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Press conferences for the 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held Tuesday, May 14 in the Laffoon Room at the Galt House. The morning and afternoon press conferences will focus on research into human sounds and language learning, protecting wildlife from man-made obstacles and potentially helping authorities respond faster in an active shooting situation, as well as other discoveries in acoustics.

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The April 15 fire that devastated the roof of Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral left many people around the globe wondering whether it’s possible to rebuild it in a way that can recreate the cultural icon’s complex signature acoustics. Six years ago, acousticians obtained detailed measurements of the acoustics of the main space within Notre Dame, and Brian FG Katz is available to answer questions from reporters about their work and reconstructing the complex acoustics.

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The Acoustical Society of America will hold its 177th meeting May 13-17 at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. This major scientific conference brings together interdisciplinary groups of researchers from many far-flung fields, including physics, medicine, music, psychology, architecture and engineering, to discuss their latest research. It will feature nearly 1,000 presentations on sound and its applications

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Beatboxing is a musical art form in which performers use their vocal tract to create percussive sounds, and a team of researchers is using real-time MRI to study the production of beatboxing sounds. Timothy Greer will describe their work showing how real-time MRI can characterize different beatboxing styles and how video signal processing can demystify the mechanics of artistic style. Greer will present the study at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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Few things can delight an adult more easily than the uninhibited, effervescent laughter of a baby. Yet baby laughter, a new study shows, differs from adult laughter in a key way: Babies laugh as they both exhale and inhale, in a manner that is remarkably similar to nonhuman primates. The research will be described by Disa Sauter during a talk at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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Hearing has long been suspected as being "on" all the time -- even in our sleep. Sounds that occur during the night have a way of registering in the brain. Now scientists are reporting results on what is heard and not heard during sleep and what that might mean for a developing brain. At the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9, researchers from Vanderbilt University will present preliminary results from a study in which preschool children showed memory traces for sounds heard during nap time.

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Here's another reason you might be exhausted after that preschool birthday party: Your brain had to work to figure out who actually asked for more ice cream. "What we found with two-and-a-half-year-olds is that it's amazingly hard for adults to identify who's talking," said Angela Cooper, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. Cooper's co-authored research will be presented in the poster session at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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To find ways to improve man-made active sensing, scientists worldwide study the sonar systems of bats and dolphins. During the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9, Laura Kloepper will compare bat and dolphin sonar systems, describing her work on how the two animals cope with acoustic interference. She'll use her findings to argue why bats have the superior system.

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Computer algorithms are playing a growing role in analyzing hydrophone audio data when monitoring marine life, but human listeners can complement and enhance these algorithms. A project known as Orcasound has produced a web application that will enable citizen scientists to listen to livestreaming audio from hydrophones near the San Juan Islands. Researchers will describe the new web app and the value of citizen science at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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Moths are a mainstay food source for bats, which use echolocation to hunt their prey. Scientists are studying how moths have evolved passive defenses over millions of years to resist their primary predators. While some moths have evolved ears that detect the ultrasonic calls of bats, many types of moths remain deaf. In those moths, researchers have found that the insects developed types of “stealth coating” that serve as acoustic camouflage to evade hungry bats. Neil will describe his work during the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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With thousands of fans, college basketball games can be almost deafeningly loud. Some arenas have decibel meters, which can provide some indication of the noise generated. Researchers at Brigham Young University wanted to see whether machine learning algorithms could pick out patterns within the raw acoustical data that indicated the crowd’s mood, thereby providing clues as to what was happening in the game itself. They’ll present at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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Some conversations are forgotten as soon as they are over, while other exchanges may leave lasting imprints. Researchers want to understand why and how listeners remember some spoken utterances more clearly than others. They’re specifically looking at ways in which clarity of speaking style can affect memory. They will describe their work at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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Next month, Rodney Rountree, “The Fish Listener,” will talk about his work with Francis Juanes of the University of Victoria, to document calls made by fish in the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve in Peru in a presentation at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9. These calls may be useful for tracking piranha populations through passive acoustic monitoring.

