This week I learnt that the Explore-a-Synth, which I developed while at the AudioLab at York, had been properly released! It was a project between the AudioLab (specifically, Jude Brereton and myself) and UKESF as part of their Key Stage 3 offering, and support from the Engineering Education Grant Scheme via The IET and IMechE.
Links:
The idea was to develop a teaching tool (and accompanying resources) to help demonstrate the relationships between music, science, technology and engineering, which would in turn encourage creativity and exploration. We wanted to directly relate to key aspects of the KS3 National Curriculum in England, including Music, Physics and Computing.
The original intention was to build a hardware teaching tool, much like the other UKESF projects in the Electronics Everywhere offering, and test these out with some focus groups to see how both students and teachers found them. Unfortunately, COVID-19 had other ideas, and while we were able to pivot the teaching tool to software-only, we lost the ability to properly assess the impact of what we'd make.
This did, however, give me the opportunity to learn some new languages. As the teaching tool needed to be distributable, Web Audio and browser-based development seemed most sensible. In the end, I used Javascript, p5.js, and p5.sound, as the full gamut of Web Audio was far more expansive than I needed for a simple synthesiser.
The teaching tool contains:
A synthesiser with:
4 different wavetypes,
Frequency and amplitude control via an X-Y pad and computer keyboard inputs,
Low/mid/high filtering,
Plotting of the waveform,
The ability to save and recall the synthesiser settings,
The ability to record, play back and save audio,
An explanation of frequency modulation,
An explanation of how a loudspeaker works.
Unfortunately, as the project was only funded for a few months, there are still a number of things I wish I could have got to. p5.js is inherently inaccessible, as it is essentially just drawing things on the screen. There are ways to deal with this (p5.accessibility, for example) but I was too far in by the time I realised this was a problem. I know now to address this at the start of any p5.js project, and will in the future!
Explore-a-synth is also not responsive to difference screen sizes. This is something else I should have accounted for earlier in development, but did not know enough about the languages I was prototyping in to be able to fix it. Something for the next development!