Vibrations and Waves for the Health Science Major Mark W. Plano Clark Doane College February 2002 Supported in part by NSF DUE

Overview Develop an introductory physics curriculum Who: Health science majors Why: Students see little relevance to goals What: –Intrinsically motivating activities –interactive engagement –Problem solving strategy –Multimedia –Mathematical modeling

Speech and Hearing Base the physics on the human body - the hook! Physics topics in this module: vibrations, waves, standing waves, Hooke’s Law, pressure, fluid flow, Bernoulli's principle Emphasize mathematical modeling, problem solving, multimedia

Motivation - The hook! Thanks Chris Wentworth and his nose!

Exploration How does the human vocal system produce such amazing sounds? –Feel your throat while making the following sounds make soft sounds, loud sounds sing a high note, a low note say aaah, say eeeee

Invention Study the properties of a simple larynx/pharynx model Make a loud sound, a soft sound Produce a high pitched sound, a low one Produce the same pitch with different levels of loudness What’s happening…?

More Multimedia High speed digital video (DV) of vocal folds model Follow one point along the edge of the “vocal folds” - vibration Can we produce a simple mathematical model that approximates the motion?

Vibrations - The Ruler

Mathematical Model - SHO? Repetitive motion Collect data using VideoPoint - more later! Model the data in Excel Introduce the simple harmonic oscillator –x(t) = Asin(2  ft  ) How well did we do?

Conclusions - so far…. Students definitely enjoyed manipulating the larynx model! Many experiments are standard physics experiments but more personal Investigators (well some) enjoyed discovering human applications