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We share a flipped class approach to university calculus-based general physics that shows increased learning and high student satisfaction compared to traditional lecture classes.

Wake Forest’s Physics of Music is an introductory science class focused on musical acoustics. It is commonly taken by music students or non-science majors seeking a science credit. The course has been taught using three different texts (Rossing et. al., Heller, and Berg and Stork) in the past few years. The texts vary in approach, focus, and breadth. I will describe some successes and difficulties I have experienced while teaching from these texts. I will also comment on additional texts such as Hall and Campbell & Greated which I regularly use to supplement the others.Wake Forest’s Physics of Music is an introductory science class focused on musical acoustics. It is commonly taken by music students or non-science majors seeking a science credit. The course has been taught using three different texts (Rossing et. al., Heller, and Berg and Stork) in the past few years. The texts vary in approach, focus, and breadth. I will describe some successes and difficulties I have experienced while teaching from these texts. I will also comment on additional texts such as Hall and Campbell & Greated which I regularly use to supplement the others.

Bugles have long played an important role in American bands and corps, reaching beyond their military origins. As early as the 1920s, competitive drum and bugle corps performed in national competitions sponsored by the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Modern drum corps continue to compete through organizations such as Drum Corps International and Drum Corps Associates. While brass bugles in these competitive drum corps began as military signaling devices, successive modifications made them capable of greater ranges of music. These traditionally valveless, key-of-G bugles evolved to include pistons and rotors, gaining notes beyond a single harmonic series. Instrument sizes were varied to permit pitch ranges from contrabass to soprano. The corresponding music in these shows thus expanded from bugle calls to classical, jazz, and popular genres. This talk will trace the evolution of bugles and their capabilities in American drum corps from their 20th century history through the current day.

The Physics of Music is a general education science class open to all students at Wake Forest University. A broad range of topics are covered: wave physics, hearing and the ear, the voice and singing, musical instrument function and performance (winds, strings, and percussion), room acoustics, and more. An instructor for such a course is not usually a master of all these areas. In this talk, I will describe how we engage some of our local experts (singers, instrumentalists, piano tuners, doctors) to enhance the student experience of learning about physics and music. Activities to incorporate their specialties into the class will also be described.

In my divisional (general education) course “The Physics of Music,” my students each design and build a simple recorder using PVC pipe. The process is borrowed from “Flute Design” and “Flute Construction” labs by Peter Hoekje at Baldwin-Wallace University, as well as Pete Kosel’s flute hole calculator. The lab has been modified slightly to fit the constraints of our class, and is done over the course of two lab periods. We have tried several variations on the process and made plenty of mistakes. Typically, our students have little to no experience using power tools or shop equipment. Consequently, this tends to be one of the most adventurous labs of the term. In this talk, I describe some of the practical things I’ve learned and mistakes I’ve made while watching and helping my students build recorders. Among these are difficulties in creating fipples and knife edges, adventures in hole-drilling, finding reasonable finger hole positions, and student reaction to the finished product.

What is meant by the words used in a subjective judgment of sound? Interpreting these words accurately allows these musical descriptions of sound to be related to scientific descriptions of sound. But do musicians, scientists, instrument makers, and others mean the same things by the same words? When these groups converse about qualities of sound, they often use an expansive lexicon of terms (bright, brassy, dark, pointed, muddy, etc.). It may be inaccurate to assume that the same terms and phrases have the same meaning to these different groups of people or even remain self-consistent for a single individual. To investigate the use of words and phrases in this lexicon, subjects with varying musical and scientific backgrounds were surveyed. The subjects were asked to listen to different pieces of recorded music and asked to use their own colloquial language to describe the musical qualities and differences they perceived in these pieces. In this talk, I describe some qualitative results of this survey and identify some of the more problematic terms used by these various groups to describe sound quality.

The Physics of Music is a lecture and laboratory class which satisfies a quantitative physical science requirement. It is open to students of all majors. Students taking the class may or may not have musical backgrounds, and generally are not majors in the physical sciences. In this laboratory exercise, students record sounds of the bells of the Harris Carillon in the tower of WFU’s Wait Chapel. Using Audacity and other software, students generate frequency spectra of different bells. The prominent presence of minor thirds in the spectrum makes for a useful comparison between spectra of bells and typical concert instruments. In this lab, students identify spectral features of individual bells, find similarities and differences between different bell spectra, and observe the decay of spectral features over time. In this talk, I will describe some of the activities performed by the students in the lab and comment on some of the challenges of performing this laboratory exercise with students of varied musical and scientific backgrounds.

Undergraduate music students have many preconceived notions about tuning and temperament. For most of them, a piano tuned in equal temperament is perfectly “in tune” and A4 = 440 Hz is the only pitch standard that has ever existed. We find these naive conceptions about tuning and temperament to be common among our introductory Physics of Music students--music majors, students pursuing majors in the sciences, and other non-science majors. In this paper we describe how we address some of these issues. We teach the mathematical underpinnings of equal, Pythagorean, just, and meantone temperaments, as well as their musical advantages and disadvantages, through the use of live demonstrations and recorded examples. We also describe our future plans to use recorded examples and available local resources—including reproductions of Baroque woodwinds tuned to A4 = 415 Hz and a 1799 organ at A4 = 409 Hz—to give students a broader understanding of historical and modern pitch standards.

ALTHOUGH the ecological role of bacterial chemotaxis has been the object of considerable speculation, little is known of its role in nature1. Moreover, chemotaxis as a factor in the interaction between the mammalian host and its indigenous or pathogenic microflora remains unexplored. Studies with Vibrio cholerae and other intestinal pathogens have shown that bacterial association with the mucosa is influenced by bacterial motility, adhesion to brush border membranes, the presence of an indigenous flora and by the inhibitory effects of local antibodies (summarised in refs 2, 3). We have shown previously that a pepsin digest of rabbit intestinal mucosa (PMS) inhibits the association of cholera vibrios and Salmonella enteritidis with rabbit intestine, and speculated that this extract was inhibitory because it neutralised the adhesion of the bacteria to a hypothetical receptor in the mucus gel3. We report here that PMS neutralises a positive chemotactic response of several bacterial species to the mucosa and in that way reduces bacterial association with intestinal tissue. Chemotaxis thus seems to be one of several mechanisms controlling interactions of bacteria with mucosal surfaces.