ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: George Stetten
Ever hear the Hendrix-esque wails of a Grimace Guitar?
Or the screechings of a Balloon Bassoon? No? Well, chances
are you never will, either. But the instruments do exist.
Both were built a couple of years ago by graduate bioengineering
students at the University of Pittsburgh who took the
class Biosignals and Systems II offered by George D.
Stetten, an assistant professor.
The Grimace Guitar is wired to the strummer’s
noggin. Its sounds are manipulated by the scrunching
of the player’s face. As for the Balloon Bassoon,
it’s a long balloon half filled with water. At
one end it has a microphone, at the other a speaker.
Feedback squawks emitting from the microphone are “played”
by moving the balloon. “It made a horrendous noise,”
Stetten recalls. He now teaches the course to a class
of 40 undergraduates and it’s impossible to ask
each one to create an instrument. But the entire class
did build a rudimentary organ. Actually, it’s
more of a cross between an organ and a theremin. It’s
a series of oscillators, and when you move your hand
over them, you can produce sounds. (A theremin was a
forerunner of the synthesizer. Listen to the old Beach
Boys’ chestnut, "Good Vibrations": That’s
a theremin making the whistle-like whooo-whoo sound.)
At this point you may very well ask why someone who
teaches bioengineering has his students messing around
with musical instruments. Good question. Stetten—who
has degrees in engineering, neuroscience, and biomedical
engineering, as well as a medical degree—is a
music buff. And he calls music a wonderful medium for
teaching engineering and electronics concepts. Many
electrical, computer, and mechanical engineering courses
are particularly compatible with music, he says. Moreover,
Stetten thinks that engineering schools should do more
to train students to work in the multibillion-dollar
music industry, which has an insatiable and growing
need for engineers.
Electronics is revolutionizing music. Digitalization
of music means that, for a few thousand dollars, you
can today create in your home a recording studio that
would have cost several million bucks a decade ago.
“And it’ll have incredibly high quality,”
says Stetten. And anyone who has ever downloaded music
from the Internet knows how the distribution of music
is changing.
The industry already relies on cutting-edge engineering,
but most practitioners are traditionally trained engineers
who happen to love or play music. Upcoming generations
of music engineers, he says, should be specifically
trained to marry the two arts. Toward that goal, Stetten
thinks engineering schools should develop more courses
that emphasize music. Even engineers who go on to work
in other areas will benefit from exposure to music,
he says. And who knows? Perhaps someone will eventually
develop a Balloon Bassoon that makes a harmonious sound.
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