Music in MATLAB: A series of programming challenges for an introductory course

Abstract

Abstract Students often find introductory programming a difficult new world. To help motivate students there are many examples of courses using robotics or graphics to provide a more concrete result for programming exercises. MATLAB's ability to output a time series to the sound card of a PC provides an opportunity for problems that create sounds and music instead of numbers. This approach requires little or no equipment to implement. Project challenges involving the creation and analysis of sound were developed to illustrate engineering and programming concepts in an introductory Engineering Computer Tools Course. Easily implemented in MATLAB by first‐year students, these challenges include structured programming, graphing, file manipulation, and simple analysis of sound waves. Problems where developed that illustrate almost all aspects of the course from a script that plays a very simple tune through a general song player that reads a data file containing the note names, durations, and amplitudes. This player requires the use of different data types, loops, conditionals, and sub‐functions. In addition to developing students understanding of computer manipulations they are introduced to a range of important engineering topics including: waves, sampling, digital representation of analog phenomenon, sound, signal processing, analog/digital conversion, and bit resolution. These projects have added an interesting and memorable variation into the course. The students have found these projects challenging and it has been important to develop aids for them working with sound. Particularly important is providing materials to help students who have little or no musical training. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 18: 67–76, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ); DOI 10.1002/cae.20201