"Crushing Stereotypes, Making Connections, and Encouraging Creativity: Music and Engineering"

Disciplinary boundaries are somewhat artificial, established as a result of organization and out of the convenience of compartmentalization.But creativity has no disciplinary boundaries.Signals, Systems and Music is an experimental, multi-campus, cross-disciplinary course designed to attract STEM students as well as students of the arts; to expose them to concepts important to both their own and someone else's discipline of interest; to give them the challenge of working with someone from a different discipline; to help them find ways to communicate with others without having a common language; to aid them in undertaking the act of creation to produce something of value, in this case a musical composition; and, finally, to encourage them to reflect on the connections and commonalities between two distinct disciplines, crushing stereotypes in the process.This paper gives a brief introduction to the course, which we have experimented with through six offerings.