Teaching STEM concepts through Music Technology and DSP

Abstract

Music is an integral part of high school students' daily lives, and most use digital music devices and services. The oneweek Summer Music Technology (SMT) program at Drexel University introduces underclassmen high school students to music technology to reveal the influence and importance of engineering, science, and mathematics. By engaging participants' affinity for music, we hope to motivate and catalyze curiosity in science and technology. The curriculum emphasizes signal processing concepts, tools, and methods through hands-on activities and individual projects and leverages computer-based learning and open-source software in most activities. Since the program began in 2006, SMT has enrolled nearly 100 high school students and further developed the communication and teaching skills of nearly 20 graduate and undergraduate engineering students serving as core instructors. The program also serves to attract students from backgrounds under-represented in engineering, math, and science who may not have considered these fields.

An approach to STFT and CWT learning through music hands‐on labs

“…Some hands‐on approaches that use music one way to another as didactic element are for example: 1) a scheme for teaching Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) through music technology and digital Signal Processing is reported in ref. ; 2) the implementation of a virtual laboratory to teach signals and systems, through audio examples and music synthesis ; 3) a sound demonstration software developed in MATLAB to teach DSP antialiasing filters . Nonetheless, these works have not considered music concepts such as timbre , melody, harmony, pitch, tempo , and beat which are the main pedagogical resources inherent in music focused on teaching Signal Processing.…”

Expressed music mood classification compared with valence and arousal ratings

“…Since the selection of the songs involves, e.g., balancing across moods and genres and thus heavily depends on previously gathered knowledge and data, we decided to use the mood categories we had been using so far and not to switch to another, e.g., the five mood categories used in the MIREX evaluations [1].…”

“…Valence and arousal ratings were included since mood is assumed to be mainly governed by these two dimensions [1,2,16,17]. This article describes the experiment and the analysis of the collected data.…”

“…Experimental data on similarity in mood of different songs can be instrumental in defining musical distance measures [1,2] and would enable the definition of prototypical songs (or song features) for various moods. These latter can then be used as the so-called mood presets in music recommendation systems.…”

STEAM Education through Music Technology (Evaluation)

“…SMT is a week-long, non-residential program where students are guided through several activities throughout the week, all centered around audio and music technology [4][5][6][7]. Additionally, SMT seeks to maximize student interaction with the material they are exploring.…”