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One concern with the increase vessel transits in the western Canadian Arctic is how noise pollution can detrimentally affect marine animals -- including Arctic cod -- given the critical importance of these fish in the arctic food web. Researchers at the University of Victoria, WCS Canada and JASCO Applied Sciences have found that the negative impact of noise from shipping vessels can be mitigated by reducing the ship's speed. They will present their research at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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The Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, to be held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association's 2018 Acoustics Week in Canada, will take place next month, Nov. 5-9, 2018, at the Victoria Conference Centre in Victoria, Canada. It will be largest gathering of acoustical experts anywhere in the world this year and the premiere meeting on the science of sound.

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Scientists are now working to take cloaking devices from the dramatic realm of science fiction and make them real. Amanda D. Hanford, at Pennsylvania State University, is taking the introductory steps to make acoustic ground cloaks. These materials redirect approaching waves around an object without scattering the wave energy, concealing the object from the sound waves. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Hanford will describe the physics behind an underwater acoustic shield designed in her lab.

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Sorry, new parents -- even though your infants appreciate your coos, they prefer to hear sounds from their peers -- other babies. Even at the pre-babbling stage, infants recognize vowel-like sounds, but they tend to dwell on these sounds when from the mouths of babes. At the 175th ASA Meeting, researchers will present from a new line of research focusing on one aspect of infant speech development: how babies perceive speech with infant vocal properties.

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New technologies for mobile devices may use ultrasonic sound waves, and these devices have varying effects on different subsets of the population. Regulation of these technologies is in many ways “the wild west,” according to Timothy Leighton, who wrote a guide for moving forward in today’s new world of ultrasonic exposure. He will describe his work uncovering the strange history and uncertain future of the use of ultrasonic sound waves during the 175th ASA Meeting.

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Locating and discriminating sound sources is extremely complex because the brain must process spatial information from many, sometimes conflicting, cues. Using virtual reality and other immersive technologies, researchers can use new methods to investigate how we make sense of the word with sound. At the 175th ASA Meeting, G. Christopher Stecker will survey his team’s use of virtual reality and augmented auditory reality to study how people use explicit and implicit sound cues.

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Fossil primates provide important clues about human evolution, but the sounds they made and the soft tissue involved in making those sounds weren’t preserved. So chimpanzees can provide important points of comparison for inferring the sorts of sounds our early ancestors may have made. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Michael Wilson, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, will present his group’s work searching for similarities between the vocal communications of chimpanzees and humans.

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Humans communicate their intentions, feelings and desires verbally, so voice disorders can have devastating personal and professional consequences. A perceived voice abnormality may lead to a negative assessment of the speaker’s intelligence, health and personality. During the 175th ASA Meeting, researchers will describe their work on voice perception and what it means for a voice to sound “normal.”

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Using both ears to hear increases speech recognition and improves sound localization. Ruth Litovsky, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wants to bring this advantage to people who use cochlear implants. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Litovsky will present data showing a new technique that synchronizes the cochlear signals that stimulate the brain in a way that is similar to people who can hear normally.

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While it is obvious that things like boats can be heard by marine life under the water, what about human activities like swimming, canoeing and scuba diving? During the 175th ASA Meeting, Christine Erbe, director of the Centre for Marine Science & Technology at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, will describe her work exploring the impact of man-made underwater noise on marine life.

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To make open offices less noisy, researchers are creating small “acoustic islands” using high-back chairs and retroreflective ceilings to direct sound to help you hear your own conversations -- not others’ -- better. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Manuj Yadav, at the University of Sydney, will present his and his colleagues’ work toward solutions to the speech distraction problem in open-plan offices.

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Science promises to sound more exciting than ever at this year's Acoustical Society of America meeting. Presenters will reveal the latest in acoustics research with insight into topics like how new materials could control acoustic waves, improving audio in virtual reality, acoustic levitation, and how certain insects use acoustics to attract a mate, as well as much more.

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Vocoded speech, or distorted speech that imitates voice transduction by a cochlear implant, is used throughout acoustic and auditory research to explore speech comprehension under various conditions. Researchers evaluated whether musicians had an advantage in understanding and reciting degraded speech as compared to nonmusicians, and they will present their work on the effect of musical experience on the ability to understand vocoded speech at the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8, 2017.

