On Thursday Oct. 20, during STEM week, on the Haverhill Campus in the Technology Center building a talk was held on the Science of Music with physics
professor J. Oscar Azaret with NECC chemistry student Lindsey Fevry.

In this talk Azaret discusses how Art, Science and Craft combined creates the classical guitar, the predecessors of guitars, the kinds of woods and the harvesting of
the woods used to create the guitars we know today, how these woods affect the musical instrument artists use as their tool, and the science behind the guitar.

The talk began just a few minutes before 1pm with Azaret making sure his guitar was tuned right and strumming along. He quoted Pete Seeger, “‘you spend half the time
tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.”

He soon began with his talk, discussing the origin back to the 8th century, to the creation of the classic guitar we all know today in the 1800’s, created by Antonio Torres Jurado. Next, Azaret spoke of the kinds of woods guitars are made of and how things are. Like, for example the fretboard, neck and soundboard when all brought together influence the overall sound
of a guitar if you listen closely. After, to demonstrate the difference he plucks Pedro Aguiar’s “Se ela perguntar” beautifully. With Azaret’s explanation you can find the key
note differences in the three examples he showed with three different guitar’s he had made himself.

With the help of Lindsey Fevry, NECC chemistry major student Azaret began exhibiting the science behind the classic guitar. With linear density, string tension, the
velocity of string vibration, and the resonant modes of string are some of the smaller pieces behind what makes your favorite guitar solo special. Music sounds different to everyone and speaks different volumes or tones to different individuals everywhere.

Azaret used a device called a sinusoidal flapper so you can see, visually how sound waves are affected by tension- like string tightening on a guitar, which brings up the frequency, vibration, and weight. To find the resonant modes of the frequencies you hear when listening to guitar takes three different equations.

To find the linear density it is the mass over the length of the string. To find the string tension with the mass found prior times gravity.

Next, to find the velocity of the string vibration takes the square root of the tension over the linear density-meaning the speed of the vibration of a string. Lastly, to find the resonant modes members of the audience had to figure out what frequency would come next and Azaret then demonstrated the Hz on the sinusoidal flapper made in his class.

“The whole point of this board is because we are trying to calculate the frequency of the resonant modes…the way that one person resonates well with another is because they fit together… with this board it explains what frequency works best or ‘gets’ each other well enough to find the mode” says Fevry, who was given the opportunity to present the math explained because of how well she had presented a similar topic in her physics class with Azaret. “

The way he (Azaret) presents this topic makes it interesting and important because it explains the ‘why’ and how this all connects to life in some manner, it makes you look at the grand scheme of things while learning.”

Not only is Azaret a physics and engineering professor but he is also a luthier and Executive Director of the Boston Classical Guitar Society.

Before teaching at NECC in 2012 Azarat was a mechanical engineer at Bell Laboratories for three decades in the Boston Area. His passion for
guitars began in ‘94 and now he makes them. If you would like to have a guitar handmade or to discover your voice you can get more information on this at www.azaretguitars.com .

When asked why he thought the topic of the science behind the sound of guitars are important Azaret said “I think it’s important because, it’s important to stretch your
thinking and look underneath the surface of things and try to integrate together the different contributing factors of things….if you see a guitar you look at it as it is but you don’t think about the history of guitar and how it has. evolved, you don’t think about what it takes to build a nice guitar…it’s important for people to look beneath the surface and see all the contributing factors’.”

 When Northern Essex Community College opened its doors in 1961, few would’ve expected the former schoolhouse would one day morph into two sprawling campuses, with an enrollment of nearly 4,000. Northern Essex Community College was one of only four community colleges in Massachusetts when it was founded and its inaugural class only had a student body of 186, the vast majority being male.

While Northern Essex Community College has remained, the world it began in has changed profoundly in the decades since its founding.

The experiences of its students in those interweaving decades have varied widely as the college has expanded and its course catalog has grown larger and larger.

While their experiences may not be universal, they can help us understand the history and greater purpose of Northern Essex Community College and how we might wish to move forward in the future. 

When Northern Essex first moved to its current Kenoza Lake one would be hard pressed to recognize the campus we see today.

According to the NECC website, there were four buildings open in time for the Fall 1971 semester; The Fitness Center, the Science Building, the Science Building, and the Spurk Building. The parking lot was still mostly unpaved, which proved problematic for students looking to commute; with The Observer at the time even lampooning the situation with an article entitled “Mud Pies.” 

While today Northern Essex Students have dozens of programs to choose from, there were only six degrees available to students at the time. Slowly the Northern Essex Student Body started to shift from mostly 18 to 19 year old high school graduates to adults looking to further their career opportunities , along with other nontraditional students outside of the typical ‘fresh out of college’ demographic. 

Around this time, Mary Burke (NECC 85’) began to pursue a career in medicine and enrolled in the Nursing Program. “It was completely different from the first time I tried at college, it was much more hands-on,” she remarked on her experience in the nursing program in 1984, which had just seen an expansion around the same time after receiving Title III grants from the federal government. Burke, of Haverhill,  credits the firsthand experiences she received in the Northern Essex Nursing Program with her later success in the nursing field.

“Once I started at the hospital I realized a lot of the nurses who’d graduated from four year schools were nowhere as prepared as we were,” she said.

She looks back fondly on the changes she witnessed in higher education from her first attempt at a degree in the mid 1970s.

“College was too abstract for me the first time around. The classes were a lot more confusing, and really irrelevant to what you actually wanted to do for a living. By the time I went back I wanted something that would teach me how to be a nurse, I wasn’t really interested in anything else.” Burke continues to work as a nurse today. 

The wide array of people who’ve attended Northern Essex Community College over the years can serve as reminders of where Northern Essex Community College grew out of and where it might hope to grow in the future.

Women have gone from being a fraction of the student body to the majority (65 percent), and while most students were once fresh out of high school, today 30 percent of enrolled students are over 26, according to the website.  Though 60 years is trivial compared to the centuries some of its more established rivals have been open, these accounts can help us put into perspective just how many lives have been changed over the decades and the progress Northern Essex Community College continues to make as the years go by.

Though ‘Harvard on the Kenoza’ has long served as a demeaning moniker of sorts, it might not be far off in the minds of the community it serves.