TC Chair Julianna Simon says, “In the last few years, there has been significant discussion over how to relate measured acoustic cavitation signals to the desired bioeffects. This paper compares optical imaging to broadband hydrophone and narrow-band receive signals from a dedicated histotripsy therapy array in three common tissue-mimicking hydrogels. Stiffness was varied for each hydrogel composition and bubble radii, lifespan, and shock wave amplitudes were compared for each of the three cavitation monitoring mechanisms. Results from this and other papers in the last year will help determine which cavitation features best map to the desired bioeffect for different tissue types.”

TC Chair Jonas Braasch says, “Stephen McAdams, Etienne Thoret, Grace Wang, Marcel Montrey (2023) Timbral cues for learning to generalize musical instrument identity across pitch register is an interesting study investigating how novices can learn to identify individual musical instruments in an orchestra,  even though each of them sounds different throughout their range of over two octaves. The study used a listening test with non-musicians to learn what features they would use to learn to identify orchestral instruments over time. The results show that listeners predominantly used those parameters that remained stable over the whole range of the instrument while paying lesser attention to cues that vary with pitch. The paper provides insight into how we listen to orchestras, a topic that is of interest to a wider readership.”

TC Chair Alexandra Loubeau says, “There were several good papers, but this one stood out with a topic of the most general interest.  As part of the special collection on COVID-19 Pandemic Acoustic Effects, this paper discusses the indoor and outdoor acoustic environments in communities across India, and how various lockdowns affected the public’s perception of the environment and their well-being.  An online survey was used to gather responses, and analyses shed light on current preferences for remote education and work.”

TC Chair Christopher Stecker says, “This paper reconceptualizes the nature of peripheral auditory channels (they are not ‘filters’ but in fact complex dynamic systems) to explain a fundamental mystery in the perception of concordant pitches: Specifically, why do perfect octaves (2:1 frequency relationship) sound less natural than slightly stretched octaves (>2:1)? And why is it harder to detect positive mistuning (>2:1) than negative mistuning (<2:1) of the octave?  The paper is important not only for answering those questions using a simple mechanism [cancelation filtering, see de Cheveigné 2023 JASA 153(6):3350], but for also for challenging the obsolete conceptualization of auditory channels as simple ‘filters.’”