[sdiy] Calculations & Calculus

[Aaron Lanterman]

On May 7, 2010, at 5:46 AM, Rainer Buchty wrote:

> Although a follow-up regarding "now calc through what you did and how it affects the sound" would be cool.

I'd like to do more of this, but we run out of time, basically. 

I have to get the main lecture material out of the way before they start on the project, since I find that if I make them pick projects before I'm done, they pick projects based on the things they've already seen. Since the last thing I get to, really, is *filters*, you can see that would be a problem in terms of traditional analog synthesis... ;)

And in some cases, depending on the project, I have no real clue myself... for instance, that Hammond lowpass circuit required different values to work on the final soldered perfboard than it did on the breadboard, and I only vaguely understand the circuit.

Then there's the Buchla 291, which has me totally stumped...

> (...and bring back long-lost math knowledge. I'm teaching "Electronics Design / Computer Engineering I" these days which contains a fair amount of physics in the first couple of lectures, and what I see in the tutorial sessions is that quite a number of students just fold when it comes to integration and differentiation.)

I often Introduction to Signal Processing course (we teach it to sophomores - they take it and learn about convolution and Fourier analysis and such before they take circuits), and I tell them that I need to them to know how to integrate and differentiate sin, cos, and exp, and that's it. (If they can't do that, I can't help them...)

- Aaron