Nebraska Acoustics Group (NAG)

Matt Blevins was the featured speaker at this week’s NAG meeting.  He spoke about research that he conducted as an undergraduate research assistant at Herrick Labs, Purdue University, under the guidance of Dr. Kai-Ming Li.  This involved developing acoustic techniques that could be used in the field to study how porous cementitious structures are.  Matt just started his first year in our PhD program; we are very pleased to have recruited him to join our group, with funding from a Durham School Graduate Assistantship.

It was also exciting to see some new faces at the meeting (Brent and Jordan), who are first year students in our Architectural Engineering Bachelor’s of Science program … they expressed interest in acoustics after a presentation in AE 1010 “Intro to Architectural Engineering”, where we do a ‘noise scavenger hunt’ through the Peter Kiewit Institute, searching out all of the bad acoustics in the building.

Here’s a link to this week’s acoustic nugget, shared by Hyun Hong: the iBamboo loudspeaker!  (Search for it on YouTube as well.)

At this week’s Nebraska Acoustics Group meeting, Ellen Peng made a presentation about measurements that she, Dr. Lau, and Mustafa Kavraz (visiting scholar) took in the variable acoustics ‘EPod’ room at Armstrong World Industries in Lancaster, PA.  Ellen and Dr. Lau spent two weeks in Lancaster this past summer, making over 300 binaural impulse response measurements in 8 different EPod room configurations (with reverberation times spanning from 0.38 to 1.1 seconds)!  That’s a lot of data!  Ellen will be using some of the gathered data in her research project on speech comprehension by English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) listeners.  Megan Christensen and James Cottrell plan to use subsets of the database too, for their MAE Graduate Projects.  We’re grateful to Dr. Ken Roy, Sean Browne, and all the other folks at Armstrong who welcomed us to their facility!

Ellen, Dr. Lau, and Dr. Ken Roy at the Armstrong EPod

During the NAG meeting, we also heard about a visit that Eric Powell recently made to the 2011 CEDIA Expo in Indianapolis.  Andrew Hathaway will be playing a show with his band Field Club at O’Leavers Pub on Fri. 9/23, 9:30 PM.  And here’s the link to the acoustic nugget we discussed, shared by a student in AE 3300: “Bridges Are Acoustic Information”

Our first NAG meeting was held yesterday.  It was great to see all of the students again and hear about our members’ many summer adventures (including traveling to Italy, India, Korea, assorted national US parks; getting married; and skydiving!)  Christopher Ainley took the group to PKI 146 to show the work he’d done on cleaning up our equipment storage area (Yay Christopher!)  And here’s the link to the meeting’s acoustic nugget:  “Acoustic Diode Only Lets Sound Travel in One Directions (Read: True Soundproofing)”