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In this activity, learners construct a playable kazoo from inexpensive materials. They will experience how vibration creates sound waves and music.

In this activity, leaners build their very own rainsticks, an instrument filled with pebbles and seeds that create sounds like falling rain. Save costs by using material found around the home.

In this activity, learners will create their own percussion instrument with recycled materials. Learners will explore design, fabrication, cause and effect and sound through this activity.

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

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.

Learners explore soybeans, soak them in water to remove their coat, and then split them open to look inside. They also make a musical shaker out of paper cups, a cardboard tube, and soybeans.

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.

Listen to the beat of gravity. By taking two strings with weights tied to them at different, yet uniform intervals, you can hear the uniformity (and rhythm) of gravity's accelerating pull.

Oboes's unique sound originates from the two small reeds a musician blows into. Make your own double reed instrument out of straw!

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.

In this simple and fun activity, learners discover the relationship between vibration and sound by making a squeaky toy instrument out of simple household materials.