2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 190A: A New Educational Experience: Community College Engineering and Music Students Create User-Friendly Music Theory Application for Education and Composition

Presented at Two-Year College Division Poster Session

Community college students invented, built, and implemented a user-friendly computer and mobile phone tool that enables musicians to compose and analyze music in the classroom and outside the classroom quickly. The key enabler was the collaboration among first- and second-year students who study engineering and music. While in the classroom, a music student contrived a clever idea for a new tool. The student reached out to the community college’s engineering department for help with the necessary creative program logic and formulas in Microsoft Excel. The first edition of the tool is used by students with positive reviews. It saves hours of time in learning and applying music theory concepts. This student-led project opened excellent research opportunities for community college students, motivated retention, and prompted innovative teaching and studying. It also inspired more students to participate in academic research and aspire to higher levels of education, including master’s and doctorates in engineering.
Tonal music comprises the musical keys, scales, and chords that are used most in much of the Americas and Europe today and since the 1600’s. Tonal music is complex and highly mathematical.
Understanding music theory takes many students three to four semesters to learn. Music analysis and composition are time consuming. The coordination between music theory students and engineering students enabled the project to progress. This creative combination of music theory expertise and engineering creativity with mathematics resulted in a time-saving tool. This user-friendly laptop tool offers substantial time savings and reduces the amount of information that must be looked up in textbooks or committed to memory.
Music theory course material taught at the community college provided the data and numerical relationships for the new mathematical spreadsheet tool. Musical notes were organized into tonal keys, scales, and chords, then input into mathematical databases. Students programmed handy look-up tables. Next, students developed a user-friendly input function to access the spreadsheet's programmed music theory. There are many attractive features that save music students a lot of time. Here are a few examples:
(1) Tonal Composition Guide: the user types in one piece of information--the musical key--in which to compose, and the tool provides all the chords, notes, and typical sequence of chords for "tonal" music.
(2) Diatonic Post-Tonal Music Guide: User types in one data point—name of the collection. Tool provides the proper ordering of notes in ionian, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, & locrian modes.
(3) Octatonic and Hexatonic Guide: User simply reads notes off the provided charts.
(4) Twelve Note Serialism: the user can use the provided template to create a 12x12 matrix that is super handy for composers to pick the proper ordering of notes.
Engineering skills in algebraic formulas and data lookup features in spreadsheets combined well with music theory knowledge to create this elegant tool. Online research generated several music theory applications. However, none of them were free nor as focused for music theory academic studies nor for music composition.
Link to the User-Friendly Music Theory Application tool: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EQ05ppdQUp9bpME3OvFgRv7tuBa4JB0R/edit#gid=281206229

Authors

Anita Riddle Salt Lake Community College [biography]

Anita Riddle is a student of music and engineering at Salt Lake Community College. She was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. She also worked in the oil and gas industry. Anita Riddle is originally from Arizona. She has also lived in Germany, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and Illinois. She currently resides in Draper, Utah with her husband and two daughters.
Miss Sierra Katherine Schmidt Salt Lake Community College
Miss Christine Silvia Schmidt Salt Lake Community College [biography]

Christine Schmidt is an early enrollment student at Salt Lake Community College. She expects to graduate from Corner Canyon High School in Draper, Utah in May 2023. Christine has also lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Fairfax, Virginia and Spring, Texas.
Karson Spencer
Dr. Nick M. Safai Salt Lake Community College [biography]

Dr. Nick M. Safai is an ASEE Fellow. He has been an ASEE officer and member for the past 36 years. He has been the six-time elected as the annual Program Chair of the ASEE International Division for approximately 15 years. Three times as the annual Program Chair for the Graduate Studies Division of ASEE. Nick has had a major role in development and expansion of the ID division. Under his term as the International Division Program Chair the international division expanded, broadened in topics, and the number of sessions increased from a few technical sessions to over eighteen sessions in the recent years.
The ASEE International Division by votes, has recognized Nick’s years of service through several awards over the past years. Nick has been the recipient of multiple Service awards (examples: 2013, 2010, 2006, 2004, 1996), Global Engineering Educators award (example: 2007, 2005), Best Paper award (examples: 2016, 2010, 2005, 2004, 1995) and other awards from the International Division for exceptional contribution to the international division of the American Society for Engineering Education.
Examples of some Awards from other Professional Organizations:
• American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE): Engineering Educator of the Year Award 2004.
• Utah Engineers Council, UEC: Engineering Educator of the Year 2005 award, in recognition of outstanding achievements in the field of engineering and for service to society.
• SLC Foundation; Salt lake City, Utah: Teaching Excellence Award 2004 and 2012.
* SLCC Faculkty Exemplary Service Award April 2015 and 2016.
• American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE): Chapter faculty Advisor recognition award 2002.
• Computational Sciences and Education; recognition for outstanding contributions and for exemplary work in helping the division achieve its goals1998.
• Engineering Division; recognition for outstanding contributions and for exemplary work in helping the division achieves its goals 1995.
• Science and Humanities; recognition for outstanding contributions and for exemplary work in helping the fields achieve its May 1994.
• Math & Physical Sciences; appreciation for academic expertise February 1994.

