Project Description:

In Spring 2008, Lucy Haagen used cellphones to help shape learning communities that connected Duke students with Durham high school students. Haagen and the students used cellphones both as traditional devices (as telephones) and as capturing (audio) and advanced communication (text messaging) tools.

Haagen plans to expand on the success of this pilot through the use of ’smartphones’ in Hanoi, Vietnam. Working with several Duke students participating in Duke Engage, Haagen will use smartphones to assist with ESL activities in the rural Hanoi environment. In addition to using the phones to connect Duke students with students from Vietnam, the phones’ multimedia capabilities will allow students to connect through video, audio and text-based messages. Students will also be able to document teaching and learning moments with built-in video capabilities, as well as use internet connectivity to acquire and provide additional content.

Project start date: 5/07/2008
Funding awarded: $5,630

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In this lab for “Computational Methods in Engineering,” students picked ten seconds of a favorite song, stored on their iPods, to manipulate. They adjusted the rate at which the computer takes in samples of sound, break out individual frequencies, boost and lower frequency ranges and scramble pitch and beat.

Lab instructor Professor Michael Gustafson explained why he decided to incorporate the devices into the lab. “Rather than spend any money buying signal generators, we could just use the free signal generators [i.e., the iPods] that Duke provides,” he said. Plus, he said, the music helps connect engineering principles to a familiar experience.

Sophomore Joanna Noble had done a similar lab exercise — but without the iPods — in another engineering class. “It makes a lot more sense in the context of the music,” she said.

In the lab, freshmen Corey Butler and Stesha Doku selected the song “Innocent” by rock band Our Lady Peace (listen to the clip of “Innocent” on the band’s Web site). After recording ten seconds of the song into a computer, they ran algorithms that raise or lower the strength of certain frequency ranges in the song, and then listened to how the change in frequency distribution affected the sound.

Next, Butler and Doku applied another algorithm to the original song, which switches around certain frequency ranges, effectively encrypting the song by altering it beyond recognition (listen to “Innocent” after it has been encrypted). Finally, they returned it to its original state by applying the encrypting algorithm three more times.

Butler, Doku and other students agreed the lab is more engaging using music from their own collections, than it would be using a tone generator.

You know your own music, freshman John Pura explained, so any changes to it are “readily detectable.”
In addition to learning engineering principles, students gained insight into their songs. Pura discovered in “100 Years” the lead singer of Five for Fighting “has a really, really high range.” And freshman Emmett Nicholas discovered the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Universally Speaking” “doesn’t have a really strong bassline.

And Gustafson gave the class a tip for do-it-yourself karaoke — just pick a song and filter out the frequencies in the range of the human voice.

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