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If you have looked closely at a microwave’s warnings or have experienced an accidental explosion, you know that certain foods pose a risk due to an increase in their internal pressure, and potatoes and hard-boiled eggs are among the most common culprits. Researchers from Charles M. Salter Associates will present their research on the sound pressures generated by exploding eggs at the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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Marine invertebrates are impacted by the rising levels of underwater noise produced by humans, but the production of underwater noise is not only difficult to control, but the direct effect on marine invertebrates can be challenging to observe or measure. Researchers will present results on the use of a standing wave tube to simulate and measure the effects of anthropogenic noise on marine invertebrates at the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans.

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Spending a night in the hospital is not only stressful, but also loud. The constant beeps, whirrs and alarms ascend to a cacophony that produces anything but a relaxing, restful environment. Researchers will summarize the limited number of studies available on hospital noise and discuss the different approaches health care facilities are taking to bring restful repose to patients across the country during the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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The acoustics of political speech are known to be a powerful influencer of voter preferences, but vocal disorders can change the qualities of a person’s speech, and voice scientists in France have found that this alters politicians’ perceived charisma. The researchers examined two cases of politicians with vocal disorders -- Umberto Bossi and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva -- and will present the findings at the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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The hauntingly beautiful “wailing” sounds of early New Orleans jazz clarinets, often featured in brass bands or jazz funerals, are one of the most distinctive instrument styles in American music. The unique sound begs the question: What’s behind incredible their range of sound and tonal variety? During the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Michael G. White will deliver a special presentation about the distinguishing characteristics of the clarinet in early New Orleans jazz.

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Listening requires sensitive hearing and the ability to process information into cohesive meaning. Add everyday background noise and constant interruptions, and the ability to comprehend what is heard becomes that much more difficult. Audiology researchers at Auburn University have found that in such demanding environments, both children and adults depend more on their right ear for processing and retaining what they hear. They will present their work at the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8.

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The classic sparkling wine that has rung in countless new years with a bang may have more to its bubbles. Champagne is notable for its iconic cork popping, but the bubble acoustics also play a key role in determining how expensive that bottle should be. Investigators from the University of Texas at Austin, will be presenting their research the acoustical measurements of champagne bubbles during the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans.

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Low-emission vehicles are considered too quiet for hearing-impaired pedestrians, so the European Union is mandating that they be equipped with acoustic vehicle alerting systems. With these alert systems would come a marked increase in the amount of noise on the roads across Europe. During the 174th ASA Meeting, Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, researchers will present their work assessing the effectiveness of acoustic vehicle alerting systems and their downsides.

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Most volcanoes erupt beneath the ocean, but scientists know little about them compared to what they know about volcanoes that eject their lava on dry land. Researchers think that with improved monitoring, they can learn more about these submarine eruptions, which threaten travel and alter the ocean soundscape. During the 174th ASA meeting, held Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Gabrielle Tepp of the USGS will discuss the challenges and benefits of remote monitoring and what it can teach about submarine volcanoes.

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Acoustical waves and vibrations allow us to hear and experience the world with fuller sensory stimulation. Acoustics has applications that cover a broad spectrum of topics including anthropogenic noise in marine environments, the dangers of hospital noise, and auditory sensitivity after drinking. The Acoustical Society of America’s fall meeting this year will showcase the diversity of sound and its applications, held Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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One popular theory about the Paleolithic cave paintings proposes that sites were chosen based on the acoustics in the caves. The originators of the theory reported a causal connection between the “points of resonance” in three French caves and the position of Paleolithic cave paintings. David Lubman, an acoustic scientist and fellow of ASA, will share some of the insights from his research during Acoustics ’17 Boston, held June 25-29, in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Devoted runners suffer from a surprisingly high rate of injury. One reason for these injuries is that runners endure many shocks from the impact of running, and these cause vibrations that travel from the foot throughout the entire body. Delphine Chadefaux, a post-doctoral researcher who focuses on acoustics and biomechanics, studies these repetitive shocks and investigates how runners adapt their running patterns according to running conditions and will share some of the insights from her research during Acoustics ’17 Boston.

