MONTHLY NEWSLETTERS

Have you ever heard a noise but weren’t quite able to find exactly where it’s coming from? Maybe a bothersome cricket outside your bedroom window, or a strange sound coming from under the hood of your car. Now imagine a tool that allows you to pinpoint exactly where a noise is coming from as easily as taking a picture. Read on to learn more about how such a device, known as an acoustic camera, is transforming the way we diagnose, design, and control sound.

Spooky season is officially here and it’s time to spend a dark and stormy night on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and your favorite scary movie. The main character goes up to the haunted house, and the door opens by itself with a creak. As they walk through the house, the floorboards squeak under their feet and their breath comes in harsh pants. When they enter the room at the end of the hall, the door slams with a bang, the candles woosh out, and you jump in your seat and spill some popcorn! Read on to learn how movies deliberately incorporate sound to enhance the cinematic experience.

Towards the end of last year, we wrote a newsletter all about how loudspeakers work. As noted in that article, loudspeakers are everywhere, and they play a very important role in the technology that we use every day. But there’s another electronic device as ever present in our daily lives that also deserves some recognition: the microphone. In concept, a microphone is a loudspeaker run backwards: sound waves incident on a diaphragm induce electrical currents in a wire that are recorded or amplified and reproduced. The technical aspects of how this works are fascinating, and many books have been written on the subject. For this newsletter, however, we’ll focus on two broad categories of microphone and their applications – Condenser and Dynamic.

Even if you don’t live along an active fault line, earthquakes happen.  Just last year, the Philadelphia region was affected by an earthquake centered at Tewksbury Township, NJ that was measured at Mw 4.8.  This was the largest earthquake to affect New Jersey since 1783 and the strongest to hit New York City since 1884.  In our office, we watched our desktop monitors sway as the seismic waves passed by.  These vibrations are nothing more than waves transmitted through solid media, but they propagate in different ways than the airborne sound we’re used to.  Read on to learn how seismic activity propagates across the globe.

In the heat of the summer, nothing beats a day at the pool or going down the shore. Some kids love their time in the water so much that at the end of the day when their parents tell them it’s time to get out, they go back under and pretend not to hear…or are they not pretending? Read on to dive into underwater acoustics and how it varies from the acoustics we’re used to.

Much attention has historically been paid to how to make gas-powered vehicles quieter. Electric vehicles (EV), on the other hand, are inherently quiet; the lack of internal combustion engine powerplant and transmission removes typical sounds associated with a moving vehicle. If you own an EV or have ever walked past one on the street, there’s not much going on in the sound department. But the sound of these vehicles is important enough to the owners, so much so that creative artists work to deliver artificial sound to the interior. Read on to learn more about how EV manufacturers are adding sound instead of trying to reduce it.

Have you ever heard someone talking about white noise, pink noise, or brown noise? What is the difference between these noise colors, and how effective are they for what they claim to help with? Read on to learn about the differences between white, pink, and brown noise, and the applicable uses for each.

April showers bring power outages…at least when thunder and lightning accompany the rain. And shortly thereafter, they may also bring noise from emergency generators. While these devices can provide convenient – or even life-saving – power, they can also disturb occupants of nearby buildings as well as occupants in the buildings which they serve. Read on to learn more about how to tame these electricity producing beasts.

Have you ever sat in your office and understood every word of your neighbor’s conference call? It can be pretty tiring. There is a certain amount of speech privacy you expect once you close your office door; however, not every private office provides that luxury. So, what can you do about it? Read on to learn about how to improve speech privacy without building massive walls.

Have you ever noticed that sound seems to travel differently in the cold? Think of standing outside on a crisp winter morning, aware of traffic from a distant road that you never seem to hear in the summer, or tree branches creaking from what seems like miles away. Well, it’s not your imagination, sound can seem to travel farther in the colder months of the year. Read on to discover more about winter outdoor sound propagation.