Acoustics News

November 22, 2024

Top Headlines

Ouch! Commonalties Found in Pain Vocalizations and Interjections Across Cultures

Nov. 12, 2024 — An interdisciplinary team explored possible regularities in vocal emotional expressions by comparing expressive interjections, such as 'wow,' to nonlinguistic vocalizations, such as screams and ...

AI Headphones Create a 'Sound Bubble,' Quieting All Sounds More Than a Few Feet Away

Nov. 14, 2024 — Researchers have created a headphone prototype that allows listeners to hear people speaking within a bubble with a programmable radius of 3 to 6 feet. Voices and sounds outside the bubble are ...

Bach, Mozart or Jazz

Nov. 5, 2024 — Physicists have investigated to which extent a piece of music can evoke expectations about its progression. They were able to determine differences in how far compositions of different composers can be anticipated. In total, the scientists ...

The 'Queen of the Night' Does Not Whistle

June 18, 2024 — Opera singers have to use the extreme limits of their voice range. Many pedagogical and scientific sources suggest that the highest pitches reached in classical singing can only be produced with a so-called 'whistle' voice register, in analogy to ...

Latest Headlines

updated 2:41pm EST

Researchers Are Making Jet Engines Fit for the Hydrogen Age

Nov. 8, 2024 — Hydrogen-powered planes are set to take wing around the world in the future. To make this possible, engineers have to develop the jet engines that will power them. Experiments by researchers are now ...

Enhancing Nanofibrous Acoustic Energy Harvesters With Artificial Intelligence

June 3, 2024 — Scientists have employed artificial intelligence techniques to improve the design and production of nanofibers used in wearable nanofiber acoustic ...

Spider Silk Sound System

May 16, 2024 — Researchers have investigated how spiders listen to their environments through webs and found that the webs match the acoustic particle velocity for a wide range of sound frequencies. Playing sound ...

Metalens Expands Its Reach from Light to Sound

May 14, 2024 — Engineers achieve a wide field-of-hearing acoustic metalens free from ...

Why Getting in Touch With Our 'Gerbil Brain' Could Help Machines Listen Better

May 7, 2024 — Researchers have debunked a 75-year-old theory about how humans determine where sounds are coming from, and it could unlock the secret to creating a ...

This Sound-Suppressing Silk Can Create Quiet Spaces

May 7, 2024 — Researchers developed a silk fabric, which is barely thicker than a human hair, that can suppress unwanted noise and reduce noise transmission in a large ...

Data-Driven Music: Converting Climate Measurements Into Music

Apr. 18, 2024 — A geo-environmental scientist from Japan has composed a string quartet using sonified climate data. The 6-minute-long composition -- entitled 'String Quartet No. 1 'Polar Energy Budget'-- is based on ...

Caller ID of the Sea: Tagging Whale Communication and Behavior

Mar. 25, 2024 — Biologists use a novel method of simultaneous acoustic tagging to gain insights into the link between whale communication and ...

What Kinds of Seismic Signals Did Swifties Send at LA Concert?

Mar. 13, 2024 — Seattle may have experienced its own Swift Quake last July, but at an August 2023 concert Taylor Swift's fans in Los Angeles gave scientists a lot of shaking to ponder. After some debate, a research ...

Advanced Noise Suppression Technology for Improved Search and Rescue Drones

Mar. 6, 2024 — Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are beneficial in search and rescue missions during natural disasters like earthquakes. However, current UAVs depend on visual information and cannot detect victims ...

US Navy Growler Jet Noise Over Whidbey Island Could Impact 74,000 People's Health

May 10, 2024 — As often as four days a week, Boeing EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island fly loops overhead as pilots practice touch-and-go landings. The noise is ...

Pythagoras Was Wrong: There Are No Universal Musical Harmonies, New Study Finds

Feb. 27, 2024 — The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater ...

Fundamental Equation for Superconducting Quantum Bits Revised

Feb. 14, 2024 — Physicists have uncovered that Josephson tunnel junctions -- the fundamental building blocks of superconducting quantum computers -- are more complex than previously thought. Just like overtones in a ...

