Making Waves: Engineering, Artistic, and Cultural Factors in Creating Music

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Music and engineering share a profound and often surprising interconnectedness—from the physics of sound and the mathematics of scales to the design and technology behind musical instruments. Although engineering is frequently labeled “analytical” and music “creative,” both disciplines rely on the integration of imagination, experimentation, and rigorous problem-solving. This course, inspired by more than a decade of collaboration with the Grammy-winning ensemble Third Coast Percussion, expands upon the long-running educational initiative Making Waves. The program has reached thousands of K–12 learners and has been featured at national venues such as the Exploratorium, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and the ASEE Annual Conference. In Summer 2026, students in the Engineering Summer International Program will experience an immersive version of Making Waves that blends engineering analysis and design, music composition and performance, and cultural exploration. Alcoy, Spain—where local musicians and an artisan guitar maker will partner with the course—is the preferred location for this unique offering. Students will engage deeply with engineering concepts using material from Introduction to Engineering: Modeling and Problem Solving (Wiley, 2009), including Euler’s method and first-order difference equations applied to mass-spring-damper systems, RC circuits, and chemical reaction rates. Programming will be done in Javascript, enabling students to build dynamic web-based simulations while gaining a valuable marketable skill aligned with their first-year coursework. By the end of the course, students will be able to explain how physical sound properties relate to musical perception, analyze harmonic series and timbre, combine sinusoids to synthesize sound, engineer simple musical instruments to produce targeted pitches, build Javascript animations of physical systems, and compose and perform original works using instruments they create. Three interwoven threads structure the course: -Math, physics, and engineering of sound production -Javascript programming for interactive, physics-based simulations -Instrument building and musical composition, culminating in a group performance using custom acoustic and digital instruments. This course invites students to explore creativity and analysis side-by-side, revealing how engineering and music together shape the way we understand, build, and experience the world.