Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles

David Kordahl; Emma Foster

doi:10.1119/5.0245272

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arXiv · 2512.12312

Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles

David Kordahl·Emma Foster

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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.

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David Kordahl, Emma Foster. 2025-12-13. Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles. https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0245272

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