Alba Solsona-Berga – asolsonaberga@ucsd.edu Scripps Institution of Oceanography University of California San Diego La Jolla, CA 92037 United States
Instagram: @sripps_mbarc
Popular version of 2pAO5 – Shaping the acoustic field in the Gulf of Mexico: marine mammals linked to topography and oceanographic features Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0037682
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
Exploring the Lives of the Ocean’s Deepest Divers After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, restoring marine mammal populations in the Gulf of Mexico became a priority. Protecting these animals starts with understanding how they use their habitat and where they go. Sperm whales and beaked whales are some of the ocean’s most extreme divers, spending much of their lives navigating the dark depths. They rely on bursts of sound called echolocation clicks to find their prey and navigate. These clicks act like acoustic fingerprints, helping us figure out where whales go and what environments they prefer.
To track their movements, we set up 18 underwater listening stations throughout the Gulf. These instruments recorded sounds continuously for three years. By analyzing this data, we discovered patterns in where the whales appeared and how those locations were linked to oceanographic features like currents and slopes.
Video: Deploying the instruments.
Where Whales Go Different whale species tend to favor different parts of the deep Gulf. Goose-beaked whales often stay near deep eddies and steep slopes. Gervais’ beaked whales are more likely to follow surface and midwater eddies, while sperm whales mostly stick to areas where freshwater from rivers mixes with the open ocean. They tend to avoid the tropical Loop Current, a warm flow from the Caribbean into the Gulf, that seems to create conditions less favorable for these whales.
An example of how marine mammals use different parts of the Gulf of Mexico. The maps show ocean features at three depth ranges: surface (0-250 m), mid-depth (700-1250 m), and deep (1500-3000 m). Dolphins are shown in the surface plot, sperm whales in the mid-depth plot, and goose-beaked whales in the deep plot. Colors indicate water movement, with red showing strong currents and blue showing calmer areas. Circles mark recording stations, with bigger circles showing more animals detected.
Whales Shape Their Environment Whales don’t just adapt to their surroundings, they also shape them. Their powerful clicks, produced by the millions, bounce off the seafloor and underwater features, making their presence a key part of the local acoustic environment. Where whales occur, the acoustic environment changes, influenced both by their vocalizations and by the prey that may be present. Prey layers can influence how sound propagates through the water, adding complexity to the acoustic field. Detecting whales in specific areas helps us understand how the acoustic environment might vary under different conditions. Mapping where whales are present also reveals potential biological hotspots and helps us understand how sound behaves in these deep-sea habitats.
Why This Matters This research is a collaboration between scientists from the United States and Mexico, supported by NOAA’s RESTORE Science Program, the Deepwater Horizon Restoration Open Ocean Marine Mammal Trustee Implementation Group, and the Office of Naval Research Task Force Ocean. These detailed maps of whale distribution are vital for identifying critical habitats and guiding conservation strategies. They help us understand how threats like oil spills, industrial activity, and environmental changes impact whale populations, allowing us to plan effective mitigation and restoration efforts to maintain healthy ecosystems.
Angela Guastamacchia – angela.guastamacchia@polito.it Department of Energy, Politecnico di Torino Torino, Torino 10129 Italy
Popular version of 3aAAb4 – Subjective and objective validation of a virtual reality system as a tool for studying speech intelligibility in architectural spaces Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0037846
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
When we communicate, clear speech is crucial—it helps us exchange ideas, learn, and build human connections. But often, poor acoustic conditions in rooms like crowded restaurants, wide lecture halls, or meeting spaces can make it difficult to understand speech clearly. Indoor architectural design significantly impacts speech clarity, so studying how different spaces affect communication, especially when hearing-impaired people are involved, is essential for fostering optimal designs that facilitate effective communication.
Virtual Reality (VR) might provide a practical and time-saving solution for this research, allowing us to reproduce various architectural environments and study how people perceive speech within those spaces without needing access to the real environments. Some laboratories have already implemented systems to accurately reproduce acoustics targeting diverse research goals. However, these systems typically rely on complex and costly arrays of dozens of loudspeakers, making studies difficult to set up, expensive, and inaccessible for architectural designers who are not VR experts.
Thus, a question arises: can even a less complex VR system still replicate a realistic experience of listening to speech in an actual room?
