D. Keith Wilson Selected as Next Acoustics Today Editor
Melville, May 31, 2024 – The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is pleased to announce that D. Keith Wilson will be stepping into the role of Editor of Acoustics Today (AT), the science and technology magazine of the ASA, starting in 2025. For the past ten years, Arthur N. Popper has held the position.
This role will not be Dr. Wilson’s first leadership position within ASA Publications: he was the Editor of JASA Express Letters from 2005 to 2009 and the chairperson of the Committee on Publication Policy from 2011 to 2018. Currently, he acts as an Associate Editor for The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) and JASA Express Letters.
In addition to his involvement with ASA Publications, Dr. Wilson has been an active member in the society and was elected as a Fellow of the Society in 2003. He has been involved with both the Physical Acoustics and Noise Technical Committees and helped create the Computational Acoustics Technical Committee.
The ASA welcomes Dr. Wilson into this position and look forward to the skill and insight he will bring to the magazine.
AboutAcoustics Today: Each issue of Acoustics Today is sent to ASA members in print form and is also freely available online at acousticstoday.org. The primary purpose of Acoustics Today is to provide timely scholarly articles, short essays highlighting important ASA programs, and other material to ASA members that is interesting, understandable, and relevant, regardless of a member’s background.
When advising on the noise associated with pickleball, loudness is just one of many concerns, and solutions require infrastructure or limitations on play.
OTTAWA, Ontario, May 17, 2024 – Pickleball Legal Consultant is a job title that likely did not exist a decade ago, but as pickleball courts infiltrate neighborhoods to satiate an appetite for a sport whose namesake is a snack, communities take issue with the resulting influx of noise. Now homeowners’ associations and city councils face litigation by those whose lives are disrupted by pickleball’s din.
Charles Leahy, an attorney, retired mechanical engineer, and former HOA board member became interested in this issue after his HOA dismissed the recommendations of noise consultants and failed to install noise absorbing barriers. Litigation over noise nuisance ensued and threatens closure of the courts.
Leahy sought to understand how acoustic engineers assess the noise, how they fashion their recommendations, and what best practices engineers can employ to persuade the community that the noise is real and needs to be mitigated. He will present his work Friday, May 17, at 8:35 a.m. EDT in a session dedicated to pickleball as part of a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, running May 13-17 at the Shaw Centre located in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Experts recommend HOAs and communities consider the “popping” noise associated with pickleball when deciding to build courts near homes. Image credit: AIP
“Compared to tennis, pickleball is a much smaller court, easier to learn, and especially accessible to seniors,” said Leahy. “Each tennis court can become up to four pickleball courts. Tennis involves a soft and compressible ball and a racket with strings. Pickleball is a hard plastic ball and a hard paddle. Tennis produces a ‘thunk’ sound versus pickleball ’pop,’ which is louder, sharper, more piercing, and more frequent. Thus, more annoying.”
Communities looking to invest in – and those facing lawsuits because of – the courts often seek out engineering consultants to advise them. Leahy examined over 70 pickleball consultant noise reports and compared their recommendations with the American National Standard Institute. He found many reports considered only the decibels associated with the noise, but other factors are important too.
“It’s not just the loudness, it’s the impulsive sharpness and randomness of the ‘pops,’” said Leahy. “It’s the persistence and repetition of the random noises over many hours a day, usually seven days a week.”
His best recommendation is to build courts far from homes, at least 600-800 feet away to allow the sound to naturally dissipate. Less desirable (or more difficult or costly) solutions include enclosing the courts within a building or wall barriers or using less noisy paddles and balls.
“Pickleball has a highly impulsive noise, with each court generating about 900 pop noises per hour,” said Leahy. “It’s incompatible with residential living. Cities can also locate pickleball in industrial and commercial neighborhoods rather than close to homes.
“The benefits of pickleball to the players are undeniable, and the demand for more pickleball courts is real and genuine. However, there needs to be more research, more planning and prevention, and more effort to avoid ending up in front of the judge and jury.”
