More precisely, is silence the absence of sound? (What is sound, anyway?) In this episode, we get a little philosophical, discussing with Bill Yost (Arizona State University) about what sound is and the role perception plays in our understanding of sound and silence.
Like the episode? Check out the related article!
The December cover of JASA is now available! Check it out:
The cover image is Figures 2, panel c, of “Assessment of modal density and free path distribution in central-planned halls,” by Giulia Fratoni, Massimo Garai, and Dario D’Orazio. ASA Editor-in-Chief Jim Lynch says about the feature article:
“Having recently heard an excellent lecture on ‘The Bells of Falmouth’ by retired Woods Hole Oceanographic engineer Ken Peal (yes, that’s the correct name), I became again interested in the modal patterns of bells and nearly circular reflecting rooms. The article ‘Assessment of modal density and free path distribution in central-planned halls,’ by Fratoni et al fits in that category, and presents an interesting acoustic study of three historic nearly circular rooms using both ray and mode theory. This should be a fun article for all acousticians to read.”
Some other research was also highlighted on the December JASA cover:
All the articles from the cover are free to read for a month after the cover is released, so be sure to check them out! You can find the whole issue at https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/issue/154/6.
If you’ve been reading the last couple Propagations posts, you know the ASA Publications Office likes to do end of year reviews looking at what content the acoustics community enjoyed. We’ve shared our most popular Across Acoustics podcast episodes as well as the most downloaded ASA publications. Now we’re going to share some of the most liked publications content across our social media accounts. Even though we share the same content on all our social media accounts, some posts get more likes on specific platforms. Check out which posts users on different platforms like the most.
This Technical Area Pick for Signal Processing was the most liked JASA content posted across our social platforms, specifically on Facebook and X. Check it out to read the authors’ proposed a solution for the challenge of separating overlapping calls and environmental noise in the passive acoustic monitoring of complex soundscapes.
Irina Tolkova, Holger Klinck; Source separation with an acoustic vector sensor for terrestrial bioacoustics. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 August 2022; 152 (2): 1123. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0013505
In JASA Express Letters, this Editors Pick about the potential of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) for low-frequency acoustic monitoring was the most liked JASA EL content posted across our platforms. In particular users on LinkedIn and X liked it. Be sure to give it a read!
William S. D. Wilcock, Shima Abadi, Bradley P. Lipovsky; Distributed acoustic sensing recordings of low-frequency whale calls and ship noise offshore Central Oregon. JASA Express Lett. 1 February 2023; 3 (2): 026002. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0017104
Samuel David Bellows, Dallin T. Harwood, Kent L. Gee, Timothy W. Leishman; Low-frequency directional characteristics of a gamelan gong. Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 5 December 2022; 50 (1): 035003. https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0001722
This paper was the most liked POMA content posted across our platforms, notably Facebook and Instagram.
Were any of these popular posts surprising to you? What publications would you like us to post in the coming year? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
One of our favorite things to do in the Publications Office at the end of the year is to look back and see which articles ended up getting read the most over the course of the year. In that time, we publish hundreds of articles across our three journals, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), JASA Express Letters, and The Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA). Publications span topics from all fourteen technical committees in the Acoustical Society of America, so it’s always a bit of a surprise to see which of the many diverse topics our journals cover end up piquing readers’ interest the most.
Today, we’d like to share the most downloaded articles with you, so you can see the research that’s currently making an impact in the field of acoustics. Here are the three most downloaded articles from each journal in 2023:
From the Special Issue on Reconsidering Classic Ideas in Speech Communication, this article points out the strengths and limitations of using intelligibility measures as metrics for speech perception.
This editorial introduces the special issue of the same name. (For an even more in-depth overview of the issue, check out this conversation we had with the editors on Across Acoustics!)
The third most-downloaded article from JASA this year is another Special Issue article, this time from the Special Issue on Fish Bioacoustics: Hearing and Sound Communication. This paper proposes an automated method for separating fish chorus from the environment, which could potentially help with research that will aid in the protection of vulnerable fish species.
The most downloaded JASA Express Letters article for the year received quite a bit of attention for research into the noise of NASA’s Space Launch System, including a press release and an episode of Across Acoustics!
