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Positive soundscapes project In the acoustics community, sound in the environment - especially that made by other people - has overwhelmingly been considered in negative terms, as both intrusive and undesirable. The strong focus of traditional engineering acoustics on reducing noise level ignores the many possibilities for characterising positive aspects of the soundscapes around us. Desirable aspects of the soundscape have been investigated in the past, mainly by artists and social scientists. This work has had little impact on quantitative engineering acoustics, however, perhaps because of barriers to communication across different disciplines."

Using little more than a few perforated sheets of plastic and a staggering amount of number crunching, Duke engineers have demonstrated the world's first three-dimensional acoustic cloak. The new device reroutes sound waves to create the impression that both the cloak and anything beneath it are not there.

"Hear from Meyer Sound and Foster + Partners on how they manipulate and shape spaces through invisible architecture. The creation of spaces that take people into environments that they've never experienced comes with the technological advancements in sound engineering."

"Interview with Paulus Van Horne, a radio producer, audio engineer and noise researcher based in Boulder, CO. Paulus discusses their work researching noise, particularly in relationship to gender, sexuality, and mobilizing a queer approach to sound."

"O'Daniel has worn hearing aids since she was 3. The ones she has now are digital, and sometimes they give her a heightened sense of sound: A car engine hum becomes earsplitting. Within daily experiences of frustration, and I do a lot of compensating, there's also this kind of radical, heightened attention," O'Daniel said. "And that mix, I find just fascinating. O'Daniel has spent most of her art career focused on recreating those jarring sounds.

"since 2006, when scientists at Denali began a decade-long effort to collect a month's worth of acoustic data from more than 60 sites across the park - including a 14,000-foot-high spot on Mount McKinley - Betchkal and his colleagues have recorded only 36 complete days in which the sounds of an internal combustion engine of some sort were absent. Planes are the most common source. Once, in the course of 24 hours, a single recording station captured the buzzing of 78 low-altitude props - the kind used for sightseeing tours; other areas have logged daily averages as high as one sky- or street-traffic sound every 17 minutes."

"The International Ambiances Network aims at structuring and developing the research field of architectural and urban ambiances. It wishes to promote the sensory domain in the questioning and design of lived space. This sensitive approach of the built environment involves all the senses (sound, light, odors, touch, heat,…). Such a network favors multisensoriality and pluridisciplinarity (human and social sciences ; architecture and urban planning ; engineering and applied physics). It is open to a wide variety of profiles and includes research activities as well as design, teaching or artistic ones."

"Acoustic Engineer Trevor Cox takes us on a two-part journey into the world of acoustics research, starting with the sounds we love to hate."

"Moscow-based musician/engineer Dmitry Morozov has built an incredible instrument called the Metaphase Sound Machine. It produces music based on radioactive particles sensed by its built-in Geiger Counter."

"In an attempt to understand this new pathogen better, musician and engineer Markus Buehler and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have assigned each protein and structural form a musical equivalent."

"It is common knowledge that babies and small children fall asleep in the car quite easily. This could be a few things, the muffled engine noise, the slight vibration of the car, a regulated temperature. Furthermore it could be a conditioned response: when kids are put in a seat and strapped in, they can't really move around much and are kind of forced to relax. They have probably slept in the car before so are conditioned to do it again. Using this knowledge, Ford is promoting it's new vehicle range with "Max Motor Dreams", a baby crib that reproduces the sounds, movement and light of a parent's car. Parents are even able to use an app to collect data from routes and replay it in the crib at home."

"Suzanne Ciani performs live quadraphonic modular synthesis from Envelop SF, a 32 speaker immersive audio venue in San Francisco. This event was originally live-streamed via Envelop Stream, in collaboration with The Audio Engineering Society in October 2020."

"Suzanne Ciani performs live quadraphonic modular synthesis at Envelop SF, a 32 speaker immersive audio venue in San Francisco. This event was originally live-streamed via Envelop Stream, in collaboration with The Audio Engineering Society in October 2020."

A written history of the legendary and groundbreaking BBC Radiophonic Workshop

"Conversations of Great Whales in the oceans… Low throb of ship engines… Continuous rumble of the ground beneath our feet and of the seafloor below the water… Bursts of vibrations excited by earthquakes… We cannot normally hear these vibrations as sounds-the human ear is not designed to. But what if we could? What if we could make the sounds of the Earth audible?"

"While we often think of soundwalks as engines of knowledge production, we must also consider that they may simultaneously silence divergent worldviews and perspectives of space and place."

"Ever wonder why your voice sounds so much better when you sing in the shower? It has to do with an acoustic "blur" called reverberation. From classical to pop music, reverberation "makes music sound nicer," acoustic engineer Trevor Cox tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. It helps blend the sound, "but you don't want too much," he warns."

""The Smallest of Wings" juxtaposed the beating of moth wings recorded in upstate New York with the buzzing sound of hummingbirds' wings from the Amazon to create an immersive environmental experience. Vitiello and engineers from Arup Acoustics designed an open, dome-like configuration over an inviting grass circle for the installation. Eighteen loudspeakers were attached to the configuration with four, very large subwoofers on the ground."

"WaveCloud-M is Matlab-oriented simulator which uses the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method to solve the linear acoustic wave-equation numerically. It originates from a simulation tool which I designed in 2010 to model rooms for my PhD thesis, which is called WaveCloud (without the M). The original WaveCloud project relies heavily on parallisation on a GPU and facilitates a means for large-scale modelling. Even though it is a powerful tool, it relies on specialised hardware and can be somewhat cumbersome as it requires some machine-specific tweaking. I have listened to feedback from many users, and accordingly, I decided to create a new version of WaveCloud, which can be run 'out of the box' from within Matlab, and does not require building any third-party components. This version only shares the name with the original WaveCloud, and its engine was re-designed from the core."

"The Robert L. Forward novel Dragon's Egg begins with an intrepid graduate student refusing to accept that a noisy satellite signal is just a malfunction. It must have some meaning, she thinks-and it does, turning out to herald the passing by of an inhabited neutron star (and making graduate school look rather easy). Even a malfunction, though, wouldn't really have been noise. We'd have to assume that some satellite engineer would be interested. In fact, it's hard to imagine any signal coming from space that would be of no interest to anyone. The noisiest signals are even sometimes the most important. Microwave and gravitational wave backgrounds, for example. Our modern definition of noise, as unwanted sound or signal, is a relatively recent one. The word used to mean strife, and nausea. Is the new meaning a useful ontology? Or does it encourage us to dismiss what we can't interpret? Welcome to "Noise.""