Materials:


•Straws

•Scissors

•Rulers

•Modeling Clay (such as Sculpey)

•Duct Tape (or masking tape)

•Chopsticks (or popsicle sticks, tongue depressors, etc.)


Procedure:


•Cut a piece of straw, block off the bottom with your finger and blow over the top

•[Optional - Check the resulting pitch on a piano and trim the straw to the desired pitch]. 

•Close the bottom of the cut straw with the modeling clay.  [Alternative methods:  Use a hot glue gun to close off the straws; or leave the straw longer than you need, fold the straw at the desired length, and use small strip of duct tape to keep the straw folded.]  Note that the pitch may change slightly as your clay [or glue] stops up the bottom.  It may be best to leave the lengths of straw longer than they should be, and then to trim the TOP part of the straw

•Cut other straws by using the whole-step/half-step ratio to get the correct pitches for a diatonic scale.  Following are possible straw lengths to create a straw panpipe (all lengths are approximate):

5 inches (12.8cm)

4 and 4/16ths (11 cm)

3 and 14/16ths (9.8 cm)

3 and 10/16ths (9.1 cm)

3 and 3/16ths (8.1 cm)

2 and 13/16ths (7.2 cm)

2 and 8/16ths (6.5 cm)

2 and 5/16ths (6 cm)

•Lay a long strip of duct tape sticky side up on the table.  Place the straws on the duct tape in size order, with the open ends even and the closed ends staggered.  You may wish to separate the straws slightly as you lay them on the tape to make it easier to blow a single pitch.

•Place the chopstick (or other stick) across the straws and wrap the tape around it.  The stick acts as a stiffener.


Building this instrument is a math exercise in itself.  The process of measuring the straws gives students more experience in working with rulers and precise measurements.  The structure of a major scale in whole steps and half steps can shed some light on the nature of musical scales.  For more advanced students, they can begin to find ratios in measurement by starting with longer or shorter straws (e.g., what would the measurements be if you started with the first straw being 7 inches long?  3 inches long?). 


Remember, the intervallic structure of a major scale is:


Fundamental (lowest pitch)

Whole step to the

second

Whole step to the

third

Half step to the

fourth

Whole step to the

fifth

Whole step to the

sixth

Whole step to the

seventh

Half step to the

Octave


These whole and half steps correspond to the keys of the piano, with the half-steps being those where the keys are adjacent to each other; whole steps always skip a key.