This Editor’s Pick analyzed the use of distributed acoustic sensing for monitoring the ocean.
This research exploring a central aspect to music mixing was featured in a press release and an episode of our podcast.
This article based on a presentation from the 184th ASA meeting in Chicago identified character defining acoustical differences between two historic churches.
This article from the 183rd ASA Meeting in Nashville discusses methods for measuring hearing aid microphones’ sensitivity to intrinsic vibration, which can cause feedback that is difficult to resolve.
This research presented at the Fourth Vienna Talk on Music Acoustics explored ways to produce deep-bass tones in pipe organs when you don’t have a space the size of a cathedral to house said organ.
We hope you enjoy these articles as much as we did! Thank you to our authors for a sharing their research with us this year, and thank you to our readers for turning to our publications to find the latest in theoretical and experimental research results in the broad interdisciplinary subject of sound.
Every three months, we ask four Technical Committee (TC) chairs to select one article from the past nine months that they think is a representative of their TC’s published work over that time period. The newest round of Technical Area Picks have been selected, and will be free to read from December 1st to February 29th. Read on to find out which articles the chairs selected, along with a little insight from each chair about why they chose the article they did.
Acoustical Oceanography
“Broadband backscattering from scyphozoan jellyfish,” by Rachel E. Kahn, Andone C. Lavery, and Annette F. Govindarajan.
TC Chair David Barclay says, “Not all Acoustical Oceanography must take place in the ocean – sometimes the ocean is brought into the lab. This paper describes careful tank measurements of the acoustic backscatter from a scyphomedusa (a common jelly fish found in Chesapeake Bay) and the theory to match. This work can be used to better estimate and understand the growing abundance and spatial distribution of jellyfish and other gelatinous zooplankton.”
Fig. 1. Schematic of experimental setup.
Animal Bioacoustics
“Sound sensitivity of the giant scallop (Placopecten magelanicus) is life stage, intensity, and frequency dependent,” by Youenn Jézéquel, Seth Cones and T. Aran Mooney.
TC Chair Laura Kloepper says, “Understanding the effect of anthropogenic sound on living organisms is crucial for species management and conservation, but we still lack fundamental information on sound sensitivity for many species, most notably invertebrates. This study investigates the effect of life stage on hearing sensitivities in the giant scallop, and results indicate differences in hearing sensitivity between juveniles and subadults. The results conveyed in this paper motivate the need for future studies on the auditory perception in invertebrates and a consideration of how hearing may change across life stage.”
Cover. Image courtesy of Erwan AMICE, CNRS.
Computational Acoustics
“Anisotropic minimum dissipation subgrid-scale model in hybrid aeroacoustic simulations of human phonation,” by Martin Lasota, Petr Šidlof, Paul Maurerlehner, Manfred Kaltenbacher, and Stefan Schoder.
TC Chair Keith Wilson says, “Production of vowel sounds by the larynx involves extremely complex turbulent flow through the vocal folds. The authors couple state-of-the-art turbulence simulations to acoustic finite-element methods to describe this process in three dimensions. The subgrid-scale model (that is, the model for the turbulent flow variations that are unresolved by the simulation) is found to be particularly important. A new approach, called the anisotropic minimum dissipation (AMD) model, is found to provide the most realistic sound production.”
Fig. 10. Sound sources
Engineering Acoustics
“A liquid column resonance transducer driven by Class IV flextensional transducer,” by Shichang Li, Yu Lan, and Lianjin Hong.
TC Chair Michael Haberman says, “The generation of low frequency sound underwater is complicated by the fact that commonly used transducers, like flextensional transducers, have high mechanical compliance and are therefore not mechanically robust to high ambient pressures. This work overcomes this problem by integrating a liquid column resonator, i.e. an organ pipe, with an optimized Class IV flextensional transducer as the driving source to create a broadband and pressure tolerate device with high transmit levels. The authors present numerical models for analysis and design and then fabricated and test the response of prototype device, which is an good agreement with model predictions.”
Fig. 13. Prototype multimode LCR transducer driven by FT.
Congratulations to all the authors whose work has been highlighted by the TC chairs!