ASA PRESS ROOM In the coming weeks, ASA’s Press Room will be updated with newsworthy stories and the press conference schedule at https://acoustics.org/asa-press-room/.
LAY LANGUAGE PAPERS ASA will also share dozens of lay language papers about topics covered at the conference. Lay language papers are summaries (300-500 words) of presentations written by scientists for a general audience. They will be accompanied by photos, audio, and video. Learn more at https://acoustics.org/lay-language-papers/.
PRESS REGISTRATION ASA will grant free registration to credentialed and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend the in-person meeting or virtual press conferences, contact AIP Media Services at media@aip.org. For urgent requests, AIP staff can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information.
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA The Acoustical Society of America is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world’s leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.
ABOUT THE CANADIAN ACOUSTICAL ASSOCIATION/ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE D’ACOUSTIQUE
fosters communication among people working in all areas of acoustics in Canada
promotes the growth and practical application of knowledge in acoustics
encourages education, research, protection of the environment, and employment in acoustics
is an umbrella organization through which general issues in education, employment and research can be addressed at a national and multidisciplinary level
The CAA is a member society of the International Institute of Noise Control Engineering (I-INCE) and the International Commission for Acoustics (ICA), and is an affiliate society of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration (IIAV). Visit https://caa-aca.ca/.
OTTAWA, Ontario, May 16, 2024 – Noise-canceling headphones are a godsend for living and working in loud environments. They automatically identify background sounds and cancel them out for much-needed peace and quiet. However, typical noise-canceling fails to distinguish between unwanted background sounds and crucial information, leaving headphone users unaware of their surroundings.
Shyam Gollakota, from the University of Washington, is an expert in using AI tools for real-time audio processing. His team created a system for targeted speech hearing in noisy environments and developed AI-based headphones that selectively filter out specific sounds while preserving others. He will present his work Thursday, May 16, at 1:20 p.m. EDT as part of a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, running May 13-17 at the Shaw Centre located in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
“Imagine you are in a park, admiring the sounds of chirping birds, but then you have the loud chatter of a nearby group of people who just can’t stop talking,” said Gollakota. “Now imagine if your headphones could grant you the ability to focus on the sounds of the birds while the rest of the noise just goes away. That is exactly what we set out to achieve with our system.”
Researchers augmented noise-canceling headphones with a smartphone-based neural network to identify ambient sounds and preserve them while filtering out everything else. Image credit: Shyam Gollakota
Gollakota and his team combined noise-canceling technology with a smartphone-based neural network trained to identify 20 different environmental sound categories. These include alarm clocks, crying babies, sirens, car horns, and birdsong. When a user selects one or more of these categories, the software identifies and plays those sounds through the headphones in real time while filtering out everything else.
Making this system work seamlessly was not an easy task, however.
“To achieve what we want, we first needed a high-level intelligence to identify all the different sounds in an environment,” said Gollakota. “Then, we needed to separate the target sounds from all the interfering noises. If this is not hard enough, whatever sounds we extracted needed to sync with the user’s visual senses, since they cannot be hearing someone two seconds too late. This means the neural network algorithms must process sounds in real time in under a hundredth of a second, which is what we achieved.”
The team employed this AI-powered approach to focus on human speech. Relying on similar content-aware techniques, their algorithm can identify a speaker and isolate their voice from ambient noise in real time for clearer conversations.
Gollakota is excited to be at the forefront of the next generation of audio devices.
“We have a very unique opportunity to create the future of intelligent hearables that can enhance human hearing capability and augment intelligence to make lives better,” said Gollakota.
ASA PRESS ROOM In the coming weeks, ASA’s Press Room will be updated with newsworthy stories and the press conference schedule at https://acoustics.org/asa-press-room/.
LAY LANGUAGE PAPERS ASA will also share dozens of lay language papers about topics covered at the conference. Lay language papers are summaries (300-500 words) of presentations written by scientists for a general audience. They will be accompanied by photos, audio, and video. Learn more at https://acoustics.org/lay-language-papers/.
