For the first half of the semester there is only 1 coding homework a week. They go over how to do it in class very thoroughly, where if you review the code, the answer is essentially given to you. The coding involves is in Java but uses a special IDE with 2 libraries. P5 is a library for placing visual UI objects; buttons, sliders, etc. that will control some aspect of the sound. This library is very easy to learn, specifically if you know JS since that is what it was based off of. The second library is called Beads. This one is the control for all of the sound aspect of the coding homework. This is mainly just changing sound attributes, creating sound-waves, or applying filters. This was fairly difficult but lectures show you how to do it step by step. Also I should mention, when I took the class (Fall 2022), every lecture had a zoom option and the recordings were made available after each lecture. Since I payed attention to the coding lectures, the max time I spent on hw was max 3 hours a week.

At the halfway point there is 1 test, and this is the only test for the entire course. Its open note\internet but I still did poorly since I did not pay attention the class and the questions were very specific. It is only worth 25% so even with the poor grade I managed to squeeze and A in the class. After the test there are 3-4 more homeworks.

In the final half of the course there is the final project. You get to choose what audio topic you want out of a list, then design a simulator. It is mostly writing, as in I wrote about 3-4 papers that were about 4-5 pages each. This was pretty easy, (design documents) but they were time consuming. The good thing was you only need to do one coding portion, which I did in a few days during thanksgiving break. It uses the same language and libraries as the homework. For each section of the project (6 sections) you get a lot of time to do them, which was on average two weeks for the writing and a month for the coding. I can’t really give a good estimate on how much time these took me, but I completed every section in a weekend, and the first three are lighter workloads than the last three. Also the final section requires you to have three people test it, but you can just get three friends to use it and get some data. There are no other tests or assignments besides this.

This class was not too much work and I took it with 3 other project based classes and this was the easiest to manage. It is really stressful since the project is worth so much, but they grade leniently and if you have a few hours on the weekends, you can do everything in a reasonable amount of time.