IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2014 - 20

Burg assists a student who is creating a system to integrate
input from a camera with sound output.

"For the course to be relevant in the computer science
curriculum, it needs to treat audio processing at a lower level of
abstraction," Burg says.

her Ph.D. in CS at the University of Central Florida she had to start at the beginning and take all of the undergraduate CS
requirements. She did, and it took about
eight years to finish.
Burg plays piano and likes music,
and she wanted to combine these in her
life. She became a full professor at Wake
Forest University and wrote the book,
The Science of Digital Media, covering
digital images, sound, and video.

then decided that she wanted to teach
at a four-year university and pursue a
Ph.D. degree. At that time, she didn't see
much demand for English and French
teachers, so she looked into other possibilities. She took a programming course
at a community college and enjoyed it
enough to pursue her next degree in
computer science.
Even though she had two master's
degrees in English and French, to earn

Serving on a committee to develop a
CS curriculum for a local magnet school,
Burg met Jason Romney, an instructor and
digital sound designer from the University
of North Carolina School of the Arts, who
Burg says was the ideal collaborator. Combining her expertise in CS and math with
his hands-on experience using industry
standard tools, Burg and a School of the
Arts alum wrote her second book, Digital
Sound and Music: Concepts, Applications,
and Science, which became the textbook
for her CS course. The book is available free
online and includes dynamic interactive
tutorials. A number of the online learning supplements are game-like, appealing
to young students who are accustomed to
interacting with their computer this way.

Challenges Starting the Program

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One difficulty Burg encountered putting the digital music course into the
CS curriculum was the interdisciplinary,
hands-on nature of the course. Appealing to both CS and music students and
engaging both types of students at an
appropriate level is a challenge.
"Music students are most interested
in learning audio processing software so
they can immediately make music. To
some extent they can do this, because
it's possible to use audio processing tools
without any CS background or knowledge. But for the course to be relevant
in the computer science curriculum,
it needs to treat audio processing at a
lower level of abstraction," Burg says.
"We had to weave a certain amount
of mathematics and programming into
(continued on page 56)

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

DECEMBER 2014

http://careers.ti.com

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