Middle School students had a special guest speaker in their IB Design class. Their guest was Dr. Morrison, Mrs. Morrison’s husband, who is lending his expertise on sound design for an IB Design project.
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This week the students began a 3 week project on Sound Design, with the intent of solving a real problem, the loudness of their lunch room. In Design class, the students work on real world problems using creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration to come up with design solutions. Dr. Morrison acquired his expertise from his hobby of having a recording studio and is delighted to help the students come up with a soundproofing system for their lunchroom.
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Students are first learning about sound. This first lesson was on amplitude, frequency, and acoustics. They examined wave propagation by comparing the falling speed of two stacks of dominos, considered amplitude and frequency with a slinky demonstration, and enjoyed creating their own sounds on a Theremin synthesizer replica. In subsequent lessons students will work with material science principals to design and test sound proofing for the lunch room.
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As Dr. Morrison shared, sound design is the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating audio elements. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including architecture and building, filmmaking, television production, theatre, sound recording and reproduction, live performance, sound art, post-production, radio and video game development.
