UNASA sponsored three awards in the Greater Nebraska Science & Engineering Fair, which was held at the Nebraska City High School in Nebraska City on March 24, 2012. Himanshu Malushte and Dr. Siu-Kit Lau act as special judges for those awards.
The winner is a 7th grade student, Marta Pulfer from Wayne, Nebraska, who investigated the hearing loss of dogs (above photo).
The University of Nebraska Acoustical Society of America student chapter is having a busy semester. On Tuesday, March 13, 2012, the group hosted Dr. Peter D’Antonio of RPG. Dr. D’Antonio spoke to the group about the current state-of-the-art with regards to measurements of absorption, scattering, and diffusion coefficients. He also introduced the many product lines that RPG offers. Innovation and entrepreneurship are concepts that are being more heavily focused on in engineering education, so I asked Peter how he brings so many innovative products to the market. Here are some helpful hints he shared:
Thank you so much, Peter, for sharing information with us! This was Peter’s 2nd visit to Nebraska in the past few years, and we look forward to welcoming him back again soon.
NAG dinner with Dr. Peter D'Antonio (3rd from left)
We were very excited to have Scott Pfeiffer of Threshold Acoustics co-lead a tour of Omaha’s Holland Performing Arts Center, with Ed Hurd from the Omaha Performing Arts Society during a University of Nebraska Acoustical Society of America sponsored event, on Thursday, March 1, 2012. The 2.5 hour event flew by, as we got to see every nook and cranny of the Holland Center (including above the ceiling and below to the huge underfloor plenum that provides air to the Kiewit Concert Hall)! Scott had the opportunity to work on the Holland Center in his previous position at Kirkegaard Associates.
Here are photos of our lunch at Blue Sushi before the tour:
NAG at lunch with Scott Pfeiffer (at right)...
... and now on the left with the rest of the group!
And here is a photo from the Peter Kiewit Concert Hall:
Kiewit Concert Hall at the Holland Performing Arts Center
Scott also spent time earlier that day, critiquing our students’ acoustic design work in assorted Architectural Engineering classes: (1) ASA Student Design Competition, and (2) AE 8090 “Interdisciplinary Team Design Project – the capstone course of our ABET-accredited Master’s of Architectural Engineering (MAE) degree. His comments were very valuable, as these groups focus on refining their designs. Thank you, Scott!
We are so proud of our alum, Dr. Michelle Vigeant, who recently received a prestigious NSF CAREER Award for her project “Importance of Late-Sound-Field Properties and Listener Envelopment to Room Acoustic Quality and Design”! This $422,814 award will allow her to travel to nine different concert halls across the US and Europe … oh, we so want to come with you, Michelle!
Michelle is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Hartford. Click here for the University of Hartford news release.
(Now I don’t know how many of you out there are keeping count, but that’s now TWO of our alums who have received the CAREER award! YAHOOEY!)
We are pleased to announce that members of our research group have been awarded a $31,330 grant from the Paul S. Veneklasen Research Foundation for a study on “Effects of the Acoustic Environment on Speech Comprehension by English-as-a-Second Language Listeners”! This project seeks to determine how room acoustic conditions impact speech comprehension by normal hearing persons who use English as a second language (ESL) as compared to native English speakers. About 21% of U.S. children ages 5-17 (or 10.9 million) speak a language other than English at home (Institute of Education Sciences 2010), but are expected to learn in their second language of English at school. A few previous studies have shown that the speech intelligibility by ESL subjects is significantly degraded from that of native English speakers, but those investigations have not correlated results to speech comprehension or associated learning outcomes, nor have they tested under a wide range of room acoustic conditions. The research team plans to test speech comprehension of both native English speaking and ESL participants under controlled laboratory conditions at the University of Nebraska Indoor Environmental Testing Chambers. Fifteen combinations of background noise levels (three settings: 35, 45, and 55 dBA) and reverberation times (five settings: mid-frequency averages of 0.36, 0.59, 0.79, 0.96, and 1.12 sec) will be simulated. Zhao ‘Ellen’ Peng is the graduate research assistant conducting the project, and she plans to present results at both the upcoming Internoise 2012 in New York City this August, as well as at the Kansas City ASA conference in October 2012.
