A New Tune for an Old Sonometer

Sonometers have long been a useful device for teaching about properties of standing waves on strings and production of sound. With modern probeware their uses can be increased significantly. An application of the sonometer presented in this paper is as a demonstration of Faraday's Law of Induction as applied to an electric guitar pickup. A demonstration pickup can be put together with a magnet and a coil. The output can be displayed on an oscilloscope or collected and displayed with computer based probes and a software package such as LoggerPro. This paper will describe a lab activity based on this use of the sonometer.