top of page

2.671 INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT

In spring 2013 I took Prof. Ian Hunter's class on instrumentation and measurement for mechanical engineering. The class covered different measurement tools and techniques that engineers can use to understand physical systems. The class culminated in a final project where students had to develop their own measurement strategy to answer a research question and present their findings. I used a technique called system identification to study why showers can improve the quality of someone's singing. Showers can amplify and modify human singing to make it sound pleasing to the human ear and I wanted to understand why. System identification can be used to develop a transfer function that completely describes the system being studied. I used a microphone to play a variety of musical notes across the spectrum of human audible frequencies and measured the echoed sounds with a sound recorder. I used a Fast Fourier Transform to examine how the sounds changed between the input and output. In particular I studied the coherence between the two signals and the changes in the magnitude of the signal. I found that the shower acts as a linear system which tends to amplify sound which can improve the sound of singing. 

bottom of page