Congratulations to Brian Puckett who has been named the recipient of the 2020 Leo and Gabriella Beranek Scholarship in Architectural Acoustics and Noise Control, from the Acoustical Society of America! Brian is currently a PhD student in our program, advised by Dr. Erica Ryherd.
“Ten Questions Concerning Well-Being in the Built Environment” is an open-access paper recently published in Building and Environment as part of the “10 Question initiative”. It collects the views of ten experts, from academia and industry, and offers a range of perspectives on the departure from conventional agendas that the promotion of well-being requires. Rather than focusing on the negative impacts of diseases, the paper explores how built environments can enhance positive outcomes, and how, from the questions and answers presented, a new design framework can emerge. Dr. Lily Wang was honored to contribute as the acoustics expert on the paper.
Due to COVID-19, the Nebraska Acoustics Group was unable to celebrate the end of an academic year altogether in person. So instead we partied via Zoom, with members connecting from Pennsylvania, Texas, and across Nebraska! DoorDash delivered Schlotzky’s to most members for each to dine at their own homes, and we played a number of Jackbox Games – most memorably, Trivia Murder Mystery 2 and Drawful 2! We congratulated Stephanie Ahrens, Jennifer Solheim, and Sam Underwood on graduating this semester with the Master of Architectural Engineering degree – they have mastered engineering! Best wishes to our newest graduates!
The Nebraska Acoustics Group welcomes Erik Miller-Klein of A3 Acoustics in Seattle, Washington, as one of the newest members of the UNL Architectural Engineering Industry Advisory Committee (AEIAC)! The AEIAC members visit our program typically two times a year (once in early November and once in early March) to provide input, feedback, and suggestions on our academic program from an industry perspective. Typically members serve renewable 3-year terms. We have been fortunate to have a number of prominent acousticians serve on the AEIAC (including Carl Rosenberg and Doug Sturz from Acentech, and Scott Pfeiffer from Threshold Acoustics), and are very pleased to have Erik continue the tradition! Erik attended the annual AE Banquet on March 5, 2020, and had an opportunity to congratulate this year’s Outstanding Master of Architectural Engineering (MAE) Student recipient, Sam Underwood (whose technical focus has been acoustics!), in person.
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“.
Dr. Lily Wang was quoted in a recent article “It’s not just you: Restaurants have gotten too loud. But there are some fixes”, published in the noise issue of Popular Science! Lily’s research group continues to work on restaurant acoustics; MS student Jared Paine recently presented a paper on the work at the December 2019 ASA meeting in San Diego.
Dr. Joonhee Lee and Dr. Lily Wang have published an article on “Investigating multidimensional characteristics of noise signals with tones from building mechanical systems and their effects on annoyance” in the January 2020 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America! The article presents more results from Joonhee’s PhD work at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) results pointed the researchers towards including metrics for perception of tonality, loudness, and sharpness that improves the performance of earlier annoyance prediction models. A second study investigated noise stimuli with harmonic and inharmonic five-tone complexes between 125 Hz and 2 kHz to obtain a perceptual weighting function. Utilizing a proposed metric with the perceptual weighting function improves annoyance prediction to a similar degree as including sharpness.
The annual Nebraska Acoustics Group Winter Party was held on December 15, 2019. The party featured catered fare from P.F. Changs and desserts from the Cheesecake Factory and homebaked bars from our own Jared Paine; rounds of the 5-Second Rule (to determine the order of opening gifts); and our traditional ‘white elephant’ gift exchange. Everyone enjoyed the festive headgear!
The Fall 2019 ASA meeting was held in San Diego, California (2-6 December 2019). Two NAG students, Stephanie Ahrens and Jared Paine, presented technical papers; Jared received an NCAC Student Travel Award to support his presentation. We enjoyed many a card-based game (Monopoly Deal, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, One Night Alien, and more) at Nebraska Board Game Night, and a group of us joined other ASA members to practice singing Philip Stopford’s a cappella arrangement ‘Lully Lulla Lullay’, performing it at the ASA Jam! More photos from the conference may be found at this link.
The Nebraska Acoustics Group (NAG) met regularly throughout the fall 2019 semester. At the September meeting, the shared acoustic nugget was on how Amazon Alexa uses semi-supervised learning to reduce speech recognition errors. In October, Kenton Hummel presented on his recent hospital acoustics work, and in the Halloween spirit, we shared a link on “Is That a Ghost? Vibroacoustic Explanations for False Poltergeists”. The November meeting featured a presentation by Jared Paine on his recent restaurant acoustics work, and we shared recent acoustic news on why quiet cars are getting louder, and how the voice can be used to be persuasive.