The Hot Chocolate Effect

In my Understanding Science MED course we did the classic Hot Chocolate Effect experiment.


You make hot chocolate- hot water + cocoa powder + mix=hot chocolate
 After stirring you tap your spoon (this works with plastc, metal or wooden spoons- who knows what else?!) in the cup- and guess what?! The pitch of the tapping rises! What happens if you stir it again? Well the pitch starts low and rises again! Good times!

So my lab partner suggested we make it legit and record our findings in his sound recording studio! Here are the results:

This is what Ron Proctor, who understands this all much better than me, said,

This is, "the audio spectrograph from yesterday's hot chocolate escapade. The left one is regular hot chocolate, the left is sugar free (that's my lab partner and I talking in the middle there). Horizontal axis = time, vertical axis = Logarithmic Frequency (Hz).

Anyway, for some reason the regular hot chocolate's pitch raised a lot more progrssivly, while the sugar free took an immediate jump up! The bright horizontal lines are the pitch rizing. The vertical lines are my spoon taps.

The point- SCIENCE IS FUN. DO SCIENCE OR DIE.