This one I remember fondly from my time in York back in 2013. Speaking to Brass players I had learned about their usual practice of warming up an instrument before it would be ready to play during a performance. What came to my mind for one of my class projects was the question “can we provide a tool to help with that process?”. In fact, knowing when an instrument is fully ready to play is not a trivial task for beginners, especially in noisy environments when no auditory feedback can help to determine when the sound is optimal.
For this project, I toyed around with temperature sensors (thermocouple probes) and created a small MATLAB program which would plot the progress of the instrument in Celsius over time, complete with a rudimentary curve-analysis monitor to establish when the warming-up process stabilizes.
I am not really confident that this tool would be actually useful to professionals, but it was fun to put together. And surely there is a lot to say about the relationship of timbre with temperature.