JASA

Most Downloaded Journal Articles of 2023

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:

Intelligibility as a measure of speech perception: Current approaches, challenges, and recommendations – Melissa M. Baese-Berk, Susannah V. Levi, Kristin J. Van Engen

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.

Noise-induced hearing disorders: Clinical and investigational tools – Colleen G. Le Prell, Odile H. Clavier, and Jianxin Bao

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!)

SoundScape learning: An automatic method for separating fish chorus in marine soundscapes – Ella B. Kim, Kaitlin E. Frasier, Megan F. McKenna, Annebelle C. M. Kok, Lindsey E. Peavey Reeves, William K. Oestreich, Gabrielle Arrieta, Sean Wiggins, Simone Baumann-Pickering

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.

JASA Express Letters

Space Launch System acoustics: Far-field noise measurements of the Artemis-I launch – Kent L. Gee, Grant W. Hart, Carson F. Cunningham, Mark C. Anderson, Michael S. Bassett, Logan T. Mathews, J. Taggart Durrant, Levi T. Moats, Whitney L. Coyle, Makayle S. Kellison, and Margaret J. Kuffskie

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!

Distributed acoustic sensing recordings of low-frequency whale calls and ship noise offshore Central Oregon – William S. D. Wilcock, Shima Abadi, and Bradley P. Lipovsky

This Editor’s Pick analyzed the use of distributed acoustic sensing for monitoring the ocean.

Lead-vocal level in recordings of popular music 1946–2020 – Karsten Gerdes and Kai Siedenburg

This research exploring a central aspect to music mixing was featured in a press release and an episode of our podcast.

POMA

Acoustical worship ambience of Spanish Franciscans built churches: Nossa Senhora do Pilar (Goa) and Mission Concepcion (Texas) – Menino Allan S. M. Peter Tavares and Susan Wiseman

This article based on a presentation from the 184th ASA meeting in Chicago identified character defining acoustical differences between two historic churches.

Microphone vibration sensitivity: What it is, why it is important, and how to measure it – Charles B. King and Chris Monti

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.

A Review of Technical Inventions to include deep Bass Tones into Pipe Organs despite Space Constraints – Frank Hergert and Paul Hale

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.

New Technical Area Picks

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!

The Cocktail Party Effect and Your Holiday Gatherings

The holiday season is well underway, and with the holidays often come holiday parties! You may have already attended a few gatherings yourself, or maybe you have some coming up. These parties all share some great characteristics: tasty food, festive music, and lots of friends and loved ones.

They all usually have another thing in common: noise.

Why is it that gatherings where we are meant to spend time with those nearest and dearest to us, reflecting on the past year and looking forward into the new one, are often so loud it’s impossible to discuss anything?

What you’re experiencing is a known problem: the cocktail party effect. Unfortunately, more isn’t necessarily merrier if you’re trying to have a conversation with someone in a crowded room. This article by Marshall Long from the Acoustics Today archive discusses why it’s so hard to understand speech in noisy settings (particularly those with lots of folks talking).

While researchers don’t have a solution for this common problem, they have looked into what’s going on in your brain when you’re trying to listen to someone talk in a noisy room. In a different article from Acoustics Today, Adrian KC Lee discusses neuroimaging tools that have allowed scientists to study how our brains understand speech in crowded environments. (Okay, so maybe this doesn’t solve your immediate problem of how you’re going to talk to your coworker or cousin at that party Saturday, but at least it’ll give you some interesting factoids to shout over the music?)

Hosting your own gathering and want to make it as hospitable to conversation as possible? If you’re going to be in a restaurant or other event space, this research from Murray Hodgson, Gavin Steininger, and Zohreh Razavi explains how to predict speech intelligibility in a eating establishment based on the number of people in the space. Plus, that article from Long’s that we mentioned earlier includes tips on how to reduce this annoying effect. Perhaps you can apply some of the ideas to absorb excess noise in your event space!

November 2023 JASA Cover

The November cover of JASA is now available! Check it out:

The cover image is from Figures 1 of “Contribution of acoustic cues to prominence ratings for four Mandarin vowels,” by Wei Zhang and Meghan Clayards. The Coordinating Editor for Speech Communication, Zhaoyan Zhang, says about the feature article: “There are many acoustic cues that speakers can use to focus listeners’ attention to words that most contribute to what they want to say. How these acoustics cues are used varies by speaker and is also constrained by other factors such as vowel types and tone contrasts in a tone language. This article is interesting in that it explores the different strategies speakers may use to signal focus for different vowels and tone contrasts in Mandarin.”

Some other research was also highlighted on the November JASA cover:

From Animal Bioacoustics, “Temporal coherence of harmonic frequencies affects echo detection in the big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus,” by James A. Simmons, Kelsey N. Hom, and Andrea Megela Simmons.
From Biomedical Acoustics, “Effect of transducer position on ultrasonic backscatter measurements of cancellous bone,” by Brent K. Hoffmeister, Blake C. Lawler, Ann M. Viano, and Joel Mobley.
From Noise, “Toward a dynamic national transportation noise map: Modeling temporal variability of traffic volume,” by Mylan R. Cook, Kent L. Gee, Mark. K. Transtrum, and Shane V. Lympany.
From Physical Acoustics, “Multiple scattering theory for modeling sonic booms in atmospheric turbulence,” by Joel B. Lonzaga.

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/154/5.