An experiment involving a rainbow of colors and the differences in frequency of male and female voices has propelled an Akins student to the state science fair.

Junior Evangelina Costuros said she is honored to advance past the district and regional science fairs to compete with the best projects from across the state.

“It feels great that I’m the first Akins student this year to go to state, that’s pretty big,” she said.

Costuros said it will be hard knowing there are others that have made it to the state competition, but she is excited about the opportunity to compete.

The scientific question Costuros investigated is whether vocal frequency is affected by gender and whether human vocal sound can relate to color. The question was inspired by a blueprint for a product that her mother brought home to show her. The product allows the speaker to speak in a cup, which produces various colors of light to shine from it.

“It’s pretty interesting. The idea didn’t come to head yet but when doing research knowing that the rainbow has seven colors and the musical scale has seven notes it sparked an idea,” Costuros said.

For this experiment she collected data from 16 people (8 males and 8 females) who had to speak through a microphone 10 times each. After collecting their voices she had to calculate the means to get the equivalent colors. After collecting the data samples, she separated the males and females and calculated an average mean each gender.

“When done calculating, the colors corresponding to male was blue and females was a reddish pinkish color, it happen to be that my hypothesis was right about the corresponding colors,” Costuros said.

Chemistry teacher Heater Rowan said she’s excited that Costuros will be going on to the state fair and go compete against other students from other schools.

“It’s exciting because it uses some of the stuff that we talked about in chemistry such as wavelength and frequency, how to use equipment to transpose one frequency into other,” Rowan said.

Biology teacher Jacqueline LaFlamme was very surprised as well, this will be the first time that she has sent a student to state.

“I’m super proud of her. I know she’s a really hard worker and she put a lot of thought, energy and work into her project,” LaFlamme said. “It’s really interesting she’s doing a project based voice regeneration and attaching to the color spectrum using vibration and her own code.”

Costuros said her project has a chance to be used in the real world by sending coded messages through painted pictures. This will benefit the military by allowing them to send encoded messages between personnel without having the enemy understand the code behind the message.