I would like a scientific explination of the sound of maracas. The beads hits the side of the maraca, so does the maraca resonate or the beans hitting eachother? I'm doing a physics project, and apparently not many people want to know the physics of the maraca! Along with how the amplitude changes when the maraca is hit harder. Anything would help.
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When you shake the maraca, what you hear is made by the beads hitting each other as well as the sides of the maraca. When the beads hit something, their kinetic energy is transformed into sound energy (the vibration of the air around it). That's pretty much the basis of it. When you ask why the amplitude changes with hit harder, that is because when you shake a maraca harder, you increase the speed of the beads. When you increase the speed of the beads, you increase the kinetic energy by the square of the ratio of speeds (Kinetic energy = mv²/2, where m is the mass of the object and v is it's speed). If you have more kinetic energy to work with, then when the beads hit, it transforms more kinetic energy into sound energy, and that is why it increases the intensity of the sound.