prove music’s worth in an arena such as this.
On October 28, I found out that I would not be flying on the November flight. I was bummed, but I knew as thorough as I thought my proposal was, I could still tweak it for the December deadline for submission for the spring flight. I figured I probably didn’t fully explain my ideas in science language instead of my usual musician wording, so I vowed to take the feedback I would be given, and try again.
The spring deadline for proposal submission was going to be December 13, but with the flights of my fellow workshop participants scheduled for mid-November, I didn’t expect feedback until after their flights. I did get feedback on December 6. This is what I heard back from Dr. Crosby: “the main comment I would make would be to make sure you review some of the existing literature and provide some evidence or a basis for thinking that microgravity would shift the frequencies of your target instrument(s). It would also be helpful to have a specific target in mind – say, a set of tuning forks, an expected frequency shift for each, and an idea of what device is capable of measuring such small shifts.”
Dr. Crosby then put me in contact with Lynne Zielinski, one of the very intelligent women who presented at our workshop. On December 9, she was kind enough to talk with me over the phone and very gently told me that there was no way my first proposal would be approved for flight. Their belief was that there wouldn’t be any effect on pitch due to gravity because gravity does not factor into any equations related to sound waves. She said even if it did have an effect, it would be such a small amount that we would need really sensitive equipment to catch those small changes. Upon thinking on it further, even if there was a change, I think it would be difficult to prove whether it was a change in gravity causing the change in pitch, or the air pressure, humidity, or temperature changes that would be taking place in the parabolic flight environment. However, that didn’t stop me from being crushed. And now I had less 4 days to come up with a viable proposal. Worse yet, I was going out of town in 2 days AND trying to get ready for the first in-person Christmas concert my students were putting on in 2 years! Talk about stressful!
Luckily, when I talked to Lynne over the phone, she suggested I look into different experiments science teachers do to how students what sound waves look like. Since the components (styrofoam beads, water, etc.) are interacting with gravity while these experiments are done in a classroom, it would be interesting to see what sound waves might look like without gravity’s effects on those components. I spent a lot of time talking to my dad, who is the first person who taught me about sound waves by showing me the oscilloscope he worked with way back when I was first learning to play an instrument. I picked my mom’s brain, as she is the best person I know at thinking outside of the box. I also talked to Kellie, my science teacher friend. Also, when my family was going out of town, we were going with some friends who are very good brainstormers and science minds, too. I watched YouTube videos on how science teachers taught sound wave concepts to their students while quarantined and virtual during the Covid-19 pandemic. I googled simple science experiments pertaining to sound. I freaked out, and had to talk myself into continuing to search for ideas. I listened to my husband when he told me I COULD do this.
While in the car on December 11, on our way to see the Galena, IL Christmas Night of the Luminaria and Living Windows, I made a list of different experiments I could try the next day. It seems like overnight I became an expert at Physics-speak and started writing my proposals in the car. Since we had learned so much about the behavior of fluids in microgravity, I wanted to find a way to use that. I saw this very interesting Sound Carousel demonstration, and thought maybe I could make it work with fluid in the bottles sealed off by a rubber balloon. The concept of the Sound Carousel is that you can spin 2 soda bottles around by playing the exact frequency of the resonance of the bottles.
Well, I attempted to make that happen at home the next day (the day before the proposal was due), and I couldn’t make the original experiment work without a LOT of hassle. I then read some more on the physics behind this, and learned that the Sound carousel is actually called a Helmholtz Oscillator, and is based around the principles of an OPEN resonating container. Closing off the soda bottles with a balloon and filling them with water seemed like it would pretty much negate all of the principles involved in the Helmholtz’s research.
My other idea at using water to demonstrate sound was creating a “Hydro Xylo,” or basically a keyboard composed of bottles filled with various amounts of water to create a scale. This went back to my original proposal, because I wanted to see if the pitch differences between the bottles would stay the same. I also thought it would be neat to see how the different amounts of water acted in the same-sized bottles. I did include this experiment in my submitted proposal.
I also put in some experiments that would show vibration in a 3-dimensional manner. I had an experiment that would show the 3-dimensional sound wave in a sound tube. This tube would be filled with styrofoam beads, and when the resonance frequency of the tube would be played, a sound wave would be generated in the styrofoam beads, displaying the nodes and antinodes of the wave.
Another experiment I proposed was a basic sound experiment used to show kids of any age that sound is caused by vibration. Usually, a teacher will stretch plastic wrap over a bowl of cup so that it is taut. They will then pour glitter or cupcake sprinkles (or rice, or salt, or….) on the plastic wrap. When any sound is played at the plastic wrap (from a gong, cymbals, any band or orchestra instrument), the sprinkles/glitter/rice/salt dances. I decided I could do a variation on this with a container to keep the small particles in.
I also thought it would be fun to find out what drumming with zero gravity would be like, as the rebound and exact moment of striking the drum are so important, and rely very heavily on gravity. I decided this could be a cool way of using this data to analyze what reaction time would be like for astronauts. Since astronauts have to do certain combinations of manual tasks (pushing buttons, flipping switches) in a certain order and within a certain time frame, it might be nice to know how much of their reaction time depends on gravity. My proposal was to take a drum into microgravity and play it at various tempos with a metronome to see how easy it was to stay in time at various speeds.
So, after spending all day on December 12 experimenting and typing up ideas, I was ready to submit my proposal. It wasn’t as pretty or didn’t feel as completely hashed out as my first idea, but it was done. Now I could focus on the all-school concert on December 15. To me, that was the most important thing to be ready for. I didn’t feel very confident at all in my flight proposals, but at least I could focus on making sure my students and their audience members felt ready for a concert, and for Christmas itself. That concert was a great reminder on what is important to me and to my school community. The concert went wonderfully, and it was so nice to be able to shove the proposal experience to the back of my mind.
To be honest, after the whole concert and Christmas season, I was not thinking much of when I might hear about the fate of my proposal. The spring flights had been moved to May (from March), and happen to line up with the week before our all-school spring concert. I figured if I didn’t get to fly, that would be ok, since it was going to be really hard to be gone the week before our concert anyways. I gave it my best effort, learned a ton, and enjoyed the experience of thinking about advanced physics concepts again. Time to move on to y next adventure…or was I done with this one yet?!?
Car Full of Harmony 
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