Engineering instructor John Kirk (left) helps Ayaan Vora '26 troubleshoot a circuit board. (photo: Brian Faircloth)
This is the second in a series of short stories on NCSSM’s January Term (J-Term), a special four-week break from NCSSM’s usual class schedule that allows students to delve deeply into a project or special interest. This year, nearly 150 courses are offered across the school’s Durham and Morganton campuses and around the world. Opportunities range from intensive lab experiences to classroom explorations and local field trips to travel to places like the western and northern United States, Central and South America, East Asia, the South Pacific, North Africa and Europe.
There are strange sounds coming from one of the classrooms in NCSSM-Durham’s engineering suite. Musical notes, some sound like. Others sound like mysterious extraterrestrial communications. John Kirk, an engineering instructor on the Durham campus, raises his voice above the auditory fray. “Is anyone going crazy yet?”
Kirk, along with fellow Durham-based engineering instructor Larry Myers, is leading students in a J-Term course called Electronic Instruments, where students gain a deeper appreciation of the music we hear by exploring how instruments such as synthesizers, electric guitars, and Theremins (an electronic musical instrument that is played without physical contact) all use electronics to produce music.
It’s very hands-on. Scattered throughout the classroom are colorful circuit boards with small wires like whiskers running between connections. A small musical keyboard sits along the back wall where two students plug and unplug various cords into jacks in its face in an attempt to modify presets. Elsewhere two students wearing headphones nod their heads and tap their fingers in the air along to a drum beat they’ve created on a small drum machine that looks like a ’60s-era NASA control panel. And those weird noises? Someone somewhere in the room is at work on a synthesizer, testing out pitch, speed, and modulation. There’s a lot going on.
Joshua Chilukuri is an NCSSM-Durham senior from Apex High School working on a wah-wah pedal, a foot-controlled device that helps electric guitarists get a unique, almost voice-like effect from their instrument (think Jimi Hendrix and “Voodoo Child.”)
While computer science and electrical engineering are Joshua’s main focus right now, he recently began learning how to play electric guitar. The Electronic Instruments J-Term course dovetailed his interests perfectly.
“This was actually my first-choice J-Term course because I just think it’s really cool how at NCSSM we get to explore such interdisciplinary interests,” he says. “I thought it’d be super cool to get to break open these circuits and actually understand the engineering behind how it all works. These types of interdisciplinary connections are always really, really exciting to me.”
Partnering with Joshua on the wah-wah pedals is Soham Gaonkar, an NCSSM-Durham junior from Apex Friendship High School. Though he banged out the tunes on a clarinet for seven years prior to NCSSM, he’s approaching the course almost strictly from the circuitry angle.
“I mainly chose the course for the electrical aspect more than the instrument parts,” he says.
Working on the electronics for instruments is very similar to working on other electrical systems, he explains – “you still have to build a project, troubleshoot it, and do all of the same engineering” – but he’s intrigued by the analog nature of the work. “These circuits are all very much analog circuitry, made before modern circuitry was invented. They were doing these things with resistors and capacitors kind of in their backyard.”
Mariam Hanna, a senior on the Durham campus, had never taken any engineering classes at her home high school, Neuse Charter School in Smithfield. Electrical Instruments is now the second electrical engineering course she’s taken at NCSSM, and it has her leaning toward pursuing further studies in engineering post-NCSSM.
Though now somewhat knowledgeable of electrical systems, investigating the foundational aspect of electronic instruments has been a unique experience, Mariam says.
“This is completely new for me. This is a different side of the electrical course I took my junior year. It’s helping me put together everything I learned from that, and it’s showing me that there’s a lot more than what meets the eye [in music]. Usually, you just listen to three minutes of a song and then just go on your day. But now I’m getting to see that, ‘Oh! People put a lot of effort into this!’”
Myers, one of the course’s instructors and also an accomplished guitarist, says the students really seem to be gaining a new appreciation for the technical side of music making.
“We’ve thrown a lot of stuff at them with all the guitar pedals and the synth modules and all that stuff, and things can get a little frustrating for them when the circuits don’t work, but they really seem to enjoy doing this. There’s a lot they can accomplish.”
And it’s not a bad gig for him as an instructor, either, he says. “I always hoped I’d get to teach with a guitar strapped around my neck.”
