Enhancing Digital Signal Processing Education With Audio Signal Processing And Music Synthesis

Audio signal processing and music synthesis are familiar, accessible and engaging motivators for students to study digital signal processing (DSP). Hands-on project activities encourage deeper understanding of DSP concepts, and are used regularly in ECE481, a course that covers music synthesis for engineering majors at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Students implement and experiment with music synthesis algorithms on a computer to gain a better appreciation for relationships between theory, sound, and visual representation of signals (time series, spectrum, and spectrogram). The LabVIEW graphical programming platform provides extensive support for DSP programming and soundcard operations, enabling students to quickly implement algorithms using graphical dataflow programming. The interactive user interface elements (controls and indicators) appear automatically while creating the graphical program, so the result is inherently interactive. ECE481 was recently revised to use LabVIEW, and students reported a high degree of satisfaction with the new approach.