At the Audio Space Lab of the Politecnico di Torino, we set up a simpler and more affordable VR system. This system combines a VR headset with a spherical array of 16 loudspeakers to create immersive and realistic audiovisual communication scenarios surrounding the listener in a 360° experience, using an audio technique called 3rd-Order Ambisonics. We then tested whether our VR setup could consistently replicate the experience of listening in a medium-sized, echoey lecture room.
To test this, we compared the speech understanding of thirteen volunteers in the real lecture hall and in its virtual replica. During the tests, volunteers listened to single sentences and repeated what they understood across five different audiovisual scenes, varying the speech source location and the presence or absence of distracting noise. All scenarios included typical background noise, such as the hum of air conditioning, to closely mimic real-life conditions.
In Figure 1, you can see a volunteer in the real lecture room listening to sentences emitted by the loudspeaker positioned to their right, while a distracting noise is presented from the frontal loudspeaker. In Video 1, a volunteer performs the same speech test within the VR system, replicating the exact audiovisual scene shown in Figure 1. Figure 2 shows what the volunteer saw during the test.
Figure 1. Volunteer performing the speech comprehension test in the real lecture room.
Video 1. Volunteer performing the speech comprehension test in the virtual lecture room using the VR system.
Figure 2. Volunteers’ view during both real and virtual speech comprehension tests.
Our findings are promising: we found no significant differences in speech comprehension between the real and virtual settings across all tested scenes.
Additionally, we asked the volunteers how closely their VR experience matched reality. On average, they rated it as “almost very consistent,” reinforcing that the VR system provided a believable acoustic experience.
These results are exciting because they suggest that even with a less complex VR system, real-life-like speech perception in ordinary environments can be effectively predicted. Our affordable and user-friendly VR system could thus become a powerful tool for architects, acousticians, and researchers, offering an accessible way to easily study speech comprehension in architectural spaces and pursue improved acoustic designs.
Marshall Day Acoustics, Melbourne, VIC, 3066, Australia
Nick Boulter, Arup
Simon Tait, AmberTech
Popular version of 5aAA3 – The use of electrocoustic enhancement systems in the design of orchestral rehearsal rooms
Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0038271
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
Rehearsal rooms for orchestras pose many acoustic design challenges. The most fundamental concern is that of safety. Modern musical instruments are loud enough to create a significant risk of long-term hearing damage to the players and conductor. Loudness also takes a toll on musicians from constant exposure to loud sound and musicians feeling that they have to always “hold back” and cannot play their instrument normally.
Unless the rehearsal venue has similar size to a performance venue, increasing cost and embodied materials, rooms are often either too loud to be a safe working environment for the orchestra or suffer from a lack of reverberation and richness which makes it hard for musicians and conductor to work on the color, blend and nuance of the music.
The use of electronic acoustic enhancement systems offers a way to break some of the fundamental “interlocks” between size and loudness of a rehearsal venue and resolve some of these challenges. Beyond just an artificial reverberation system, enhancement systems allow a “virtual acoustic environment” to be created – providing musicians with sound reflections that simulate the experience of playing in a larger room plus a richer – but quieter – room sound. This gives the musicians “breathing room” for their rehearsal.
The recent Australian Chamber Orchestra auditorium at Walsh Bay Arts Precinct, Sydney is an excellent example of how this technology has allowed a safe and comfortable rehearsal environment for the orchestra in a smaller space, without sacrificing musical quality.
Located in a heritage-listed former industrial wharf complex in Sydney Harbour, the ACO’s a 277-seat venue, The Nielson, is an “artist’s studio of sound” which features views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge through its upper floor windows. The ACO plays across all major Australian cities in venues that seat up to 2500 people, so providing the ability to preview how a performance would sound in each touring venue is important to allow the orchestra to adjust for how their performance will change in each room. The orchestra size for each tour varies from small chamber groups up to full symphony orchestra with added wind and brass players. The Nielson must therefore provide a wide range of acoustic conditions at the touch of a button, all while managing musicians’ noise exposure.
