Cuphones - Cup Headphones?

Today was kind of interesting for simple side projects. Mark Oscai, a student I work with and regular lab wrecker (just kidding), came in today with something that he had seen in class. I guess one of the ECE 311(Electric and Magnetic Field class) professor, Professor Melloch, did an interesting show and tell with copper wire, magnet, and cup. It would seem Professor Melloch makes a really simple speaker using these things to show how fields work, but I can't really say for sure because my experience with ECE 311 was super boring. Granted, I'm a physics minor and took a more interesting version of the class through the physics department (Phys 330). And by interesting I mean really, really hard. I still had to take ECE 311, but compared to the physics department equivalent it was a breeze.

Anyways, enough boring stuff, here are some of the photos of the materials that were used and just photos as Mark constructed the cup speakers.

As you might expect, the sound wasn't that great so I got the bright idea to add water inside the cup to see if it would dampen some of the noisiness out. The water kind of acted like a low pass filter in the sense that it did in fact dampen the noise, but it also dampened everything except for the muffled bass. It sounded as if you were sitting in the auditorium restroom during a concert. It was pretty interesting.

Here is Mark messing with his magnets and coils to make his speaker work. Mark however is kind of an interesting bird and even though he was able to recreate the speaker working, he still wanted to add some of that Oscai flair to it, which leads us to his revision two of the speaker... or rather... cup headphones.

And just in case you're skeptical of whether or not it works, I have a short video of the device working prior to Mark's... creative headphone revision :)

Sorry about all the background chatter. There were a lot of people really interested in this fun little project. Also, I am sorry once again for vertical videos. I'm not really the best photographer.