Daniel Zingaro - University of Toronto
In 2010, I presented a nifty assignment that has students write a program to create music from a small notational language. That one works as a second assignment in CS1. Here is another sound-based assignment: this one is an assignment 1, with a focus on processing stereo sound files in interesting ways.
At the University of Toronto, our CS1 course is taught using Python. We use Pygraphics, a locally modified media library derived from Mark Guzdial's Introduction to computing and programming with Python: A Multimedia Approach.
In this assignment, students learn how to remove vocals from music, apply various fades to sound files, and cause sounds to move across the stereo field.
| Summary | Removing vocals, fading, and panning. |
| Topics |
Composing functions, if-statements, and working with sound data. |
| Audience |
Early CS1. |
| Difficulty |
Intermediate difficulty. |
| Strengths |
Students get a kick out of the vocal-removal algorithm. Also, the fade functions give a realistic example of why function composition is useful. |
| Weaknesses |
The assignment does not require much code; and the code that it does require can be tricky. |
| Dependencies |
Requires a sounds package that gives access to individual samples of sounds. |
| Variants |
Other types of fades (e.g. log, quadratic, cubic) and pans (e.g. right-to-left) are possible.
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Installation instructions for Pygraphics and its dependencies can be found on the Installing Pygraphics page.
Last modified: 2011-12-29