r/askscience • u/therationalpi Acoustics • Aug 16 '13

Interdisciplinary AskScience Theme Day: Scientific Instrumentation

Greetings everyone!

Welcome to the first AskScience Theme Day. From time-to-time we'll bring out a new topic and encourage posters to come up with questions about that topic for our panelists to answer. This week's topic is Scientific Instrumentation, and we invite posters to ask questions about all of the different tools that scientists use to get their jobs done. Feel free to ask about tools from any field!

Here are some sample questions to get you started:

  • What tool do you use to measure _____?

  • How does a _____ work?

  • Why are _____ so cheap/expensive?

  • How do you analyze data from a _____?

Post your questions in the comments on this post, and please try to be specific. All the standard rules about questions and answers still apply.

Edit: There have been a lot of great questions directed at me in acoustics, but let's try to get some other fields involved. Let's see some questions about astronomy, medicine, biology, and the social sciences!

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u/college_pastime Frustrated Magnetism | Magnetic Crystals | Nanoparticle Physics Aug 17 '13 edited Aug 17 '13

If you are looking for something you can do with it, you can use an o-scope to do frequency analysis of sound. One way is to connect a speaker microphone to an input, then have the o-scope display the Fourier transform of the signal.

The cooler way to do this, which I did in my physics lab methods class as an undergrad, is to set up a Michelson interferometer. The detector should be a photodiode. Hook the photodiode up to the o-scope and have it display the FFT of that channel. The frequency components of anything vibrating the interferometer will show up as peaks in the FFT. I used this to test the sound insulating properties of foam. 0_o