One of the most fun places to find science is in music! With eight straws and a few other materials, you can make an octave of pan pipes to start playing music on. Straight straws are the easiest to work with. The exact width doesn’t matter, although I’ve heard that wider straws are easier to make music notes on. To start, use a ruler to measure and cut the straws to these lengths:

Arrange all the straws in order, longest to shortest, with the tops of them at the same level. Place the straw scraps in between them, slightly lower. These will space out the musical straws, making it easier to blow into just one at a time.

Tape the straws together. Any kind of tape is fine, though masking tape is easiest to write on. If you want, you can number the musical straws (not the spacer straws) 1 through 8, with 1 being the longest. These numbers can be used to help you play and create songs, even if you can’t read music.

Try playing the notes below. Can you figure out what song it is?
333 333 35123 444 4433 3355421

The pitch of a music note is determined by its wavelength, and the maximum wavelength that can be played depends on the length of the instrument. A note with half the frequency (and twice the wavelength) of another note is said to be one octave lower.