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Anyone who works in an office with an open floor plan becomes aware of a major downside of these otherwise collaborative spaces: It is impossible to hold confidential meetings with colleagues. One solution developed by a German textile manufacturer is a system of sound-insulating curtains to create temporary, sound-proofed “variable zones” within the open office, where private conversations can occur. The system will be described by Jonas Schira of Gerriets GmbH during Acoustics ’17 Boston.

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Ultrasound -- sound with frequencies higher than those audible to humans -- is commonly used in diagnostic imaging of the body's soft tissues, including muscles, joints, tendons and internal organs. A technology called high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is also being explored for therapeutic uses including the removal of uterine fibroids and the destruction of tumors. A suite of noninvasive, adaptive focusing techniques -- that allow ultrasonic beams to be focused through the rib cage and skull -- will be described during Acoustics ’17 Boston.

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The way you hear and interpret the sounds around you changes as you move. That’s how sound in the real world works. Now imagine if it worked that way while you were listening to a recording of a concert or playing a video game in virtual reality. During Acoustics ’17 Boston, Ivan J. Tashev and Hannes Gamper, with Microsoft’s Audio and Acoustics Research Group, will explain how they are using head related transfer functions (HRTF) to create an immersive sound environment.

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In 22 years, Karin Heineman has been behind the camera for hundreds of scientific stories. By bringing a plethora of scientists into the world of media, she has garnered unique expertise in bridging the communication gap between those in and out of the lab. During Acoustics ’17 Boston, Heineman, executive producer of Inside Science TV, will share some of her experience and highlight important elements of capturing the stories of science with video.

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In passive elastography, the elasticity of tissue is measured using the body’s own propagation of shear waves, which enables more effective imaging deeper inside the body in an even more noninvasive way than traditional elastography and may be used for cancer detection. Stefan Catheline, researcher at the University of Lyon will discuss this and other elastography advances during Acoustics ’17 Boston.

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Sound permeates the human experience and gets our attention, sometimes traumatically so. Consider the car horn. It is a widespread practical application of this noise-trauma-alert principle -- and an increasing source of noise pollution worldwide as the global traffic population grows. It also is the subject of new noise pollution research to be presented during Acoustics ’17 Boston. The study introduces a new pedestrian-friendly car-horn sound identified through the Mean Option Score.

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The blood-brain barrier protects the brain and central nervous system from harmful chemicals circulating in the blood but also prevents delivery of drugs that could help treat patients with brain cancers and brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. With recent advances in technology, the blood-brain barrier can now be opened safely, noninvasively and in a targeted manner using ultrasound. One of the newest approaches aiming to advance this research will be presented during Acoustics ’17 Boston.

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Paris’ Cathedral of Notre Dame has a ghost orchestra that is always performing, thanks to a sophisticated, multidisciplinary acoustics research project that will be presented during Acoustics ’17 Boston. In the project, computer models use recordings from a live concert held at the cathedral and detailed room acoustic simulations to produce a novel type of audience experience: a virtual recreation of the live performance using spatial audio and virtual reality.

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People who are visually impaired will often use a cane to feel out their surroundings. With training and practice, people can learn to use the pitch, loudness and timbre of echoes from the cane or other sounds to navigate safely through the environment using echolocation. Bo Schenkman, an associate professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, will present a summary of some aspects of his work on human echolocation during Acoustics ’17 Boston.

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Acoustics ’17 Boston, the third joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the European Acoustics Association, will be held this month in Boston. The meeting will cover acoustics across a diverse range of fields and applications including human health, technology, animal communication, education and more.

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What are the characteristics of the way you say, “hello,” (or anything else for that matter) that makes you recognizable over the phone? Despite the increasing amount of literature on personal voice quality, very little is actually known about how to characterize the sound of an individual speaker. Two researchers from UCLA in Los Angeles, California, Patricia Keating and Jody Kreiman, are joining forces to apply acoustics tools to their linguistics research, investigating this question.

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Even if they don’t understand the words, infants react to the way their mother speaks and the emotions conveyed through speech. What exactly they react to and how has yet to be fully deciphered, but could have significant impact on a child’s development. Researchers in acoustics and psychology teamed up to better define and study this impact.