Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles

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.

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Publication Details

Journal
American Journal of Physics
Published
2026-02-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0245272
Primary Topic
Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles

David Kordahl, Emma Foster
American Journal of Physics
Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies
article

Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles

David Kordahl, Emma Foster
article en

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.

American Journal of PhysicsVol. 94(3)
Centenary College of Louisiana (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 48%
Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies
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