Abstract: Teaching signal processing to senior undergraduate students can be an enjoyable task, provided that you are willing to spend some time to introduce them to digital music.
Leaded by a motivated R+D group in Acoustics or Audio, all you need is signal processing students who have good MATLAB programming skills and filter theory.
My talk will be focused in two topics:
1. How to emphasize Signal Processing concepts through digital music.
I will describe a laboratory assignment where students have to synthesize musical instruments in different ways: additive, FM, through physical modeling and using wavetables. I will give examples and achievements along the years.
2. Digital Music as Audio and Acoustics’ research themes source
Music projects in electrical engineering environments tend to be well received. I will show several subjects that became appropriate for sponsored projects or students contents.
It is interesting to remark that mixing engineering and music help develop the cultural brackground of students, creates an unstructured space where new ideas emerge easily, and turns mathematics into a more friendly resource.


Brief Biography of the Speaker:
She received her Electrical Engineering degree in 1987 from the University ITBA (Buenos Aires Institute of Technology), Argentina. She achieved a Masters degree in Speech Processing from the “Universidad Politecnica de Madrid”, Spain, where she is currently finishing her Ph.D thesis on Speaker Verification.
Since 1988 she has been holding academic positions in Argentina, until she became tenured faculty in the rank of the Full Professor in 2004. Since 2007 she is the Electrical Engineering Department Chair at ITBA. She is also the Director of a Master’s degree joint program on Engineering Education (ITBA-Universidad de Mendoza- Universidad de Granada, Spain).
Her research area is primarily Signal Processing, Speech and Education as subareas. In recent years she started research groups in different areas, such as speaker verification, acoustics, DSP applications and EMC.
She is the author of more than 20 papers, mostly in the area of signal processing education, published in reviewed journals or presented at international conferences such as IEEE ICASSP, IEEE ISCAS, IASTED and WSEAS. She is a technical reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems and IEEE ICASSP Proceedings and SSIP IASTED Proceedings.
She is an active senior member of the IEEE. She is the founder of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Argentina Chapter, from which she is currently Chair (2008-2009), she is the IEEE SPS Education Technical Committee Chair (2007-2009), she is a SPS Conference Board Member and an IEEE SPS Lensing Oversight Committee Member.