Photonics-Based Wireless Link Breaks Speed Records for Data Transmission

Feb. 1, 2024 — Researchers demonstrated a 300 GHz-band wireless link that was able to transmit data over a single channel at a rate of 240 gigabits per second. The wireless communication system employs signal ...

Sound-Powered Sensors Stand to Save Millions of Batteries

Jan. 29, 2024 — Researchers are developing a new type of sensor that reacts to certain sound waves, causing it to vibrate. The sensor is a metamaterial that acquires its special properties through the structuring of ...

Virtual Noise Assessment for Passenger Jet of the Future

Jan. 25, 2024 — Instead of tubular commercial aircraft, other designs could be used in the future: Jets with a blended wing body would fly more efficiently and make less noise -- but how would the noise emissions ...

Uncovering the Secrets Behind the Silent Flight of Owls

Jan. 23, 2024 — Owls produce negligible noise while flying. While many studies have linked the micro-fringes in owl wings to their silent flight, the exact mechanisms have been unclear. Now, a team of researchers ...

Towards the Quantum of Sound

Jan. 18, 2024 — A team of scientists has succeeded in cooling traveling sound waves in wave-guides considerably further than has previously been possible using laser light. This achievement represents a significant ...

Molecularly Designing Polymer Networks to Control Sound Damping

Jan. 11, 2024 — The world is filled with a myriad of sounds and vibrations -- the gentle tones of a piano drifting down the hall, the relaxing purr of a cat laying on your chest, the annoying hum of the office ...

Teaching Physics from the Din of Flying Discs

Dec. 4, 2023 — The sound a disc makes while soaring through the air is full of information about how fast the disc is flying and how quickly it spins. This inspired Kyle S. Dalton of Penn State University to ...

New Percussion Method to Detect Pipeline Elbow Erosion

Nov. 20, 2023 — An engineering research team is pioneering a new method, based on percussion, to detect pipeline elbow erosion to prevent economic losses, environmental pollution and other safety issues. ...

Nuclear Expansion Failure Shows Simulations Require Change

Nov. 16, 2023 — A team of researchers looked back at a model that predicted nuclear power would expand dramatically in order to assess the efficacy of energy policies implemented ...

Putting Sound Waves to Work to Create Safer Public Spaces

Nov. 14, 2023 — Absorbing excess sound to make public environments like theaters and concert halls safer for hearing and using the unwanted sound waves to create electricity is the aim of a new paper. The authors ...

New AI Noise-Canceling Headphone Technology Lets Wearers Pick Which Sounds They Hear

Nov. 9, 2023 — Researchers have developed deep-learning algorithms that let users pick which sounds filter through their headphones in real time. Either through voice commands or a smartphone app, headphone wearers ...

Complex Data Becomes Easier to Interpret When Transformed Into Music

Oct. 30, 2023 — Researchers in the field of human-technology interaction have demonstrated how a custom-built 'data-to-music' algorithms can help to better understand complex data. The transformation of ...

Pingpong Balls Score Big as Sound Absorbers

Oct. 10, 2023 — Researchers describe an acoustic meta-surface that uses pingpong balls, with small holes punctured in each, as Helmholtz resonators to create inexpensive but effective low-frequency sound insulation. ...

Medical Imaging Fails Dark Skin: Researchers Fixed It

Oct. 10, 2023 — A team found a way to deliver clear pictures of anyone's internal anatomy, no matter their skin ...

Shape-Changing Smart Speaker Lets Users Mute Different Areas of a Room

Sep. 21, 2023 — A team has developed a shape-changing smart speaker, which uses self-deploying microphones to divide rooms into speech zones and track the positions of individual ...

A System to Keep Cloud-Based Gamers in Sync

Aug. 31, 2023 — A new technique can synchronize media streams from different networks to multiple devices with less than 10 milliseconds of delay. The technique was demonstrated on cloud gaming, but could also be ...

Experiencing the Texture of Skateboard Sounds Can Mediate Divisions New Research Says

Aug. 30, 2023 — Experiencing the harsh sounds of skateboarding can help bridge the gulf between the joy and distaste of the noises created by the sport, a new study ...