During this activity, students create a working radio by soldering circuit components supplied from an AM radio kit. Since this activity is carried out in conjunction with the associated lessons concerning circuits and how an AM radio works, students should be able to identify each circuit component they are soldering, as well as how their placement causes the radio to work. Besides reinforcing concepts from the lessons, this activity will also teach students how to solder. Soldering is an activity that many engineers perform regularly; by teaching students how to solder, they are able to engage in a real engineering activity.

For adults, a short review of the physics underlying music theory.

Additive synthesis creates complex sounds by adding together individual sinusoidal signals called partials. A partial's frequency and amplitude are each time-varying functions, so a partial is a more flexible version of the harmonic associated with a Fourier series decomposition of a periodic waveform. In this module you will learn about partials, how to model the timbre of natural instruments, various sources of control information for partials, and how to make a sinusoidal oscillator with an instantaneous frequency that varies with time.

Additive synthesis creates complex sounds by adding together individual sinusoidal signals called "partials." In this module you will learn how to synthesize audio waveforms by designing the frequency and amplitude trajectories of the partials. LabVIEW programming techniques for additive synthesis will also be introduced in two examples.

Amplitude modulation (AM) creates interesting special effects when applied to music and speech signals. The mathematics of the modulation property of the Fourier transform are presented as the basis for understanding the AM effect, and several audio demonstrations illustrate the AM effect when applied to simple signals (sinusoids) and speech signals. The audio demonstration is implemented by a LabVIEW VI using an event structure as the basis for real-time interactive parameter control.

Learn about analog synthesizer modules, the foundation for synthesizers based on analog electronics technology. While analog synthesis has largely been replaced by digital techniques, the concepts associated with analog modular synthesis (oscillators, amplifiers, envelope generators, and patches) still form the basis for many digital synthesis algorithms.

Here we introduce another way of viewing phenomenon in the world. Instead of seeing things in the time domain, we introduce the concept of the frequency domain and how to go from on to the other, as well as interesting applications.

Learn how to create and manipulate arrays, perform mathematical operations on them, and use spreadsheets to read and write arrays to the file system.

Learn how to play an audio signal (1-D array) using your computer's soundcard.

Learn how to use the 'Sine Wave' subVI from the Signal Processing palette as an audio source.

Subtractive synthesis techniques often require a wideband excitation source such as a pulse train to drive a time-varying digital filter. Traditional rectangular pulses have theoretically infinite bandwidth, and therefore always introduce aliasing noise into the input signal. A band-limited pulse (BLP) source is free of aliasing problems, and is more suitable for subtractive synthesis algorithms. The mathematics of the band-limited pulse is presented, and a LabVIEW VI is developed to implement the BLP source. An audio demonstration is included.

Implement several different Chowning FM instruments (bell, wood drum, brass, clarinet, and bassoon) and compare them to the sounds of physical instruments. Develop code to model the Chowning algorithms as LabVIEW "virtual musical instruments" (VMIs) to be "played" by a MIDI file within MIDI JamSession.

John Chowning pioneered frequency modulation (FM) synthesis in the 1970s, and demonstrated how the technique could simulate a diversity of instruments such as brass, woodwinds, and percussion. FM synthesis produces rich spectra from only two sinusoidal oscillators, and more interesting sounds can be produced by using a time-varying modulation index to alter the effective bandwidth and sideband amplitudes over time. A LabVIEW VI is developed to implement the sound of a clarinet, and the VI can be easily modified to simulate the sounds of many other instruments.

Signals can be composed by a superposition of an infinite number of sine and cosine functions. The coefficients of the superposition depend on the signal being represented and are equivalent to knowing the function itself.

In this project you will design sounds in LabVIEW. You will create two subVIs: one to implement an ADSR-style envelope generator and the other to create a multi-voice sound source. You will then create a top-level application VI to render a simple musical composition as an audio file.

A "subVI" is equivalent to a function, subroutine, or method in other programming languages, and useful for encapsulating code that will be reused multiple time. A subVI is also used to develop hierarchical programs.

In this project you will create your own LabVIEW application that can produce a standard MIDI file. You will first develop a library of utility subVIs that produce the various components of the file (header chunk, track chunks, MIDI messages, meta-events, and delta times), as well as a subVI to write the finished binary file. You will then combine these into a a top-level VI (application) that creates a complete MIDI file based on an algorithm of your choosing.

This module discusses the method to convert a given frequency to the note that was most likely played to generate it.

This module provides homework questions related to lessons on descriptive statistics. The original module by Dr. Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean has been modified by Roberta Bloom. Some homework questions have been changed and/or added.