LISTENING TO WAVES: USING COMPUTER TOOLS TO LEARN SCIENCE THROUGH MAKING MUSIC
The present paper details our experience launching an outreach project across several schools in the greater San Diego Area. Our program leverages the deep interest that society has in music to engage students in learning the basics of signal processing and the science of waves and vibration. Our program provides a hands on and creative learning experience. We describe various aspects of our curriculum, including approaches for incorporating lessons within regular school activities. In recent years, the integration of arts as a means of teaching subjects in STEM fields (STEAM=STEM+ART) has gathered traction. Often STEAM takes the form of doing art about science. Such an approach can be very useful since art is able to convey and portray scientific concepts with great clarity and thus might prove fundamental for a deep understanding of scientific concepts. However, this approach also risks establishing a division between science as a message and art as a carrier. 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 created by the students are presented in a public art science show. In this way, the entire 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 also will also understand that the laws of nature are not restricted to outer space or micro organisms but pervade all that we know and love.