Pipelinefunk Gon’ Give It to You

In this video, musician Armin Küpper performs a saxophone duet with the echo of his past self by playing near the end of a large pipe. That’s pretty cool. And it’s also a learning opportunity! Hey wait, come back…you haven’t finished your bowl of physics yet:

What you hear after each note is an echo, a sound wave reflecting off the far end of the pipe and traveling back to him.

Sound travels at around 343 meters per second (1,235 km/h or 767 mph) through air. In this video, the echo takes about 1.5 seconds to return. That means the reflected sound traveled about 514.5 meters (1,688 feet) round-trip, so the end of the pipe is at around 257 meters (843 ft) away.

It seems more like a second to me (so ~563 feet), but whatever…still cool.

• Armin Küpper
• music
• physics
• science
• sound
• video