Digital Signal Processing: An Abstract Mathematics to Real World Experience

Teaching large classroom is always a very challenging task for educators. This is due to many difficulties imposed on the teaching-learning process. Digital signal processing (DSP) is now pervasive as it is used in everything from digital photo cameras, MP3 players to automobiles. However many students see DSP as abstract mathematics. This is because of the gap between understanding the mathematical formalism of each concept and being able to make sense of them in practice. Getting students actively participate in learning process and motivating them to fill these gaps is a difficult task [3]. To address this difficulty a "recipe" is suggested i.e. "visualizing" the DSP theory with practical applications like speech processing, image processing and so on will help the students in learning better. Sensory stimulation theory of learning says that majority of knowledge held by adults is through seeing (75%) while hearing is the next (13%) and if multi-senses are stimulated; greater learning because of synergy takes place. This theory encouraged us to develop undergraduate level course activity with the applications of audio processing. In this way students are able to see the results of audio processing in MATLAB plots and analyze the results by varying few design parameters. Thus DSP related theoretical concepts will be studied not just as mathematical abstracts but as a useful tools having sense in real world.