Instruments of Identity: Engineering the Music of Meaning
I selected Engineering the Acoustical World—GENED 1080—as the first class I ever planned to take at Harvard. Not Ec10, not LS1a. GENED 1080. I still remember scrolling through the course catalog as a high school senior, eyes lighting up as I read the description. An engineering class that was also about music? About how we listen, how we interpret vibration, how sound becomes structured?
But for the first three years of my time at Harvard, GENED 1080 remained just out of reach. My schedule was a delicate balancing act between Bioengineering, History of Science, research, and leadership commitments, and each semester something collided. The dream stayed shelved.
And yet, when I finally enrolled as a junior, it felt like the timing was perfect. I was no longer just a musician trying to hold onto that part of myself through labs and p-sets. I was someone who had spent years thinking deeply about systems—biological, mechanical, cultural. Someone whose hands had learned to solder and wire just as much as they’d learned to play. And someone increasingly convinced that the way we design technology says as much about our values as our intentions.
GENED 1080 met me there—and took me further. Through lectures on the physics of resonance and damping, to lab explorations on how materials shape acoustics, the course illuminated the profound ways in which engineering is, at its core, about storytelling. Each lesson we learned was both technically rigorous and emotionally rich. We studied the mechanics of vibrating strings, tubes, and membranes—then linked that knowledge to the evolution of musical instruments, to the cultural role of design, to the physical embodiment of sound.
The final project asked us to build something that made sound in a new way. With my partner, I co-designed the Harmonic Cylindrica—a cylinder-shaped instrument with guitar strings vertically wound around its wooden shell, tuned to the Circle of Fifths. A motor inside, controlled via a potentiometer, struck the strings in rhythmic patterns. Wind chimes added organic resonance from the outside. The whole instrument was designed to mimic the soundscape of the rainforest, inspired by Victor Gama’s Toha, which draws on the behavior of the sociable weaver birds of Southern Africa. Just as those birds built together in community, we imagined an instrument that could be shared—played in a circle, interacted with collectively, and designed with multiple auditory layers.
This is the Harmonic Cylindrica, the instrument I built for GENED 1080. Its cylindrical wooden body is wrapped in guitar strings tuned to the Circle of Fifths, which are struck by a motorized mechanism controlled via Arduino. Wind chime pipes on the exterior add natural resonance, creating an immersive 360-degree soundscape. This project explored how acoustical principles, cultural inspiration, and engineering can come together to shape both music and meaning.
GENED 1080 didn’t just give me permission to build this—it gave me the technical vocabulary, the acoustic theory, and the historical context to understand why it mattered. We weren’t just experimenting with sound. We were experimenting with meaning. The Harmonic Cylindrica became a symbol of what can happen when creativity and rigor meet on equal terms.
But what I cherish most about the course was not just the opportunity to build—it was the call to extend the work beyond the lab.
In the winter of my senior year, I traveled to Yerevan, Armenia, to teach at the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies. There, I led a two week-long workshop titled “Symphonies of Science,” where students learned to use music production software and MIDI controllers to create musical interpretations of human biological systems. The concepts we had explored in GENED 1080—tempo, frequency, resonance, harmonics—suddenly became the vocabulary through which I could empower others to learn.
I watched students as young as twelve grapple with what it meant to translate a heartbeat into a kick drum pattern or represent neural signaling through rapid arpeggios. Some chose to layer smooth synth pads to evoke respiration; others used jagged rhythms to mimic the chaos of anxiety or the erratic pulse of hypertension. One student crafted a gastrointestinal “soundtrack” using slow, wave-like modulation that mirrored peristalsis. As they worked, I realized I was watching them discover the same truth I had uncovered in GENED 1080: music isn’t just a language—it’s a model. A way to encode, interpret, and express complex systems. And everyone, regardless of age or background, already knows how to speak it. They just need the tools. Even more so, they were teaching me—offering new ways of thinking about these systems through whatever musical interpretations they used to explain them. Their creativity pushed me to reconsider how we teach science and medicine in the first place. By the end of the workshop, these students weren’t just making music—they were using it to explain processes like synaptic transmission, digestive flow, and cardiovascular regulation, demonstrating a grasp of anatomy and physiology that reached far beyond the traditional classroom.
GENED 1080 had given me a way to communicate STEM in ways that felt intuitive, joyful, and culturally grounded. Watching students adjust timbre and pitch as a way of expressing illness and healing made me think: why don’t we teach this way more often? Why don’t we let sound carry meaning into places words can’t go?
This desire to bridge science, culture, and communication through music is now at the heart of my senior thesis. I’m designing a soft robotic assistive device that delivers rhythmic, tactile pulses based on polyrhythmic analysis of Nigerian and African American jazz music. The device converts rhythms into vibrotactile cues that guide motor movement. It’s built for use in rehabilitation and music therapy, particularly in populations with neurodegenerative or motor coordination disorders. But beyond the biomedical function, this work asks: what does it mean to feel a culture? How do we design tools that heal not just the body, but affirm identity?
GENED 1080 planted the seed for this inquiry. It showed me that resonance isn’t just a technical phenomenon—it’s an emotional and cultural one. That tuning a string is not just about frequency but about intention. That we can build with circuits and still honor our traditions.
And perhaps most importantly, the course revealed an intersection I had never thought was allowed. Before, I had considered music and engineering to be two lives I was living in parallel. One was personal, expressive, and intuitive. The other was analytical, structured, and measurable. GENED 1080 showed me that they could be the same. That a waveform could carry a story, a circuit could hold rhythm and a design could be both functional and poetic.
This reimagining of engineering as a humanistic, communicative, and sensory discipline has shaped my approach not only as a student but as a future educator, researcher, and innovator. In my thesis work, I’m now incorporating OpenCap-based motion capture to visualize gait and body movement in response to different rhythmic structures. I’m comparing participant motion under simple binary beats, ternary swing rhythms, and complex polyrhythms derived from Yoruba and Afro-Cuban traditions. It’s biomechanics—but it’s also biography. The rhythms I use are drawn from my own Nigerian and African American heritage, and reflect my passion for human centered design around marginalized communities that are often decentered in medical device design.
All of this—every signal, every design, every interaction—traces back to the foundational experience of GENED 1080. A course that taught me how to listen to the spaces between logic and feeling.
Science communication is one of the most urgent challenges we face today. As misinformation spreads and the divide between experts and the public grows, I believe engineers must become storytellers. GENED 1080 gave me a model for how to do this. It didn’t reduce science to spectacle. It elevated its complexity through clarity. It dared us to build instruments that speak in frequencies people can feel—in body, mind, and heart.
Music is a universal language, but it’s also a precise one. GENED 1080 showed me how the same principles that govern acoustics also govern ethics: tension and release, harmony and discord, pattern and disruption. As I look toward graduate study and continued work in therapeutic device design, I hold those lessons close. I want to continue building systems that sound like and feel like the people they are meant to serve.
Because at the end of the day, what I learned in GENED 1080 was that engineering is not just about solving problems. It’s about translating dreams. And for the first time, I saw a classroom that didn’t ask me to choose between the engineer and the artist—but welcomed me as both.