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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.

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.

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.