Varying the apparent motion of a waving string with a strobelight and changing the number of waves

In my physics class, my friend and I did and experiment where we had a waving string and a strobe-light. We used an oscillator to wave the string up and down. At ~16.3 Hertz we generated a single standing (stationary) wave. This is called the fundamental frequency - the frequency that produces a single standing wave. At 2x the fundamental frequency, we got 2 standing waves. At 3x the fundamental frequency we get 3 standing waves and so on. Each time we increased the number of waves, their amplitude (height) decreased.
By varying the frequency that the strobe-light flashed at, we could slow down or speed up the apparent motion of the wave. We could even make it look like there were multiple strings, even though there was one string with constant speed.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• string
• wave
• strobelight
• experiment
• frequency
• wavelength
• fundamental