Teaching Non-science Majors (and the general public) to Visualize Musical Overtones in an Informal Education Setting

The Barbershop Harmony Society has had a long running education camp experience each summer that offers classes on various topics to enrich the experience of Barbershop singers of all ages and backgrounds. I was scheduled to teach “The Physics of Barbershop Sound” for the July 2020 Harmony University which would have happened in Nashville, TN. That ended up moving online due to COVID, and my week-long course became a one hour online module on visualizing overtones. Using the free audio recording software “Audacity”, a free package called “Spectrogram 16.0”, or high-feature commercial packages, and a decent microphone, you can easily show the overtones present in the human voice, how vowels (formants) affect the overtones, and what singers can do with good vocal production to better enhance overtones. In this talk, I will describe how to use these tools, my experiences getting people of all ages and backgrounds to understand what they are seeting, and describe how to use this visualization to get people excited about the physics of sound.