Hearing and sound activities

These resources were developed to be used by science centre staff for school visits. They are interactive activities that look at sounds, hearing damage, the ear and noise. Many of the activities cover aspects of the key stage 3 science curriculum and could be used in the physics classroom. These would link well to our lesson starters. Below you’ll also find links to Q&As with acousticians who are dealing with hearing loss in their jobs.

Activities

• Hear the Music: To introduce participants to the event and demonstrate differences in hearing at different frequencies.
• How do we hear sounds? To find out how hearing works and to understand how loudness is measured
• Good and bad sounds. To think about what makes a sound good or bad.
• What makes a noise dangerous? To realise the different factors involved in making a noise dangerous to health
• What is Hearing Damage? To find out how hearing can be damaged and what a damaged ear structures look like. To experience how hearing loss can affect someone. To look at methods of preventing hearing loss cause by loud noises.
• Tell your friends. To encourage participants to inform their peers about the potential dangers of sound.

Links to careers in acoustics

Read about people whose work is about hearing loss:

• Emma Shanks, who works to reduce hearing loss at work places due to excessive noise.
• Teli Chinelis assists the courts in cases of alleged harm due to noise and vibration at work.
• Magnus Woodgate writes software to improve the sound from hearing aids.

Listening is also a key skill for many acousticians trying to make things sound more pleasant. This is what Lucy Diggle who works for Jaguar Land Rover designing audio systems for cars wrote,

“Understanding how the human ear works & how our brains process the different sounds we hear is very important, so I can make sure the audio system inside the car is enjoyable to listen to in all of the seats.”

Lucy Diggle, JLR

Jose Maria Marin who works for Amazon Alexa Automotive getting voice activated technologies into cars, also makes a similar comment in his career Q&A.

Resources to download

Acknowledgements

These activities were developed by the Association for Science and Discovery Centres working with Acoustics researchers at Salford and Southampton Universities.