Can You Break Glass with Your Voice?
It's an old cliche: an opera singer hits a note so high, it breaks a wine glass. It may seem over the top, but with a little science (and an amp), you too can break a glass like the finest...
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Remember that scene in the Prisoner of Azkaban where the lady in the Gryffindor painting tries to break her wine glass with her voice? Even though she doesn’t succeed, you might be able to, thanks to SCIENCE. Sound is just vibrations, and it can break glass by making it vibrate so hard that it shatters. See, every material has what’s called a resonance frequency: the frequency it’ll naturally tend to vibrate at. That frequency—or frequencies, since there can be more than one—just depends on its physical properties. A guitar string, for example, will vibrate at its resonance frequencies when you pluck it, which is what produces the sound. Since it’s easy for something to vibrate at its resonance frequency, when it’s hit with sound waves of tha...
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Remember that scene in the Prisoner of Azkaban where the lady in the Gryffindor painting tries to break her wine glass with her voice? Even though she doesn’t succeed, you might be able to, thanks to SCIENCE. Sound is just vibrations, and it can break glass by making it vibrate so hard that it shatters. See, every material has what’s called a resonance frequency: the frequency it’ll naturally tend to vibrate at. That frequency—or frequencies, since there can be more than one—just depends on its physical properties. A guitar string, for example, will vibrate at its resonance frequencies when you pluck it, which is what produces the sound. Since it’s easy for something to vibrate at its resonance frequency, when it’s hit with sound waves of tha...
