Electroacoustics laboratory assignments for computer music students

A series of pedagogical exercises are described that integrate concepts from traditional musical acoustics laboratory assignments with the fundamentals of computer music. Students are asked to rapidly prototype hybrid devices that contain both musical acoustic components as well as sensors, embedded audio signal processing, and loudspeaker drivers. To help students rapidly complete working prototypes, students are provided with working audio effects and sound synthesizer programs. Students learn the programming language (Pure Data) only by example for making small changes to the previously designed programs, as they are integrated with custom-made, physical acoustics components (e.g., D-I-Y vibrating strings, drums, columns of air, rattles, etc.). Music students first learned that building quality acoustic instrument components is harder than they originally thought. Although out-of-the-box thinking is regarded as an important factor in devising novel electroacoustic prototypes, students starting from pre...