It’s not always feasible to measure the sound field generated by an acoustic source; instead, scientists have to model to come up with a best guess for the missing pieces of the sound field. In this episode, we talk to Efren Fernandez-Grande and Xenofon Karakonstantis (Technical University of Denmark) about their new machine learning method to reconstruct sound fields.
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While analyzing acoustic data from the Mariana Archipelago, Angela Szesciorka (Oregon State University) noticed something funny: a signal unlike any other she’d seen. It showed up over and over, and only seemed to occur at night. In this episode, we talk to Szesciorka about this mystery call and what animal possibly made it.
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Happy MLB Opening Day, baseball fans! To kick off the latest season, we’d like to highlight some literature about the acoustics of the humble baseball bat. The sounds a baseball bat makes connecting with a ball can vary so much in frequency that a person with enough bats on hand can create a makeshift musical instrument! In fact, Daniel Russell from The Pennsylvania State University did just that. Check out this video of him playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on a piano made of baseball bats:
This video comes from Russell’s article in the Winter 2017 issue of Acoustics Today, “Acoustics and Vibration of Baseball and Softball Bats.” It turns out sound and vibration feedback are incredibly helpful to players and can influence their perception of their performance. The article talks all about the physics of baseball bats and how the sounds they make when hit by a ball. You can also hear Russell talk about the acoustics of baseball bats in detail on an episode of Across Acoustics.
Russell realized that sports are a useful tool for teaching acoustics concepts. In the JASA article, “Acoustic testing and modeling: An advanced undergraduate laboratory,” he and coauthor Daniel O. Ludwigsen wrote about an instructional module in which students study the vibrational characteristics of baseball bats and other sports equipment.
The crack of the bat that heralds a home run seems even more exciting now, doesn’t it?
Recent advances in technology have allowed scientists to gather larger quantities of acoustic data from locations more remote than ever before. As a result, the study of animal sounds can be used to inform species or habitat conservation and natural resource management practices in new and exciting ways. In this episode, we talk to Aaron Rice of Cornell University about how acoustics can be used to advance conservation efforts, as well as how folks outside of large research universities can take part in efforts to help save the planet with science.
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Metamaterials have been a hot topic in the acoustics community since the late 1990s, but there’s no consensus among researchers as to what a metamaterial actually is or when they first came about. Christina Naify (University of Texas – Austin) took a deep dive into the literature about metamaterials and then posed the question to an audience of researchers in a session at the ASA conference in Chicago. In this episode, we talk to her about what came up during this discussion.
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