Acoustical Analysis of Shouting Into the Wind

The physics of shouting into the wind are now slightly better plumbed. Details emerge in the study “Effects of flow gradients on directional radiation of human voice,” Ville Pulkki [pictured here, performing the experiment], Timo Lähivaara, and Ilkka Huhtakallio, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 143, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1173-1181. (Thanks to […]

Acoustical Watermelon Studies: Reaching for More Than What’s on Tap

To know whether a watermelons is ripe — before cutting into the melon — is a dream brought to exciting levels by generations of scientists, building on the wisdom and wishfulness of their ancestors. Here are three of the juicier studies published in recent times. Acoustical Watermelon Study (1998) “Study on acoustic characteristics of the […]

Those peculiar Harvard Sentences, developed in a basement

Sarah Zhang writes, in Gizmodo, about how “The ‘Harvard Sentences’ Secretly Shaped the Development of Audio Tech“: During World War II, the boiler room under Harvard’s Memorial Hall was turned into a secretive wartime research lab. Here, volunteers were subjected to hours of noise as scientists tested military communications systems. Out of this came the […]

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