PRESS REGISTRATION ASA will grant free registration to credentialed and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend the in-person meeting or virtual press conferences, contact AIP Media Services at media@aip.org. For urgent requests, AIP staff can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information.
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA The Acoustical Society of America is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world’s leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.
ABOUT THE CANADIAN ACOUSTICAL ASSOCIATION/ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE D’ACOUSTIQUE
fosters communication among people working in all areas of acoustics in Canada
promotes the growth and practical application of knowledge in acoustics
encourages education, research, protection of the environment, and employment in acoustics
is an umbrella organization through which general issues in education, employment and research can be addressed at a national and multidisciplinary level
The CAA is a member society of the International Institute of Noise Control Engineering (I-INCE) and the International Commission for Acoustics (ICA), and is an affiliate society of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration (IIAV). Visit https://caa-aca.ca/.
OTTAWA, Ontario, May 16, 2024 – The COVID-19 pandemic changed life in many ways, including stopping nearly all commercial flights. At the Toronto Pearson International Airport, airplane traffic dropped by 80% in the first few months of lockdown. For a nearby group of researchers, this presented a unique opportunity.
Low-flying aircraft can lead to noisy and unhealthy neighborhoods, and a pioneering survey can help track their impact around Canadian airports. Image Credit: Julia Jovanovic
Julia Jovanovic will present the results of a survey conducted on aircraft noise and annoyance during the pandemic era Thursday, May 16, at 11:10 a.m. EDT as part of a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, running May 13-17 at the Shaw Centre located in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
“For many years, researchers like me have looked to assess the impacts of aircraft noise on communities surrounding airports, particularly in terms of annoyance,” said Jovanovic. “The travel restrictions due to COVID and the resulting sustained reductions in noise gave us an unprecedented opportunity to test the correlation between noise and annoyance.”
In early 2020, the NVH-SQ Research Group out of the University of Windsor surveyed residents living around the airport to gauge how their annoyance levels changed with the reduction in noise. A follow-up survey in 2021 provided even more data for the researchers, and according to Jovanovic, they highlight flaws in the tools authorities use to assess and manage the impacts of aircraft noise on communities.
“The industry has, for too long, erroneously relied on noise complaints as a proxy measure for annoyance,” said Jovanovic. “These surveys show that complaints and annoyance are different phenomena, triggered by different mechanisms. Only annoyance has a proven correlation to overall noise levels.”
According to their data, while noise complaints dropped overall during the pandemic, many of the people sending those complaints continued to do so, and some areas even saw an increase in complaints. This demonstrates the need for collecting survey data on annoyance specifically, something Canadian authorities overseeing air transport have been reluctant to do.
“Even though the annoyance metric draws much criticism due to its subjective nature, it is still indicative of the overall effect of aircraft noise on individuals and the resulting possible long-term health impacts,” said Jovanovic. “These types of surveys are conducted in most developed nations on a regular basis. To the best of our knowledge, we are unaware of any similar efforts in any other Canadian airport.”
Jovanovic and her colleagues hope these results will spur regulatory agencies to collect better data and use it to develop more updated standards and guidelines for protecting the public from aircraft noise and protecting the future of airport operations from continuous residential encroachment.
“The survey should be repeated around all of our nation’s airports to get an accurate representation of the effects of aircraft noise on Canadian communities and update Transport Canada’s severely outdated guidelines for the management of aircraft noise,” said Jovanovic.
ASA PRESS ROOM In the coming weeks, ASA’s Press Room will be updated with newsworthy stories and the press conference schedule at https://acoustics.org/asa-press-room/.
LAY LANGUAGE PAPERS ASA will also share dozens of lay language papers about topics covered at the conference. Lay language papers are summaries (300-500 words) of presentations written by scientists for a general audience. They will be accompanied by photos, audio, and video. Learn more at https://acoustics.org/lay-language-papers/.
