Tone Bender: A collaborative activity for signal processing education & psychoacoustic data collection

Collaborative web-based activities can serve as a cogent method for large-scale, psychoacoustic data collection. The advancing maturity of web-based platforms makes it feasible to rapidly develop entertaining games that can collect information on specific tasks, such as audio and image annotation, on a large scale. The accessibility and entertainment value of these games make them attractive to educators as well, since they promote interactive learning methods through gaming. To this end, we have developed Tone Bender, a collaborative activity developed for signal processing education and data collection on the perception of musical instruments. In this paper, we describe how Tone Bender collects perceptual information from players and provide sample lessons for K-12 curricula using the game as an educational platform.