By Gonzalo Pea MY SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT QUESTION

By: Gonzalo Peña MY SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT

QUESTION Does the location of a fret being held on a guitar have to do with it having a longer lasting harmonic?

Hypothesis My hypothesis is that as you lower your finger to the lower frets the sound will last shorter because as you press your finger down lower the string turns smaller

Sciencebuddies. o rg Sources

First I will get my guitar. I will hold down my finger lightly above the 12 th fret on the E string with my index finger and I will pluck the string with my pinky with my other hand. I will keep doing 10 times on each fret and I will put the amount of seconds I got most of the time this until I get to the first fret. While doing this I will write down the frets and how long the harmonic lasted. I will review the notes I took to see which part of the guitar had the longer lasting harmonics. I will make a graph showing how long the harmonics lasted.

Materials I will only need 4 things for my project 1. Electric Guitar 2. Paper 3. Pencil / Pen 4. A Computer I COULD’T FIND A GOOD IMAGE WHOOPS

Research/Background Info Harmonics are bell like sounds that guitars produce. When you pluck a string, you hear a fundamental frequency, resulting from the slowest up-and-down motion. You also hear overtones, resulting from faster up-and-down motion. These overtones are called harmonics because they happen at two times, three times, four times, five times, etc. the fundamental frequency. This animation shows a standing wave for a fourth harmonic, with the red dots representing nodes. One wavelength is the distance between repeating parts of the wave.

8 8 8 7 6 6 5 4 4 2 1 st 2 nd 3 rd 4 th 5 th 6 th 7 th 8 th 9 th 10 th 11 th 12 th

Conclusion My Hypothesis was right. The harmonic lasted shorter when I played lower frets. The strings were shorter when lower frets were played therefore the sound lasted a least amount of time. In my graph it went from 8 seconds to 2 seconds as I played lower frets.