Listening to Waves: Using Computer Tools to Learn Science Through Making Music (2024)

Description

In this work we detail our experience carrying out an outreach project across several schools in the greater San Diego Area. Our program is oriented at leveraging the deep interest that society has in music in order to teach students the basics of signal processing and the science of waves and vibrations. Our program is oriented at creating a hands-on and creative learning experience. We detail various aspects of our lesson plan and a way to integrate the lessons within regular school activities.
In recent years, the integration of arts as a means of teaching subjects in the STEM fields (STEAM=STEM+ART) has gathered much traction. Often STEAM is taken as doing art about science. This approach can be very useful since a clearly transmitted message, such as one that only through art can be achieved, might prove fundamental for a deep understanding of a scientific concept. However, this approach also risks establishing a hard division between science as a message and art as a carrier, “a scientist” or “an artist”, science as a glorified object and its depiction through art. For those of us who have explored the paths of both art and science, this hard division does not exist. We do science because we find beauty in it, a beauty that we can explore and “bring out” just as much as we do when we are painting or playing music. We also understand that there is science in art, and we need experimentation, research, and a deep understanding of our artistic media, to create beauty or transmit a message. This is well exemplified in the making of music and in particular in the making of sounds, since sound is created through vibrating materials and composed of waves.
In our educational program the students learn the hidden and ubiquitous world of waves through the making and analysis of music and sound. For this they use computer tools to record, visualize, manipulate, and create sounds, thus learning the basics of wave theory and signal processing. Integrating science and arts, the students design creative musical instruments or sound installations and analyze their acoustic properties. They explore how sound is propagated through the environment and represented in the brain. At the end of this program the installations thus created, are presented in a public art-science-show. In this way, not only the participants of the program but also the whole community can appreciate the richness of the physical world embedded in music. Our goal is that, through this program, the community will not only learn about vibrations and music, but will also understand that the rules of nature are not restricted to outer space or micro-organisms but pervade all that we know and love.

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