Alex Medearis

Alex's tasks were as follows:

• Build a monochord test bench following the KTH monochord assembly instructions, developed previously during the REALSIMPLE planning grant.
• Interface the monochord to a PC sound card.
• Test the sound card on a PC running Windows XP in JOS's CCRMA office, following the KTH soundcard set-up instructions, also developed previously during the planning grant.
• Interface monochord and sound card with Pure Data (Pure Data (pd)) software, following and extending the KTH soundcard set-up instructions.
• Help design lab experiments using the monochord and pd software on the PC.

Alex performed extremely well on all of his assigned tasks. He proved to be a motivated, efficient, and hard working engineering student, with excellent problem-solving talents. The monochord is working well and was used to create example waveforms and spectra in our newly developed monochord laboratory assignment.

Availability of ``Max Lab'' at CCRMA was very good over the summer, so it has not yet been necessary to purchase the planned equipment for the small electronic and acoustics laboratory in JOS's office. However, the monochord and PC are now installed in JOS's office, making the nearest screwdriver two floors away. We therefore expect to acquire the planned equipment next year during the full grant.

Our experience building the monochord revealed that it required significant time and effort to construct, considerably more than we feel can be reasonably expected of busy high-school physics teachers. To address this, Alex investigated possible sources of molded plastic parts (especially the main piece for holding the string and sensors). The hope is that with such parts the monochord can be more quickly assembled in kit form, or perhaps sold to teachers fully assembled. The costs of making the mold is high (starting at $2000, based on Alex's investigations to date). However, the per-unit cost is low. It seems plausible therefore that the REALSIMPLE project could make 100 or so of these units and sell them directly from KTH and CCRMA to interested teachers around the world, at an affordable unit cost. An alternative is to coordinate the physics class with an earlier shop class!