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.
Professor Yang-Hann Kim, from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, has been awarded the 2015 Acoustical Society of America Rossing Prize in Acoustics Education.
The Rossing Prize is awarded to an individual who has made significant contributions toward furthering acoustics education through distinguished teaching, creation of educational materials, textbook writing and other activities. The Prize will be presented at the 170th meeting of the ASA on 4 November 2015 in Jacksonville, Florida.
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.
Watch a youtube “truckmentary” on Noise, Vibration, Harshness testing on the Nissan TITAN XD.
There are many online reviews of earphones that provide non-scientific opinions with comments such as “excellent bass response”, “clear mid-ranges”, and so on, without providing any measured results. As an engineer and a researcher, I find these unsubstantiated claims unsettling. We did a literature review on the internet to find articles that recommended low-price earphones and conducted instrumented testing.
An article published in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery by researchers from the University College London and Davies Veterinary Specialists describes a new condition called feline audiogenic reflex seizures (FARS) that seizures can occur in some elderly cats when they are exposed to certain sounds such as crinkling tin foil and striking a metal spoon on a ceramic feeding bowl.
Read the full article reported in The Telegraph.
The Federal Aviation Authority has started a helicopter noise complaint system in the Los Angeles county area called the Automated Complaint System (this sounds like a spambot!). The monitoring system uses the WebTrak site that Bruel and Kjaer bought a few years ago.
The WebTrak system combines GPS data from aircraft movements with noise levels from monitoring stations. Historical data of flight paths and noise levels can be inspected using a web browser.
The NFL team Atlanta Falcons were fined $350,000 for playing artificial crowd noise into the Georgia stadium.
Read the article on the NFL.com web site.
Researchers at University of Connecticut Health Center, the University of Rochester, and University of Louisville have published a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience, investigating the ability of a rabbits to determine the distance of a noise source depends on the modulation of the sound. The researchers inserted tiny microphones inside rabbits’ ears to record the sounds played at several locations. They used these recordings to simulate modulated or unmodulated noise coming from different distances away from the rabbit. Then they played the simulated sounds back to the rabbit, and measured the responses of neurons in the rabbit’s inferior colliculus (IC), a region of the midbrain known to be important for sound perception. When the rabbit heard the simulated sounds, certain types of IC neurons fired more when the sound was closer and the depth of modulation was higher – that is, when there was a bigger difference between the sound’s maximum and minimum amplitude. The neurons fired less when the sound source was further away.
Read the full article on the UConn Today web site.
An acoustic consulting company ARUP has created a 3D virtual sound simulation of the proposed Heathrow’s third runway in their facility called SoundLab. The room is lined with acoustic material to reduce reflections and 12 loudspeakers are positioned on the surface of an imaginary virtual sphere, which are used to generate sound from any direction.
Read the full article on wired.co.uk.