PRESS REGISTRATION ASA will grant free registration to credentialed and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend the in-person meeting or virtual press conferences, contact AIP Media Services at media@aip.org. For urgent requests, AIP staff can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information.
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA The Acoustical Society of America is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world’s leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.
ABOUT THE CANADIAN ACOUSTICAL ASSOCIATION/ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE D’ACOUSTIQUE
fosters communication among people working in all areas of acoustics in Canada
promotes the growth and practical application of knowledge in acoustics
encourages education, research, protection of the environment, and employment in acoustics
is an umbrella organization through which general issues in education, employment and research can be addressed at a national and multidisciplinary level
The CAA is a member society of the International Institute of Noise Control Engineering (I-INCE) and the International Commission for Acoustics (ICA), and is an affiliate society of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration (IIAV). Visit https://caa-aca.ca/.
OTTAWA, Ontario, May 16, 2024 – Oscar Wilde once said that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence. Perhaps that is due to how difficult it is to use and understand. Sarcasm is notoriously tricky to convey through text — even in person, it can be easily misinterpreted. The subtle changes in tone that convey sarcasm often confuse computer algorithms as well, limiting virtual assistants and content analysis tools.
Xiyuan Gao, Shekhar Nayak, and Matt Coler of Speech Technology Lab at the University of Groningen, Campus Fryslân developed a multimodal algorithm for improved sarcasm detection that examines multiple aspects of audio recordings for increased accuracy. Gao will present their work Thursday, May 16, at 10:35 a.m. EDT as part of a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, running May 13-17 at the Shaw Centre located in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Using text recognition, incorporating emoticons, and introducing audio analysis, researchers designed a robust system for detecting sarcasm in human speech. Image credit: This image was created with the assistance of DALL•E 3.
Traditional sarcasm detection algorithms often rely on a single parameter to produce their results, which is the main reason they often fall short. Gao, Nayak, and Coler instead used two complementary approaches — sentiment analysis using text and emotion recognition using audio — for a more complete picture.
“We extracted acoustic parameters such as pitch, speaking rate, and energy from speech, then used Automatic Speech Recognition to transcribe the speech into text for sentiment analysis,” said Gao. “Next, we assigned emoticons to each speech segment, reflecting its emotional content. By integrating these multimodal cues into a machine learning algorithm, our approach leverages the combined strengths of auditory and textual information along with emoticons for a comprehensive analysis.”
The team is optimistic about the performance of their algorithm, but they are already looking for ways to improve it further.
“There are a range of expressions and gestures people use to highlight sarcastic elements in speech,” said Gao. “These need to be better integrated into our project. In addition, we would like to include more languages and adopt developing sarcasm recognition techniques.”
This approach can be used for more than identifying a dry wit. The researchers highlight that this technique can be widely applied in many fields.
“The development of sarcasm recognition technology can benefit other research domains using sentiment analysis and emotion recognition,” said Gao. “Traditionally, sentiment analysis mainly focuses on text and is developed for applications such as online hate speech detection and customer opinion mining. Emotion recognition based on speech can be applied to AI-assisted health care. Sarcasm recognition technology that applies a multimodal approach is insightful to these research domains.”
ASA PRESS ROOM In the coming weeks, ASA’s Press Room will be updated with newsworthy stories and the press conference schedule at https://acoustics.org/asa-press-room/.
LAY LANGUAGE PAPERS ASA will also share dozens of lay language papers about topics covered at the conference. Lay language papers are summaries (300-500 words) of presentations written by scientists for a general audience. They will be accompanied by photos, audio, and video. Learn more at https://acoustics.org/lay-language-papers/.
PRESS REGISTRATION ASA will grant free registration to credentialed and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend the in-person meeting or virtual press conferences, contact AIP Media Services at media@aip.org. For urgent requests, AIP staff can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information.
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA The Acoustical Society of America is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world’s leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.
