2021_Fall

Part 1 (sound)

The air around and in your ears is made up of molecules of various types: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and others that we probably don’t want to think about. Between the molecules in the air is … nothing. This means that the air molecules can be pushed together, or compressed, into a smaller space. A property of air known as elasticity causes the molecules that have been compressed together to spring apart again.

Hosken, Introduction to Music Technology (Routledge, 2011)

Assignment:

Each person in the class will be assigned a number below to research and teach the term or question to the class during using Google Slides thoroughly explaining the concept:

  1. sound propagation (including the following terms = wavelength, hertz, frequency, period, pitch, etc. ... also include the terms compression & rarefaction)

  2. amplitude and "transient"

  3. how does the ear work? and what is the frequency range of human hearing?

  4. What do Fletcher—Munson curves refer to? What does this have to do with Pink Noise?

  5. sine wave vs complex waveform

  6. timbre (include the terms = partial, harmonic, and overtone)

  7. spectrogram vs. time-domain waveform representation

  8. how is sound different than light in how it travels?

  9. loudness (including the term "decibels" = ratio of what humans perceive as silence to how loud a sound seems to be to a human) Provide a range of examples of things/environments that create different loudness levels (from nearly silent all the way to the threshold of pain for humans)

  10. amplitude envelop (give examples of amplitude envelops of difference acoustic instruments)

  11. What are the terms aperiodic and periodic used to describe in the sound medium? What is something that produces an aperiodic waveform? What is something that produces a periodic waveform? What is "noise"?

  12. What is Fourier transform?

Resources:

Previous1. Google Slides PresentationsNextPart 2 (computers)

Last updated