As part of the school curriculum in Nova Scotia, Canada, students in 4th grade learn about the science of sound. For ten years, Craig Evans, an analyst and technician at JASCO Halifax, has helped make this part of the curriculum exciting for the children in Mrs. Tracey Evans’s classroom. Every year Craig teaches the fourth graders at Grosvenor-Wentworth Park Elementary about sound energy and how humans and animals use sound to communicate, even under water.

“It’s hard sometimes to bring such complicated things down to their level. But when you do, they eat it up,” says Craig. Among other things, he has the students hold their hand to their throat as they speak to feel the vibrations of their vocal chords. “Even that blows them away”, he says.

With the help of the Discovery of Sound in the Sea website, the children listen to sounds made by ocean animals, including some audio recording contributions from JASCO. Then they get to mimic the animals and see which ones they sound like with JASCO’s educational DORI software. When the students make sounds into a microphone, DORI, which stands for Detecting Oceanic Real-time Impersonations, shows a cartoon of the animal they most resemble overlaid on a spectrogram, a scrolling chart that shows the frequency distribution of their sounds. In this way, the children can try to sound like various animals including North Atlantic right whales, ribbon seals, humpback whales, and snapping shrimp.

Craig’s JASCO-supported outreach efforts have not gone unappreciated, as evidenced by the dozens of thank you cards he received from the students. A selection of their sentiments and drawings, which include whales, sound maps and even a spectrogram, are shown below.

Thank you for showing us what Dori is. I learned that shrimp make a snap noise and humpbacks make a doooooop noise.
Dear Mr. Evans. I know that you love science and sound. Because I love science! And Math Too! Thank You!
Thank you for making sound fun. Now I know I sound like a right whale.