Happy National Engineers Week!
During today’s NAG meeting, we learned about the hot topic of acoustic metamaterials, as introduced by Matt Blevins. If developed into building partitions, these materials may have the ability to provide significant low frequency transmission loss without being overly massive. Many of the upcoming professional society meetings have special sessions dedicated to this topic, and we at Nebraska are certainly interested in keeping abreast of the developments.
Two acoustic nuggets this week: it was especially fitting that the Google Doodle today was in honor of Heinrich Hertz’s 155th birthday (shared by Eric Powell). Dr. Lau also shared a link he found on the iPad webpages about using iPad for the design of performing arts facilities, as done by Theatre Consultants Collaborative – we all wondered about the quality of the iPad microphone, though, for Type I measurements…?
Andrew Hathaway led the discussion at this NAG meeting, discussing the Vienna Musikvereinsaal and his recent visit to this facility over the winter break 2011. The hall is truly stunning visually, and Andrew felt that it deserved its reputation as being one of the best concert halls in the world. The nugget of the week was on “Translating Brain Waves to Reconstruct Sounds and Conversations You’ve Heard”. I always thought it would be so cool to hear other people’s thoughts, just like Sookie Stackhouse does in the Charlaine Harris book series! Seems like we may be hop, skip and a jump away from that …
In other news, we’re in the midst of planning a University of Nebraska ASA student chapter trip to visit the new Kaufmann Center in Kansas City (acoustic design by Nagata) at the end of March, to hear Bronfman play Bartok, plus Mozart’s Jupiter. Bob Coffeen’s group from the University of Kansas will be joining us for that trip. We are all looking forward to it!
Also, the University of Nebraska is proud to be hosting the national Architectural Engineering Institute student conference, April 19-21, 2012. It will be fun to tour the new T.D. Ameritrade park in Omaha, since we haven’t had a chance to do a behind-the-scenes tour of that facility yet. We invite all AE students around the country to join us for this national event!
Many NAG members went to Chicago to participate in the national ASHRAE Winter Conference, January 21-24, 2012. We attended a performance in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. We all switched seats at intermission, and many found that they liked the seats they were in for the second half better than the first half … no matter where they were in the hall (main floor, or high gallery)!?! Probably because the Dvorak Symphony sounded absolutely amazing –
It was fun to attend with friends from ASHRAE’s Technical Committee 2.6 on Sound and Vibration Control: Patrick Oliver of Price Industries, and Rob Lilkendey of Siebein Associates. Here’s a photo of us after the concert:
NAG at Chicago's Orchestra Hall after CSO Concert
Besides participating in TC 2.6 activities and listening to a seminar on controlling vibration in mechanical systems at the ASHRAE conference, we also got to take a tour of Orchestra Hall with Scott Pfeiffer of Threshold Acoustics. We learned about the changes from the last renovation of the hall, including the use of metal perforated absorbers. After the tour, Scott graciously allowed us to visit the offices of Threshold Acoustics which are located in the historic Monadnock building. On the first floor, many of us sampled the best coffee in Chicago (according to Scott) at Intelligentsia – yummy. THANK YOU, SCOTT, for being such a great host while we were in town!
Outside the Monadnock building in Chicago
Congratulations to Adam Buck, a senior in the UNL Architectural Engineering program! He has been selected as the recipient of the 2012 Robert W. Young Award for Undergraduate Student Research in Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America! He plans to use the funds to pay test subjects in a study looking at the just noticeable difference of reverberation time, and to cover travel expenses to present the work at the ASA meeting in Kansas City.
Happy New Year! The spring semester is under way, and at our first NAG meeting of the semester, we shared news about several upcoming acoustics events in 2012:
Members of our group plan to be at each of these conferences – it promises to be a great year! The primary focus of this NAG meeting was on professional development in acoustics. Besides mentioning many of the professional societies related to acoustics, we also discussed how to become a licensed professional engineer in acoustics (through the state of Oregon) and how to become a Board Certified member of the Institute of Noise Control Engineering. We hope that ALL of our NAG graduates will pursue such professional development opportunities!