Abstract:

The European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) involves deep changes of the educational paradigms. The students should take a more active attitude in the learning process rather than be seated just listening to the professor. This change involves not only the students but also the professors.
• Students have to get involved to a higher level on the teaching and learning processes. They have to create and improve their skills on autonomous and cooperative learning.
• Professors have to develop new interesting experiences and material that improve student skills on autonomous and cooperative learning.
In this paper, we present a experience of autonomous and cooperative learning for students, that was carried on at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Telecomunicación at the Universidad de Málaga. The key of the experience we are going to present in this contribution is to use an attractive topic for the student that capture their attention and make them put more interest in the subject that should be learned. In order to do this in a successful way, there should be some points in common between the thing use to catch their attention and the subject to be studied.
In this experience, the novelty is to include the relation between music synthesis and communication.
The crucial targets of our experiences are:
• There is a strong relationship between the modulation techniques used in communications with the music synthesis techniques.
• Modulation techniques and musical synthesis are two issues that are usually studied separately.
• The Telecommunication Engineering student, normally, do not link these two fields because their studies doesn't include music synthesis techniques.

The experience presented in this paper is based on the proposal to the student of an additional work, whose title was "Generation of musical sounds using modulation". The objectives of this experience are:
• In depth study of all the modulations used in communications, analyzing how to generate them and their spectrum.
• To learn the basics of musical synthesis and its relation with modulations.
• To consider what are the main characteristics of musical sounds and how they are translated in the spectrum.
• To synthesize musical sounds based on modulations, using Simulink/Matlab and to improve the knowledge of Simulink.
• To learn working collaboratively with others and to assess the work in groups.
• To improve independent learning skills and to relate concepts that, in principle, seem unrelated.
The main conclusions obtained from this work are:
• The assessment of this experience, for both students and teachers, has been very positive. In fact, this experience are going to be repeated for the 2010/2011 in all the groups of the Laboratory of Communications.
• Students have learned more and faster about Simulink, than with the normal practices of the laboratory.
• Students find difficult to perform jobs in which the solution is not clear from the beginning, but they are surprised at the reached results.
• It has been shown that the inclusion of new topics away from the normal ones, makes the work more attractive.
• Evaluation results of the student who participate in this experience was better than not participant student .

Keywords:

Communications, Modulations, Music Synthesis, Autonomous learning.