ABOUT THE CANADIAN ACOUSTICAL ASSOCIATION/ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE D’ACOUSTIQUE
fosters communication among people working in all areas of acoustics in Canada
promotes the growth and practical application of knowledge in acoustics
encourages education, research, protection of the environment, and employment in acoustics
is an umbrella organization through which general issues in education, employment and research can be addressed at a national and multidisciplinary level
The CAA is a member society of the International Institute of Noise Control Engineering (I-INCE) and the International Commission for Acoustics (ICA), and is an affiliate society of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration (IIAV). Visit https://caa-aca.ca/.
OTTAWA, Ontario, May 16, 2024 – The best microphone in the world might have an unexpected source: spider silk. Spiders weave webs to trap their insect snacks, but the sticky strands also help spiders hear. Unlike human eardrums and conventional microphones that detect sound pressure waves, spider silk responds to changes in the velocities of air particles as they are thrust about by a sound field. This sound velocity detection method remains largely underexplored compared to pressure sensing, but it holds great potential for high-sensitivity, long-distance sound detection.
Researchers from Binghamton University investigated how spiders listen to their environments through webs. They found the webs match the acoustic particle velocity for a wide range of sound frequencies. Ronald Miles will present their work Thursday, May 16, at 10:00 a.m. EDT as part of a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association, running May 13-17 at the Shaw Centre located in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Larinioides sclopetarius, commonly known as bridge spiders, helped researchers from Binghamton University investigate how spiders listen to their environments through webs as a way to inspire future designs for microphones that would also be able to respond to sound-driven airflow. Image credit: Junpeng Lai
“Most insects that can hear sound use fine hairs or their antennae, which don’t respond to sound pressure,” said Miles, a professor of mechanical engineering. “Instead, these thin structures respond to the motion of the air in a sound field. I wondered how to make an engineered device that would also be able to respond to sound-driven airflow. We tried various man-made fibers that were very thin, but they were also very fragile and difficult to work with. Then, Dr. Jian Zhou was walking in our campus nature preserve and saw a spiderweb blowing in the breeze. He thought spider silk might be a great thing to try.”
Before building such a device, the team had to prove spiderwebs truly responded to sound-driven airflow. To test this hypothesis, they simply opened their lab windows to observe the Larinioides sclopetarius, or bridge spiders, that call the windowsills home. They played sound ranging from 1 Hz to 50 kHz for the spiders and measured the spider silk motion with a laser vibrometer. They found the sound-induced velocity of the silk was the same as the particles in the air surrounding it, confirming the mechanism that these spiders use to detect their prey.
“Because spider silk is, of course, created by spiders, it isn’t practical to incorporate it into the billions of microphones that are made each year,” said Miles. “It does, however, teach us a lot about what mechanical properties are desirable in a microphone and may inspire entirely new designs.”
ASA PRESS ROOM In the coming weeks, ASA’s Press Room will be updated with newsworthy stories and the press conference schedule at https://acoustics.org/asa-press-room/.
LAY LANGUAGE PAPERS ASA will also share dozens of lay language papers about topics covered at the conference. Lay language papers are summaries (300-500 words) of presentations written by scientists for a general audience. They will be accompanied by photos, audio, and video. Learn more at https://acoustics.org/lay-language-papers/.
PRESS REGISTRATION ASA will grant free registration to credentialed and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend the in-person meeting or virtual press conferences, contact AIP Media Services at media@aip.org. For urgent requests, AIP staff can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information.
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA The Acoustical Society of America is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world’s leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.
ABOUT THE CANADIAN ACOUSTICAL ASSOCIATION/ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE D’ACOUSTIQUE
fosters communication among people working in all areas of acoustics in Canada
promotes the growth and practical application of knowledge in acoustics
encourages education, research, protection of the environment, and employment in acoustics
is an umbrella organization through which general issues in education, employment and research can be addressed at a national and multidisciplinary level
The CAA is a member society of the International Institute of Noise Control Engineering (I-INCE) and the International Commission for Acoustics (ICA), and is an affiliate society of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration (IIAV). Visit https://caa-aca.ca/.
