Year 2 Science of Sound – Pitch Perfect Understanding

Year 2 are looking at the science of sound as part of their science week. The music team are contributing to a good understanding of vibrations, playing instruments and high and low sounds from a musical point of view.

We started with some questions this week and had some excellent discussion:

What is sound?

Where does sound come from?

How can we make sound?

Although none of the children had prior knowledge of sound being vibrations, their answers to these questions made it easy to extend their learning from what they did know.

Children’s responses:

‘Sound is music’

‘Sound is noise’.

‘Is noise music?’ I asked. And together we figured that music was organized sounds (not random….usually!).

‘Sound comes from instruments’

I held a triangle and listened.

‘I can’t hear it.’

‘Well you have to hit it.’

‘Oh! So I have to do something to it? If it’s just still like this it doesn’t make a sound.’

This segued really well into the observation that if I ‘move’ my hand and tap the triangle, it makes the triangle move too which is called vibrating. We formed the conclusion that sometimes we can see the moving and sometimes we can’t but we can feel it.

Using a triangle, tuning fork and ukulele I had the children look, listen and feel. They were amazed!

We watched this video of slow motion guitar strings vibrating in waves (the droplet of water part was not relevant).

Followed by this one where we could clearly see the big, thick, low string vibrating slowly and the thin string vibrating much faster.

Big (low) things vibrate more slowly. Small (high) things vibrate more slowly. This was brilliant reinforcement of our current ‘pitch’ topic.

One comment particularly stuck with me. It was made by the same boy who last week had walked into my room and declared ‘I smell music!’. This week he stated that sounds come from the brain. This is because

“It is your brain that tells your voice to sing or your hand to strike the drum”.

What an amazing description of motor impetus by a 7 year old.