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In this activity, learners will explore the ways natural materials can produce sounds. Appropriate for any age, learners can make individual music or create a symphony with others.

Break open that used musical toy and squish some Play-Doh over the circuit boards, and you will hear some weird and distorted sounds the manufacturer never intended!

In this activity, learners explore sound by constructing tube zithers, stringed instruments from Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

This is a simple activity for learners to create a traditional musical instrument. Pan Pipes have developed all over the world in different cultures, from South America to Greece and China.

In this activity, learners build a musical drum using a cardboard tube, plastic wrap, and beads.

Play-Doh is conductive! Use the semiconductive qualities of Play-Doh to make your own squeezable instrument. Pico Cricket is required.

In this activity, learners create a traditional Mexican noisemaker (a matraca) using cardboard, craft sticks, and a wooden dowel.

In this activity, learners explore sound by constructing their very own banjo out of a coffee can. Learners experiment with the canjo to change the instrument's pitch and timbre.

In this activity, learners explore how sound travels through solid objects better than through air. Leaners attach a metal clothes hanger to a piece of string and hold it to their ears.

In this activity, learners build a slide whistle using PVC pipe, bamboo skewer, and piece of foam. Construction of the instrument is relatively simple.

In this activity/demo about piezoelectricity, learners discover how some crystals produce electricity when squeezed.

In this activity, learners listen to songs and decode hidden messages based on the same principle as a modem. As a final challenge, learners decode the binary messages in a music video.

Make a cuíca (“kwee-ka”), a traditional Brazilian musical instrument that originated in Africa. Played primarily in Brazil, now you can play it at home, too, with this Exploratorium produced activity.

Make a one-string "guitar" by stringing a cup with some fishing line. You amplify the plucking of the string by placing a piezo contact microphone and mini battery powered amplifier inside the cup.

This lesson (on pages 15-24 of PDF) explores how sound is caused by vibrating objects. It explains that we hear by feeling vibrations passing through the air.