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INTRODUCTION:
Hello visitors, this page is all about my Science Fair Project on Helium. Helium is the second lightest gas known to man. Helium is two times lighter than oxygen but heavier than hydrogen. The experiment of this project is tested on a fellow classmate or a human being that was volunteered because a human being is the organism of this whole experiment. The study/purpose of this project was to find out why helium makes the voice high pitched. Also, the purpose of this experiment was to observe or see how much helium a person can take in their body before passing out. The previous research of this project was that the helium's atomic mass is 4.00 and the atomic number is 2 and it is the type of gas and the symbol is "He". Also, the oxygen's atomic mass is 15.99 with an atomic number of 8. type of gas, and the symbol for it is "O". The citations of ideas or opinions from sources is that the whole experiment and project is based on personal pleasure and for a creer as a cartoon character in entertainment. The opinons that the website gave was that helium makes the voice high pitch because it's much lighter then oxygen. The expected results of the experiment is that when a person sucks up the helium and takes up the helium in their body without passing out, the helium will travel faster in their body to their voice box, which will cause the voice to become higher than the normal voice.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
The background information to helium is that since the 1950s they used the helium gas for entertainment such has famous cartoons like "Mickey's Clubhouse." One of the famous cartoons such as "Donald Duck", his voice is high pitch and kinda croaky when he talks. That was one of the examples of using helium.
PROCEDURE:
To fnd out why our voice changes in pitch, first we must find edzackley how much it changes. To do this we will need to do a rather simple experiment. To preform this experiment you will need the following:
A microphone
A small guitar tuner
Batteries for the tuner
A large balloon filled with helium
And something to log the results on
1) Attach the microphone to the guitar tuner. You do this by plugging the microphone wire into the tuners input jack
2) Now turn on the tuner and the microphone
3) Speak into the microphone wit a steady normal speaking voice. Try to keep the volume and pitch as normal possible.
4) Look at the guitar tuner as you speak and the tuner will indicate which notes you are speaking in. Take the median and document it.
5) Now inhale two large breaths of helium and once again speak into the microphone as normal as possible.
6) Your voice will be much higher than normal. Record the median note again and compare.
The pitches you recorded will tell you how much you voice increased in pitch after inhaling helium. All you have to do is count the amount of notes that your voice increased.; every eight notes is an octave. You voice, if you used normal concentrate helium, should have had its pitch increase two and one half octaves.
DATA:
To find out why our voice changes when we inhale helium to the body, you must first do a experiment to find the results of the experiment.
Now that it is known how much a voice increases, we can prove that the voice's pitch does not increase because helium passes through the voice box faster than regular air. This is proved because helium is four times lighter than normal air so it should have raised the voice's pitch to four times as high, it didn't, it rose it onley to two an one half times its regular pitch. So it mus be a chemical, or another phyisical property of the gas. To find this out more reasearce will have to be done.
For adult males and females the average frequencies of the fundamentals are 130 hertz and 205 hertz, respectively. The amplitudes of the harmonics for vowel sounds vary approximately as the inverse of the 1.5 power of the order of the harmonic.
The sound that exits the mouth is the result of selective transmission by the configuration of the vocal tract (throat, mouth, and nasal cavities) produced by the tongue and lip constrictions. For any cavity, sound waves bouncing back and forth within it will interfere constructively for certain frequencies (the resonance frequencies) to produce a loud sound. The cavities in the vocal tract have such resonances, and the maxima in the sound transmission curve correspond to the resonance frequencies. Those harmonics near a resonance frequency of the vocal tract will be strongly transmitted, while the other harmonics will be damped. The lowest-frequency peak in the transmission curve is referred to as the fundamental, while the regions at the other peaks are called formants.
The fundamental frequency of a resonating cavity is directly proportional to the speed of sound in the gas occupying the cavity. But from the kinetic theory of gases, as well as direct measurements, we know that the speed of sound in an ideal gas (such as dry air) is proportional to the square root of the ratio T/M, where T is the absolute temperature of the gas and M is its molecular weight. For a fixed temperature and cavity volume, it is clear, therefore, that the speed of sound will be greatest for gases with the smallest molecular weights. For example, the speed of sound in dry air (M=28.964) at 0 degrees Celsius is 331.3 m/s. At this temperature in helium (M=4.003) the speed is 891.2 m/s. The resonance frequencies of the vocal tract, and hence the formants, are therefore almost 2.7 times higher for helium than for air. At a pressure of one atmosphere, with pure helium in your vocal tract instead of air, the pitch of your voice will be about two and a half octaves higher than usual (like Donald Duck's). For a helium-oxygen mixture containing 68% helium by volume, the pitch increase is only one and a half octaves.
CONCLUSION:
In conclusion, helium is the second lightest gas known to man. The experiment was based on helium and the effects of the inhaling of the gas in the body. The results were not really clear because the experiment didn't start yet so might as well have a prediction to it. The experiments have both advantages and disadvantages because the advantages of this experiment is the the career and future planning as a cartoon character like Donald Duck about the way he talks. The disadvantages is the way how you talk, it's irritating and annoying for some people that cause them to be not friends with you. The future research can be done to expand the experiment is that if the scientist in the world would have time to study and research about inhaling other gasses besides helium that makes your voice high pitch.
