Abstract
I used Backward Design to scaffold ten weeks of assignments that taught students how to perform sine wave vowel synthesis and a Fourier transformation approximation using just a few fundamental programming concepts. This strategy gave all students, regardless of their previous programming experience, the opportunity to implement algorithms related to core concepts in phonetics and speech technology. Reflecting on the course, it seems that the coding assignments were generally well-received by students and contributed to students programming something complex and meaningful.
Highlights
I served as teaching assistant for a general education undergraduate Speech Technology course taught in a Linguistics department for six terms and three different instructors of record
Even though we started teaching code from the fundamentals, students had relatively few chances to practice coding; and we never spent enough time on coding for students to be able to program an actual piece of speech technology
Sine waves and Fourier transformations are foundational components of phonetics and speech technology, and the coding techniques used for these algorithms are quite common in programming at all levels
Summary
Dynamical systems can be challenging for learners unused to the math, so I introduced them early in class and in code because they would show up thematically throughout the class—starting with sine waves, later algorithms like dynamic programming (for concatenative synthesis) and stochastic gradient descent (for neural network speech recognition). Sine waves and Fourier transformations are foundational components of phonetics and speech technology, and the coding techniques used for these algorithms (i.e., nested for loops and iteratively manipulating lists and matrices) are quite common in programming at all levels.
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