Figure 1: View of The Nielson in flat floor mode with seats retracted. Source: Authors
The electro-acoustic enhancement system installed in ‘The Neilson’ is a Yamaha AFC4 system consisting of 16 microphones, various DSP (Digital Signal Processing) modules, 79 amplifier channels and 79 loudspeakers mounted within the walls and ceiling space which allow the room’s apparent width and height, reverberation and timbre to be varied, creating different virtual ”venues” for the orchestra to rehearse and perform in.
To provide support to musicians and control loudness, the physical room’s surface finishes emphasize reflections from the side walls (lateral reflections) and de-emphasize sound reflections from above.
This allows the AFC4 system to “raise the roof” and create the impression of a much larger room without overwhelming the sound, “knitting together” the physical and electronic parts of the room sound.
The Nielson’s walls and ceiling include several sound scattering finishes that blend and “soften” the sound, where the architecture itself was inspired by music.
The lower walls are textured with small indentations, encoding a quote by Beethoven written in Braille.
Figure 2: View of the “wavy wall” with “Braille” acoustic diffusion. Source: Authors
The glazed upper walls along the balcony level are “frozen music”, based on the chord progression of Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin, with each of the 16 window sections “spelling” a chord (the widths of the panes of glass are in proportion to the intervals of the notes in the chord).
Figure 3: Render of the “Chaconne window” glass diffuser. Source: TZG Architects
The ceiling “wells” and “fins” were set out in a sequence where the height of the wells in each portion of the ceiling was proportional to the intervals between notes in three famous musical motifs by Wagner (Tristan und Isolde), Shostakovich (String Quartet No.8) and Richard Strauss (Elektra).
The “virtual acoustics” provided in the Nielson make it more than just a beautiful space, but one of the most flexible orchestra rehearsal rooms in the world that allows the ACO to preview how they will adjust their performance to venues ten times larger than the “real” room – and unlock new performance options for audiences in the room and reach new streaming audiences online. It provides a great example of how technology has allowed “more from less” via the sustainable re-use of an existing heritage building.
Brandyn Lucca – blucca@uw.edu
Bluesky: @brandynlucca.bsky.social
Instagram: @brandynmark
Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Henderson Hall (HND), 1013 NE 40th St, Seattle, Washington, 98105, United States
Joseph Warren
Instagram: @warren.bioacoustics.lab
Bluesky: @warren-lab.bsky.social
Affiliation: School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University
Popular version of 2aAO9 – Active acoustic detection of fish and zooplankton along bathymetric features of the New York Bight
Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0037522
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
Imagine standing on the beach in New York City, looking beyond the harbor over the horizon where rolling waves meet an armada of ships lined up to unload their cargo. What remains hidden from view are the vast underwater plains, valleys, and canyons teeming with marine life beneath the surface. From a bird’s-eye view, this area forms the New York Bight, a stretch of ocean off the coast of New York City situated between southern New Jersey and eastern Long Island. This seascape offers prime real estate for animals ranging from copepods to whales.
Some animals often gather along the shelfbreak, where the relatively flat, shallow seafloor of the continental shelf dramatically changes to the deep sea. Others prefer life in a well-known ecological hotspot and one of the largest marine canyons in the world: the Hudson Canyon. Like many people, marine animals choose habitats based on the amenities they offer, but their preferences can evolve as they age or in response to environmental shifts. Some may leave the New York Bight entirely, while others may settle in undiscovered hotspots elsewhere. But how can scientists find these hotspots in the first place?
How do scientists “see” beneath the waves?
Researchers use a technique called “active acoustics” to get snapshots of where animals are in the water column across large areas that can complement other sampling methods like nets. With this approach, they send out short pulses of sound from a moving ship and measure the echoes that bounce back from the seafloor or are created from animals that live in the water column. The equipment scientists use to measure these echoes is similar to bottom-finders and fish-finding systems used by fishers and boaters. The results can reveal dense fish schools clustered along the steep walls of a canyon or zooplankton aggregations in the near-surface waters along the shelfbreak. These patterns help scientists better understand how seascapes shape habitat preferences among marine organisms (Figure 1).
Echograms are one way to visualize acoustic backscatter, with color scale units corresponding to the total energy in echoes measured from marine organisms. This echogram reveals how animals are distributed vertically in the water column along a ship transect that crossed the Hudson Canyon. The dark gray region corresponds to the seafloor.
