Physics Lab

I am a grade 12 student, and have chosen to conduct a lab on sound waves using tuning forks. I intend on determining the speed of sound by varying frequency and measuring wavelength (from screenshots). Can I do this in Audacity? Mainly what I need from the program is to be able to view the waves as distance vs. displacement, instead of volume vs. time.
Please let me know if this is possible, or if you know of a program that does this.

Thank you!
Jordana

I know what “amplitude vs. time” means with relation to audio signals, and what “sample values” and “sample rate” mean, but I don’t know what you mean by “distance vs. displacement”.

Not sure what your plan is, but if your goal is to to measure the speed of sound what you can do is setup two microphones at different distances from your tuning-fork sound source and record the pair as a stereo pair. You will then be able to visually compare the phase of the two channels and from that deduce the length of time sound took to get from one mic to the next.

Needless to say this will require a pretty quite and echo free room – or perhaps a test enclosure fabricated from old packing boxes lined with foam.

You might want to use a constant tone generator (I’m sure somewhere there’s “an app for that”) instead of a tuning fork. A concert A tone (440 Hz) should have a wavelength of a bit more than 2 feet, so if you space the mics with 1’ difference the recordings should be 180 out of phase.

Good luck!

Audacity can generate tones: “Generate menu > Tone”

Using audacity to measure the speed of sound