Engineer Your Sound (EYS) Participatory technical design using the example of music. Pupils develop didactic concepts for interdisciplinary technical education.

The project "Engineer Your Sound" (EYS) is one project in the research program "Sparcling Science" from the Federal Ministry of Science and Research. The program aims at promoting scientific recruitment and supports the collaboration of young people and scientists in terms of actively participating young people in the work out of scientific projects. In the EYS project the interest in music of young people, visiting a music secondary school, is used as vehicle to encourage them to develop their own technical products. The conveyed technical competence should further provide a basement for the development of didactic methods to support interdisciplinary technical education at secondary schools without musical priority.

The first part of this research work describes the communication of technical competence and the allocation of resources to support the pupils in realizing their own technical projects. As result of the working process the technical products are presented. In the second part the development of one of the projects, the "Air Instrument", is described in detail. This project demonstrates the exploration of the technical principle of an, especially for young people common, technology and it's usage in a deviating musical context. The instrument is controlled through purely moving the fingers in the air. The finger tracking is performed by using the infrared camera and multi object tracking (MOT) of the Wii Remote. The position data is transfered to Pure Data (PD) which is used to accomplish the wavetable synthesis of piano sound.