Nebraska Acoustics Group (NAG)

At the last official NAG meeting of the 2013-14 academic year, Ellen Peng presented an update on her study on speech comprehension by native English speaking listeners versus ESL listeners.  She will be presenting on this work at the upcoming International Congress on Acoustics in Montreal, June 2013.  The acoustic nugget of the week was about the number of auditory demonstration CDs that are out there, as summarized in this webpage off of the Auditory listserv.  All serious acousticians should get their hands on these audio demos!

At this NAG meeting, Matt Blevins gave an update on the research project aimed at measuring the just noticeable difference of reverberation time, using an adaptive up-down procedure.  Adam Buck had previously conducted a full study on 30 subjects using white noise bursts; Matt has been extending the work by on a smaller group of subjects with only 1000 Hz band-limited noise.  So far, the results appear to be the same.  He’ll be presenting on this work at the upcoming International Symposium on Room Acoustics (ISRA) in Toronto, June 2013.  As for the fun acoustic nugget, we shared the news that Mayor Bloomberg in NYC has been targeting loud music through earbuds – a worthy endeavor, in our opinion!

At our March 6 NAG meeting, Josh Thede presented on the measurement of acoustic absorption.  His undergraduate research project, funded by a UNL UCARE grant, focused on measuring the absorption properties of a number of foam products using an impedance tube.  The greatest difficulty is cutting a perfect circle of the product to use with the tube!  The acoustic nugget of the week was on the US National Park Service Natural Sounds webpage… lots of fun stuff to be found there!