Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles
Abstract
As anyone who has blown across the mouth of a beer bottle knows, beer bottles have a well-defined fundamental frequency. This paper shows how a beer bottle's acoustical resonance can be modeled as a one-dimensional driven-damped oscillator and includes enough detail to be useful in undergraduate laboratory experiments. While the frequency-domain Green's function of the bottle can be extracted through sequential pure-tone measurements, sufficient data to fit the model's parameters can be collected in just a few seconds when Fourier methods are used.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies
Mechanical and Optical Resonators
Scientific Research and Discoveries
Publication details
- Journal / source
- American Journal of Physics
- Volume
- 94
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 180–185
- Publication date
- 19 February 2026
- Language
- EN