The founder of Head Acoustics, Klaus Genuit, said that
“A soup might be delicious or not, but you can’t answer this by knowing the temperature of the soup. It is the same with restaurant soundscapes—you need a lot more information than just noise level.”

At the 177th Acoustical Society of America conference in May 2019 in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, Genuit will present an application of the standard ISO 12913-3, Acoustics — Soundscape, which is still under development.

The new standard requires the use of binaural recording equipment, which Head Acoustics happens to make and sell.

Read the conference abstract on the Acoustical Society America web site.

Fujitsu in Japan has developed a device called Ontenna, that converts sound into light and vibration, that provides an aid for deaf people. Fujitsu plans to distribute the device for free to 30 schools for the deaf in Japan.

Read the news article on the web site nippon.com.

Read about some of the best sounding concert halls, and how they are designed, on the web site Interesting Engineering.

Zoom, who make portable audio recorders, have released the Zoom H3-VR recorder that has 4 microphones arranged in a tetrahedron to enable recording of ambisonic spatial audio.

Engineers at PCB have published an interesting article at audioxpress.com on how microphones are calibrated.

I can see this recent article as a contender for an Ig Nobel prize

“Acoustical performance of samples prepared with cigarette butts”

Spanish researchers from Departamento de Física Aplicada, Escuela Politécnica, Universidad de Extremadura, measured the sound absorbing properties of cigarette butts.  Given the enormous number of cigarette butts that get thrown away, which don’t decompose very well, it is great that someone tried to find a use for waste.

You’ve probably thought that numerous pop songs sound similar to each other. An article on Public Radio International explains that is a fairly accurate deduction. The old-school way involved lyric and song writer sitting down together and composing a song. Now it is done in a production line and out-sourcing method.

Read the full article on pri.org.

The Altair company, which makes the software Hyperworks and formed the Altair Partner Alliance, announced that Brüel & Kjær, one of the oldest sound and vibration instrumentation companies, is bringing its noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) software, Insight+, to HyperWorks customers. The Insight+ software enables designers to listen to the sound a vehicle would make from a virtual design.

Read the press releases on the Altair and the Bruel and Kjaer web sites.