Btw, the textbook is Hall, Donald. Musical Acoustics.
Maybe it's just a matter of emphasizing the final formula E ∝A2 going forward, and reiterating that the equations in the other explanation can't all be used, that it was a way to try to give an explanation for something?
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Throwing this out here for anyone: the problem is I already gave the class that explanation of E ∝A2 yesterday; I was perhaps feeling hubristic and rushed into it before I got replies on the thread; will not do that sort of thing again. (I did say it was crude and simplified, and that they...
I tried to come up with a simple calculus-free explanation for why the energy in a sound wave is proportional to the square of the wave's amplitude for my musical acoustics class. I think this makes sense, and seems to just be an elaboration of what Donald Hall writes, but I haven't seen it...
I think my class might be different from yours. First, I am at a small liberal arts college. The course is offered by the music department and taught by a composer/music technologist but counts as a science elective. It fills up, with a long waiting list, when it is offered, in no small part...
I used the video and a GIF from the above links, then had them try graphing sine waves with the desmos link, find their periods, etc., and then had them play with sine wave oscillators so they could view and listen to them. It worked! They had a great time and seemed to really click with the...
I've taught music theory at a number of universities, have been published in a theory journal, and have presented at music theory conferences. It is definitely a rigorous and challenging subject but it is not really a mathematics-intensive discipline. I'd sooner compare it to learning a...
It enables people to visualize the concepts of frequency, period, amplitude, and phase shift with the most simple type of wave before they go on to apply these concepts with more complex waves. They will then actually listen to what pure sine tones sound like before they start adding and...
Thanks for the tips. For the first lab they submit, they will analyse the waveforms of various instrumental recordings in Audacity. I've also demonstrated the waveforms in a jazz recording I've mixed in class: they can see that e.g. a kick drum's waves is aperiodic while a sax and bass both...
I'm thinking that maybe next class I could have them try graphing different sine functions with this: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/nqfu5lxaij
before moving on to actually playing with an audio sine tone generator with oscilloscope?
Hi, thanks for the replies. I did use degrees rather than radians. The students have not learned about harmonics/overtones yet but they will. However, I did point out that we study SHM because it is the simplest version of the sorts of vibrations that we find in any instrument, whether a...
I'm (a music academic) teaching a musical acoustics course to a very mixed group (music students, science students, and neither). Today, I covered the basic concept of simple harmonic motion and how this produces a sine wave pattern of motion over time. In the extra time we had left over, I...