Quality of content.
The collection does present a wide array of valid and significant concepts, models, and skills. The concepts it presents include the physics of sound (waves, frequency, harmonics, reflections, decibels, impedance, and amplification), and the application of these principles to a number of traditional orchestral instruments, categorized into wind, string, brass, percussion, and voice.
Potential effectiveness as a learning tool.
The Musical Acoustics collection can be used primarily in the Explanation phase of the learning process. The collection largely comprises a large amount of HTML pages for the student to explore that contain specific facts, data, diagrams, pictures, and referential links to other relevant parts of the collection.
The collection also contains an interactive piece that allows students to measure and chart their own hearing as per the relative sensitivity of their ears, a fascinating audio and visual demonstration. Below is graph that charts the limits of my own hearing.
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/hearing.html
© Joe Wolfe
The learning objectives are clear and overt, although not stated as such. The learner is meant to use this resource to gain a detailed understanding of the physics of sound and hearing, as they eventually apply to music and instruments. The target learners are likely high school and higher. Although the resource can be fully integrated into existing curricula, I believe it does not have multiple applications; it’s meant to be used as an informational resource solely. Teaching and learning goals are not stated as such, but it would be easy for a teacher or curriculum designer to create authentic assignments based upon or utilizing this dense, information-rich resource.
Ease of use.
The user interface of the Music Acoustics collection is easy enough to use. While it is purely HTML-based and has an early 2000’s HTML look and feel, the navigation is fleshed out quite well. The amount of information the collection presents is dense, and may seem overwhelming to some learners, but I believe this can be overcome by a coherent structure to any assignment that utilizes the resource. Despite the slightly out-moded aesthetic design, I must admit that the designers has made clever use of HTML tables that represent charts containing musical notes that link out to detailed pages for the particular note’s characteristics played on a particular instrument (and contain sound files for demonstration purposes)
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/music/saxophone/tenor/index.html
© Joe Wolfe
The resource’s vast number of HTML pages are well titled and labeled, so the user is always aware of where they are within the collection. The navigation mechanism persists on all pages except the drill-down notes-on-instruments pages. In my opinion, the collection presents its information in a variety of ways including visual charts, photos, diagrams, sound files, and of course text. Despite the slightly dated web-aesthetics, I think this is an attractively designed resource that will hold the attention of most students.
Neat. I am glad you found something interesting and that would work for you. I remember a couple of years ago there was a test on the internet that measured hearing and older people could not hear the sound and only younger people could. It was quite interesting. I remember being very surprised as I like to think of myself as young and it was pretty accurate.
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