Home

About the Course

AME 292: Acoustics Portfolio is a course offered every fall through the Audio and Music Engineering program at the University of Rochester. Typically taken by undergraduates during their third year of study, this course centers around the completion of a semester long project related to acoustics. Students work in small groups to propose, research, and complete a project of their choosing.

Adapting to COVID Guidelines

This semester has brought a unique set of challenges to the students in this course, as guidelines involving COVID had restricted in-person meetings and data collection sessions. In particular, small rooms were limited to hosting one student at a time. The department’s Whisper Room, which is normally used heavily by the students for gathering clean testing data, was one such room who’s use was severely limited due to these guidelines:

Small rooms were limited to one student at a time to enforce social distancing. Jaewoo’s partner, Zack, set up the microphones inside this anechoic space before Jaewoo entered to produce testing data. Once Jaewoo played his flute inside the room, nobody could enter the room for a subsequent half an hour, further complicating the acoustic measurements.

Several groups also played instruments to gather performance-related testing data. If a student played a woodwind instrument in a space, the University mandated a 30 minute settling time in the room before anyone else could enter in an effort to reduce through-the-air COVID transmission.

The students did an excellent job adapting to these guidelines. Careful and far-in-advance planning was required to facilitate the collection of all data used in these projects, and each group ultimately collected the data they were anticipating in a safe and organized manner.