The INFINITY Project: digital signal processing and digital music in high school engineering education

The importance of mathematics and science education in modern technological society cannot be understated. This keynote paper outlines the structure and goals of The INFINITY Project, a joint effort between educators, administrators, and industry leaders to establish an engineering curriculum at the high school level. The curriculum motivates students to learn about the fundamental concepts and principles of mathematics, science, and engineering through the study of multimedia and information technology. Digital music and audio synthesis are used at the onset of this curriculum to teach students about signals, systems, and modeling. Several examples from this portion of the curriculum are described, including a real-time interactive waveform synthesizer, a real-time guitar synthesizer based on physical modeling, a real-time sinusoidal MIDI player, and an extremely low-cost loudspeaker that each student designs, builds, and tests.