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During the fall of 2006-2007, Ryan and Edgar worked on the following:
- Ryan spear-headed the installation and debugging of a Javascript form
system for use in conjunction with the RealSimple
monochord laboratory
(with help
from Alex Medearis, an undergraduate research assistant).
- Edgar created a laboratory for investigating the role of a harmonic's
contribution to the sound of a plucked string. For instance, a recording
of an electric guitar is made to sound more like that of a clarinet by
approximately removing the even-numbered harmonics and attack transients.
- Ryan created a lab involving psychoacoustics and loudness, which steps
students through the creation of a state-of-the-art loudness model using
freely-available computer software.
- Edgar updated the first monochord laboratory in several ways. He
increased the refresh rate of the spectrogram in the Pd patch. Edgar then
added a description of the energy decay behavior of a lightly-damped harmonic
oscillator. Edgar modified the Pd patch so that students could
estimate the energy decay time of the string pluck that they measure in the
lab. Finally, Edgar modified the graphics files so that they would not cause
the PDF files to have large file sizes, yet they would still have appropriate
resolution and visual appearance in the PDF file and on the website.
- Together, Edgar and Ryan created a new monochord-based lab, in which a
known weight was used to provide tension on the chord. While Edgar was
primarily responsible for building the new monochord prototype, Ryan handled
the lab write-up and computer software for the lab in Pd, a freely-available
computer music program. Both Edgar and Ryan were involved in testing the lab
with the new prototype, and making appropriate modifications. This lab
allows students to test hypotheses based on facts obtained from physical
properties of the apparatus.
- Ryan presented two RealSimple works at the 152nd Meeting of the
Acoustical Society of America, held in Nov. 2006 in Honolulu, HI. The
presentations emphasized the pedagogic benefits of our
RealSimple web site lab
activities, as well as a
state-of-the-art method developed by Nelson Lee for the modeling of acoustic
guitar strings.
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Download rsadmin.pdf