Ever wondered if it’s possible to sing two notes at once? It turns out yes, and much more! In this class will cover an overview of audio signals, how sound is physically produced and transmitted. This includes an introduction to spectrograms, waveforms and frequencies. After this, we will explore being able to hear and identify these interesting properties of music. Then a large part of the class will be spent activity-style on exploring a fun application of this knowledge with the strange and mystifying art of unusual singing techniques; including overtone singing and Tuvan throat singing. We will record our voice and examine the frequencies to augment our singing.

What makes the sound of a guitar different from a piano? How do computers process audio to detect what song you are listening to? In this class, we will cover an overview of audio signals, the math behind it and how this relates to the music you hear. This includes an introduction to spectrogram, waveforms, frequency analysis and Fourier transforms. Basic math and program implementation will be covered. We will explore how these interesting properties of audio signals affect the sound that you hear. The next part of the class will be spent activity-style exploring audio processing and synthesis. This includes short lab activities for note detection/transcription, song matching (Shazam), and audio synthesis using software. We will also explore interesting musical phenomena including tuning systems, microtonality, audio quality and harmonics.