Headline-demanding talks are the order of the day at the 152nd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Three that screech out, so to speak, for attention are:
1. “Termite Head-Banging: Sounding the Alarm,” by Tom Fink, Lichuan Gui, Yong Wang, Zhonghua Cao, Adarsh Jaiswal, Orwa Tahaineh, Vijay Ramalingam, Roger Hasse, Alan Lax and John Seiner.
2. “Laughometer: Non-Restrictive and Long-Term Monitoring System of Utterances and Laughing Noises,” by Masafumi Matsumura, Yutaka Kawabata, Ryoji Suzuki and Masaki Yoshida. The authors explain:
How many times do you burst out laughing in a day? We are attempting to develop a laughter-recognition system that can provide a definitive answer to this question. The purpose of our study is to develop a non-restrictive and long-term monitoring system that measures the frequency and duration of burst-of-laughter instances.
3. “My Voice Does Not Work in This Classroom – Why?” by Malte Kob, Gottfried Behler, Anja Kamprolf, Christiane Neuschaefer-Rube and Oliver Goldschmidt. The authors conclude that
Differences in the room acoustical conditions in classrooms seem to affect teachers with voice problems more than healthy teachers.
(Thanks to investigator Jim Handman for bringing this to our attention.)