NAG Meetings in Spring 2020

The Nebraska Acoustics Group (NAG) began this decade, excited that 2020 had been named the International Year of Sound https://sound2020.org/. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many planned activities have had to be cancelled. Organizers are now planning for the International Year of Sound to extend through 2021. At the February meeting, Lily shared updates on the AHRI-funded study investigating bias, reproducibility, and repeatability of sound power measurement methods. We also discussed a recent news item on “How a tiny button became a weapon in the fight against airplane noise in the San Fernando Valley“. In March, Will Spallino introduced the group to the topic of his MS thesis which is on assessing levels of impulsive noise with kurtosis corrections. Recent acoustic nuggets from the news included “Electric cars too quite? Automakers add real or fake sound to their cabins” and “Teaching kids how to make guitars can get them hooked on engineering“. The April meeting, held remotely via Zoom, featured Jenny Solheim presenting her work on the 2020 ASA Student Design Competition (which as part of the ASA Meeting in Chicago has been postponed to December 2020). We discussed recent acoustic news, such as how “Coronavirus lockdowns have changed the way Earth moves“.