Musical acoustics as learning support for engineers: examples of student achievements at mechanical engineering department - INSA Lyon

Abstract

International audienceSince 2016 and the merger of two old departments, a new project is proposed to INSA Lyon students in first year ofthe mechanical engineering program (L3 in LMD system or Bachelor degree). It consists on a scientific and technicalproject of around 40 hours on classroom plus an equivalent time duration of personal work at home; it is supervisedby a pair of teachers. The idea is to insist on the abilities of thinking, analysing, well-defining, and resolvinga given scientific problem. To this end, we propose each year to six pairs of students to work on musical acousticsprojects. The principle is that the subject must be theorised and defined by the students without the help of theteacher, related to any field of musical acoustics, on experimental, theoretical or numerical skills. A long duration ofthe beginning of the project is dedicated to the definition of the scientific problem and objective, and to the clear exposureof a scenario to answer to them. One constraintconcerns the budget of eventual experimental campaigns:we privilege the use of a simple smartphone (and the sensors existing in it) to do the measurements. Some examplesof recent results on studied projects will be given and discussed. Examples of some of them would be: design andconception of metallic xylophone bars for given harmonic series helmholtz resonance of a classical guitar, modelingand measuring a Cajon, experimental and analytical study of the wolf note of a cello...--> Video of the presentation here : https://youtu.be/jf1-US1YWt