Leveraging audio and music experience in a first-year engineering sequence

Abstract

Recently, the introductory courses in Audio and Music Engineering (AME) at the University of Rochester have succeeded in attracting an academically diverse group of students, such that engineering majors often comprise a minority of those enrolled. Therefore, we see our mandate as balancing the need to prepare AME majors for subsequent courses while simultaneously engaging and supporting non-majors. To meet this challenge, we leverage students’ existing experiences with sound and music to introduce foundational concepts in acoustics, circuits, and programming in a project-based environment. In the fall, students complete a series of labs where they build and conduct experiments on sections of a guitar amplifier. Each lab emphasizes a key electronics concept, culminating in a completed amplifier that students can keep. Similarly, the spring semester centers around a series of MATLAB assignments, culminating in a short-time Fourier transform project where students investigate the properties of reverberant speech. In both classes, lectures are designed to provide students with the theoretical tools necessary to fully engage with these projects. In this presentation, we share a specific approach that has been successful for us in engaging non-majors while supporting majors in STEM courses and plan to provide associated open curriculum materials.