SOURCE Award Winner

The "Support of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors" association has posted its list of students who will be receiving a grant to stay at school over the summer and work on projects. I was the only recipient to get a grant for an artistic endeavor. Over the summer, I plan to complete a piece I'm calling "Hamelin, After the Rats". It will be a 6 movement work that picks up the Pied Piper story right after the townspeople refuse to pay the Piper.

Acoustics Research Project Completed

Today completes the 4 month project I have been working on with MechE professor Isaac Greber. I compared digital, synthesized, instruments to live instruments (flute, saxophone, marimba, and violin). Our hypothesis, which was confirmed, was that the instruments with simple waveforms were better approximated by the digital synthesizers than instruments with complex waveforms. There were some other interesting and unexpected results. The most striking being that the high frequency peaks in the complex waveforms (violin and saxophone) have been drastically reduced in the synthetic sound. We think this is done on purpose so that the synthesizer can support many instances of the same sample while avoiding "beating" in the upper registers.