It is all about pitch: An introductory design project in acoustics for 1st year undergraduate engineering students

This acoustics project evolved responding to a challenge to increase the role of analysis in design for 1st year students early in their engineering careers. Student teams must design three musical instruments each producing a single note meeting frequency and sound level specifications using different physical sound generation processes. They are given background material, example analyses, references, and resources. A key requirement is that they create a spreadsheet with equations guiding the design of each instrument before proceeding with construction. Students experience the entire design process: brainstorm, analyze, create, build, test, iterate, present, demonstrate, and report. This introduces the range of resources available to them. An emphasis is on comparing theory and experiment and explaining reasons for any disagreements. As implemented, this project concentrated over about a two week period, provided an introduction to a major design project continuing for a full semester.