To carry out this research, scientists measure echoes from animals in the water column, collect fish and zooplankton using nets and trawls, and measure how temperature and salinity (and other environmental factors like oxygen) vary in the ocean as you go down in depth. Researchers collected the data for this study during seasonal surveys aboard a research vessel that covered the waters south of Long Island, New York, out to the shelfbreak, approximately 140 miles away (Figure 2).
Acoustic surveys were conducted along seven transect lines (black lines) with biological and seawater sampling stations at each square point. The white lines represent isobaths, or lines of constant depth, at 25, 50, 100, 500, 100, and 2000 m. The orange and red stars indicate where the Hudson Shelf Valley and Hudson Canyon begin.
Location, location, location: Hotspots change with the seasons
The New York Bight regions with the most fish and zooplankton (as measured by our echosounders) change with the seasons. In winter and early spring, most organisms concentrated farther offshore, often along the canyon edges or beyond the shelfbreak. As summer arrives, these biological hotspots grow along the shelfbreak, especially in and around the canyons, and move closer to shore. By fall, acoustic measurements showed that fish and zooplankton spread more evenly across the continental shelf.
For fish living near the seafloor, a seasonal feature called the Mid-Atlantic Cold Pool plays a major role in their movements. This layer of cold water forms on and above the seafloor over part of the continental shelf each spring and slowly decreases in volume throughout the summer. When the Cold Pool forms, many near-bottom fish shift away from their spatial extent due to the fish having temperature preferences and gather in the Hudson Canyon, other shelfbreak canyons, inshore areas, and the Hudson Shelf Valley. As the Cold Pool shrinks in late summer, their distribution becomes more like the broader patterns observed for overall biological backscatter (Figure 3).
An example echogram of biological backscatter near the shelfbreak. The 9º (gray) and 10º (black) isotherms, or lines of constant temperature, approximate the lateral and vertical extent of the Mid-Atlantic Cold Pool that, in this case, nearly walled this aggregation off from the inshore waters on the continental shelf entirely.
From underwater sound to action: Guiding management decisions
The New York Bight is a dynamic and productive ecosystem that experiences significant fishing pressure, shipping activity, and offshore energy development. By combining acoustic surveys with biological net sampling and oceanographic measurements, scientists can identify areas that fish and zooplankton may prefer (or avoid) throughout the year. Surveys such as this one help guide management decisions that balance the economic and commercial health of the New York Bight.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Ying-Tsong Lin
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
Wenbo Wu
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA
Popular version of 2aAB7 – Integrating hydrophone data and distributed acoustic sensing for pile driving noise monitoring in offshore environments
Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0037513
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash
Throughout recorded history, the sea has provided humanity with resources and access to global trade. The discovery of marine oil and gas reserves transformed offshore activity in the 20th Century, and today the growing demand for sustainable energy has led to the development of offshore wind energy. While these developments have brought economic benefits, they have also increased the potential for environmental impacts.
Animals in marine ecosystems have evolved to thrive in a world dominated by sound. While animals on land rely primarily on vision to navigate their environment, marine animals have adapted to a world where light is scarce and sound is abundant. Most notably, marine mammals such as whales and dolphins rely on sound for navigation, communication, and hunting, and there is a growing body of evidence that other species, such as fish and invertebrates, also use sound for these purposes. Monitoring the soundscape of the ocean is an important component of understanding the potential impacts of offshore activity on marine ecosystems.
Our study focuses on the 2023 construction of the Vineyard Wind project, an offshore wind farm located south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Wind farm construction often involves pile driving, which generates impulsive noise that can, in certain conditions, adversely affect marine life, though modern construction operations employ protocols designed to mitigate these effects. Construction operations are acoustically monitored to measure the affected soundscape, assess the effectiveness of noise mitigation, and identify marine mammal vocalizations in the area.
A spectrogram from a hydrophone shows pulses from pile driving (vertical striations) and vocalizations from a nearby fin whale (horizontal striations at 20 Hz) during the 2023 construction of the Vineyard Wind project.
