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.”

AO - Technical Area Picks

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.”

AB - Technical Area Picks

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.”

CA - Technical Area Picks

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.”

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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:

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.

11 2023 JASA Cover

Popular Social Media Posts – November

It’s time to look at some of last month’s most popular social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn. The following posts got people to like, share, save, and perhaps most importantly, read the published research!

On the ASA Facebook page, a JASA Express Letter post featuring “Sound power of NASA’s lunar rockets: Space Launch System versus Saturn V” had really good engagement. You can visit the post first or read the article at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0022538.

Facebook - November social media

Facebook

Users on Instagram really liked the cover image from Acoustics for Engineers from ASA Press. You can check out the IG post or get the book yourself at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-63342-7

Instagram - November social media

Instagram

Then, on the The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) X (Twitter) account, the post featuring an article from the Fish Bioacoustics Special Issue shared multiple times. See the original tweet here or read the article at: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0021878.

LinkedIn - November social media post

LinkedIn

Last, but certainly not least, a post inviting media to attend the press conference for the 185th ASA Meeting in Sydney, Australia piqued the interest of users on Linked In. See the original post and help spread the word by sharing the press release invitation at https://acoustics.org/press-conference/

Linked In - November Social Media

Linked In

In fact, many of our upcoming social media posts will be about 185th Meeting, Acoustics 23 and will contain #Acoustics23. If you will be attending, be sure to include the hashtag so that we can follow along! We are especially looking forward to the POMAs that come after the meeting!

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Active and Tunable Acoustic Metamaterials

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) and JASA Express Letters are calling for papers for a joint Special Issue on Active and Tunable Acoustics Metamaterials. This Special Issue invites all manuscripts exploring new active and tunable acoustic or elastodynamic metamaterials. Guest Editors for this Special Issue are Michael R. Haberman, Christina Naify, Bogdan Popa, and Serife Tol. The submission deadline is September 31, 2024. Read more here!

How joint Special Issues work: Authors have the option to select JASA or JASA Express Letters to submit a paper to for a Special Issue. Accepted papers will be published in the next available regular issue of the selected journal and identified as belonging to the Special Issue. After all papers have published for the Special Issue, they will be included in a cross-journal online collection at the JASA and JASA Express Letters websites. For more on how to submit, see the Call for Papers.

Special Issue CFP