Academics: Nick Safai received his PhD degree in engineering from the Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey in 1979. He also did a one year post-doctoral at Princeton University after receiving his degrees from Princeton University. His areas of interest, research topics, and some of the research studies have been;
• Multi-Phase Flow through Porous Media
• Wave propagation in Filamentary Composite Materials
• Vertical and Horizontal Land Deformation in a De-saturating Porous Medium
• Stress Concentration in Filamentary Composites with Broken Fibers
• Aviation; Developments of New Crashworthiness Evaluation Strategy for Advanced General Aviation
• Pattern Recognition of Biological Photomicrographs Using Coherent Optical Techniques
Nick also received his four masters; in Aerospace Engineering, Civil Engineering, Operation Research, and Mechanical Engineering all from Princeton University during the years from 1973 through 1976. He received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical engineering, with minor in Mathematics from Michigan State. Nick has served and held positions in Administration (Civil, Chemical, Computer Engineering, Electrical, Environmental, Mechanical, Manufacturing, Bioengineering, Material Science), and as Faculty in the engineering department for the past twenty seven years.

Industry experience: Consulting; since 1987; Had major or partial role in: I) performing research for industry, DOE and NSF, and II) in several oil industry or government (DOE, DOD, and NSF) proposals.
Performed various consulting tasks from USA for several oil companies (Jawaby Oil Service Co., WAHA Oil and Oasis Co., London, England). The responsibilities included production planning, forecasting and reservoir maintenance. This production planning and forecasting consisted of history matching and prediction based on selected drilling. The reservoir maintenance included: water/gas injection and gas lift for selected wells to optimize reservoir production plateau and prolonging well’s economic life.

Terra Tek, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT, 1985-1987; Director of Reservoir Engineering; Responsible of conducting research for reservoir engineering projects, multiphase flow, well testing, in situ stress measurements, SCA, hydraulic fracturing and other assigned research programs. In addition, as a group director have been responsible for all management and administrative duties, budgeting, and marketing of the services, codes and products.

Standard oil Co. (Sohio Petroleum Company), San Francisco, California, 1983-85; Senior Reservoir Engineer; Performed various tasks related to Lisburne reservoir project; reservoir simulation (3 phase flow), budgeting, proposal review and recommendation, fund authorizations (AFE) and supporting documents, computer usage forecasting, equipment purchase/lease justification (PC, IBM-XT, Printer, etc.), selection/justification and award of contract to service companies, lease evaluation, economics, reservoir description and modeling, lift curves, pressure maintenance (gas injection analysis, micellar-flooding, and water-flooding), Special Core Analysis (SCA), PVT correlations, petrophysics and water saturation mapping.

Performed reservoir description and modeling, material balance analysis. Recovery factors for the reservoir. Administrative; coordination and organization of 2 and 6 week workplans, 1982 and 1983 annual specific objectives, monthly reports, recommendation of courses and training program for the group.
Chevron Oil Company, 1979- 1983;
Chevron Overseas Petroleum Inc. (COPI), San Francisco, California 1981-1983. Project Leader/Reservoir Engineer, Conducted reservoir and some production engineering work using the in-house multiphase model/simulators. Evaluation/development, budgeting and planning for international fields; Rio Zulia field – Columbia, Pennington Field – Offshore Nigeria, Valenginan, Grauliegend and Rothliegend Reservoir – Netherlands. Also represented COPI as appropriate when necessary.

Chevron Geo-Sciences Company, Houston, TX, 1979-1980 Reservoir Engineer Applications, Performed reservoir simulation studies, history matching and performance forecasting, water-flooding for additional recovery (Rangeley Field – Colorado, Windalia Field – Australia), steam-flooding performances (Kern River, Bakersfield, California), gas blowdown and injection (Eugene Island Offshore Louisiana) on domestic and foreign fields where Chevron had an interest, using Chevron’s CRS3D, SIS and Steam Tube simulator programs.

Chevron Oil Field Research Co. (COFRC), La Habra 1978-1979, California. Research Engineer, Worked with Three-Phase, Three-Dimensional Black Oil Reservoir Simulator, Steam Injection Simulator, Pipeflow #2. Also performed history matching and 20-year production forecast including gas lift and desalination plants for Hanifa Reservoir, Abu Hadriya Field (ARAMCO).

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