Traditionally, acoustic monitoring is performed using hydrophones located in the vicinity of pile driving. Figure 1 shows a spectrogram of data collected by an array of four hydrophones deployed near the construction site. The spectrogram shows the amount of sound energy at different frequencies over time, with red colors indicating higher sound levels. In the data, the vertical lines indicate pile driving pulses. In the recording, vocalizations from a nearby fin whale are also present.
A fin whale surfaces near Greenland (image courtesy of Aqqa Rosing-Asvid – Visit Greenland, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons).
In this study, we also utilize a nearby fiber optic cable that provides data connectivity to the Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The cable is capable of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), a technology that uses laser light in fiber optic cables to measure vibrations along the length of the cable. DAS is a promising technology for marine monitoring, as it provides high-resolution data over long distances. An example of DAS data is shown in Figure 3, where signals from 100 channels are arranged vertically by distance along the cable. The vertical striations in the data indicate pile driving pulses traveling through the array.
Data from 100 channels of a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) array at Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory. Vertical striations are pules from pile driving arriving at the array.
These results suggest that DAS can detect and characterize pile driving noise, offering a complementary approach to traditional hydrophone arrays. The continuous nature of the fiber optic sensing allows us to monitor the entire construction process with unprecedented spatial resolution, revealing how acoustic energy propagates through various marine environments.
As offshore human activity continues to expand globally, integrating such innovative acoustic monitoring techniques will be crucial for environmentally responsible development of our ocean resources.
Additional Authors: John M Cormack , Zhiyu Sheng, Yu-hsuan Chao,1 Allison Bean, Ryan Nussbaum, Jiantao Pu, Ajay D. Wasan, and Kang Kim
Popular version of 2aBAb5 – Three-dimensional vibration-controlled transient elastography in human subjects with myofascial trigger pain points Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0037535
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
Almost everyone experiences back pain at some point in their lives. For many, this pain becomes long-lasting and difficult to manage. One possible cause of chronic back pain is myofascial trigger points. These are small, sensitive knots or tight spots in muscles that not only hurt when pressed but can also spread pain to other areas. Although physicians know these trigger points exist, they are very difficult to detect with current available medical imaging tools. This makes diagnosis and treatment more challenging.
In this research, we are developing a new ultrasound-based method to find these hidden painful spots more accurately. We tested this method on 32 volunteers,16 who had chronic low back pain and known trigger points, and 16 healthy individuals without pain. Our approach uses a small vibrating device placed on the lower back skin. This device produces vibration inside the lower back tissue so that the vibration wave propagates through the skin and muscles of the subject. The propagation speed of this wave called shear wave speed is directly related to stiffness of the tissues. We used an advanced type of three-dimensional ultrasound probe to capture how these waves traveled inside the muscles in three different directions.
Figure 1: experiment setup
By measuring the speed of the waves moving through the muscles, we could assess their stiffness knowing high speed indicates stiffer tissue. Our early results showed that muscles with trigger points had higher wave speeds, meaning they were stiffer compared to muscles without pain points. This finding is important because increased muscle stiffness could be a sign of the presence of painful trigger points.
Video 1: Black and white image showing different layers of lower back tissue using 3D ultrasound. Colorful waves indicating corresponding shear wave propagation through the lower back tissue.
If future studies confirm these findings, this technique could provide physicians with a valuable new tool for diagnosing chronic back pain related to myofascial trigger points. Unlike current methods that mostly rely on physical examination and patient reports, this method could offer objective and visual evidence of muscle problems. This might help guide treatment decisions and track patient progress more accurately.
By improving the way we see and measure muscle stiffness, this research could lead to better care for the many people experiencing chronic low back pain.
Figure 1: View of The Nielson in flat floor mode with seats retracted. Source: Authors
Figure 2: View of the “wavy wall” with “Braille” acoustic diffusion. Source: Authors
Figure 3: Render of the “Chaconne window” glass diffuser. Source: TZG Architects
Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash
A spectrogram from a hydrophone shows pulses from pile driving (vertical striations) and vocalizations from a nearby fin whale (horizontal striations at 20 Hz) during the 2023 construction of the Vineyard Wind project.
A fin whale surfaces near Greenland (image courtesy of Aqqa Rosing-Asvid – Visit Greenland, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons).
Data from 100 channels of a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) array at Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory. Vertical striations are pules from pile driving arriving at the array.
