Sound Science Part 2 - Recreate sounds with Audacity

This is one of my favorite demos involving sound. In this demo we use a computer to recreate the sound of a beaker being struck with a pencil or a ruler. All you need is Audacity, which is free. The first part involves the use of the FFT function to analyze our sound and then we use the tone generator to build the sound one frequency at a time.

While sounds are composed of a combination of different frequencies there's more to them than just that. You also have to look at the initiation and the ending of sounds. Specifically for our beaker you have to look at how the various frequencies decay. We can use another feature built right into Audacity to get close enough to the decay as well by applying the "Fade Out" effect several times.

For full instructions, simply watch the video below. If you want detailed written instructions surf over to my page on Probeware on a Budget.