I am a highschool teacher, and I am teaching a mediaproduction course as this is a private media highschool located in Norway. Its only one hour per week, and I have a general book on the topic for my students, but I was wondering if there are topics that you feel I should cover, that would not be part of a general soundwave, frequencies and recording-type book.

Keep in mind that the students are about 16-18 years old, with quite limited knowledge on the topic, so I guess the complexity should be kept to a minimum level.

Any takers ?

I happen to be a student in Norway myself. Struck me as kind of odd to read your thread, as I'm currently studying electronics. Just before the holidays, we were taught about using simple passive filters. Except for just hanging/lurking on Hydrogenaudio, I don't really have that
much knowledge of audio technology, but just an off-topic post, yey~ I should get to bed or something.

That's a tough question to answer since audio is so multidisciplinary involving physics (acoustics), electronics (analog and digital), psychoacoustics, perception, music, etc.

I taught a course on Critical Listening: Perception and the Audio Environment for first year college students interested in working in the recording-post-production industry and I tried to focus on variables within the audio recording/playback chain that generally affect the sound quality -- I used Alton Everest's Master Handbook on Acoustics with a lot of supplemental reading to cover microphones, digital audio, loudspeakers, room acoustics, etc.

In my opinion, the biggest variables in the entire recording-playback chain are the loudspeakers and their acoustical interaction with the listening rooms. Why? Because everything within the recording chain is manipulated based on listening through loudspeakers in rooms - yet these are the weakest and least understood component in the entire recording and playback chain. And there no meaningful standards to define their performance --

There are not many good books on that subject until Floyd Toole wrote one this year called Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms. It's not too technical and only has graphs and text (no math).

Good luck !
Cheers

One thing that most people don't grok immediately is the slowness of the speed of sound.

So introducing the idea of 1153feet/second, or roughly 1 foot/millisecond, (of course you'll use the real units, not the fake English units we use here) and showing how you can easily get comb filtering, etc, in a pure acoustic environment might start some minds out a bit better.