IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2014 - 17

the pitch. The system tells them when they
hit certain notes, training their ears.
Another project team used the same
camera to create a system that motivates
mobility-impaired people to do physical
therapy. If the system senses leg and
arm motions, it plays consecutive sections of a piece of music. The goal is for
patients to move their limbs continuously so that the music plays smoothly.
In Burg's most recent incubator class,
students used audio processing software to
create a 2-min soundtrack to a black-andwhite silent movie that was stripped of its
audio. They selected a scene and created
their own multitrack audio score to go with
it. On different tracks, they combined samplers, synthesizers, and sounds that were
"hand-made" by their own C programs.
"At the lower level of abstraction, the
students write a C program that puts
together undulating sound waves of various frequencies piece by piece. While
writing programs, mentors explain basic
programming concepts to the apprentices, like algorithms, variables, expressions, lists, and arrays, so they can put
what they create on a track. This project
is intended to motivate the students to
learn," Burg says. "When they're done
they have the gratification of hearing
their creation and sharing it with others."
Burg also is part of a National Science
Foundation-funded grant in Computing
in the Arts (CITA) in collaboration with
the College of Charleston in South Carolina and the University of North Carolina-
Ashville. The goal of the grant is to foster
new CITA programs at other schools and
develop curriculum material integrating
CS with visual and sound/music arts.

Music Makes Better Engineers
and Scientists
According to Burg, science and mathematics are fundamental not only to
medicine, technology, inventions, and
practical matters but also to art and
natural phenomena. Through music,
students begin to see how science and
mathematics relate to artistic expression.
"It's motivational to see how science
and math apply to a natural phenomenon like sound. It's fascinating to learn
how frequencies relate to pitches and

how sound waves vibrate the air, reaching our ears to be perceived as sound and
music. When cycles of waves fit together
in integer multiples of each other they
can create sounds that are pleasing to
the ear," explains Burg. "When students
see and feel mathematical relationships,
they begin to understand, and they then
have power. They find it interesting to
manipulate the sounds simply by making

the right sets of numbers on a computer
come out through a sound card."
Using music is also a way to exercise creativity. "People don't always recognize how
creative one must be in the sciences. We
think of creativity as being associated with
the arts but research in science is very creative. You try to see something that wasn't
seen clearly before. You describe or model
it mathematically to uncover relationships

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DeCEMBER 2014

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2014