Transcript Learning STEM Subjects Through Guitar Making

Learning STEM Subjects
Through Guitar Making
Mark French – Purdue University
Scot Rabe – Ventura College
Guitars can be a great
inspiration for learning in
formal academic
environments
Broadly, there are two kinds
of guitars: Acoustic and
Electric
• The STEM lessons that emerge from
A Nice Stick with Strings
guitar making depend, in part on which
kind of instrument you are working with
• Just about any stringed instrument will
work – guitar, ukulele, dulcimer,
whatever
A Nice Box of Air with Strings
A Guitar Doesn’t Need To Be Magnificent To
Be A Good Learning Tool
A Diddley Bow
Very Simple Instruments will
Work Fine if Resources are
Limited
• A long as the basic components are
there, STEM lessons can be supported
by the simplest of instruments
• Even electric guitars can be very simple
•
Single pickup
•
Limited electronics
Bo Diddley – Something
Altogether Different
Rick Nielsen plucks a string
on his crazy 5 neck guitar
Sample – How Does the
Sound Get from the String to
My Ear?
• Following energy through the system can
teach students to think of all electromechanical systems in a logical way
• The components involved are familiar
and accessible
A pickup senses the string motion and
converts it to a proportional voltage
An effects box modifies the electrical
signal to make it more gnarly
Finally, an amplifier adds power to
the electrical signal and sends it to a
speaker. Your ear senses the
pressure waves in the air and turns
them back into electrical signals in
the auditory nerves
From gmarts.org
A web site
worth visiting
Don’t Shy Away from the
Electronics
• Ears (especially teenaged ones) are very
good sensors and they are very good at
evaluating signals that have been turned
into sounds.
• Information about how strings vibrate is
encoded in the output signal. Easy to
record output using Audacity and to
identify string frequencies.
I have Audacity, Octave and Matlab, so I
can do lots of cool signal processing. I can
calculate sound quality of a guitar, right?
An actual bottle of mojo
No