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Studying whether animals possess additional language-related skills can help us understand what it takes to learn speech and reveal the history of its evolution. Andrea Ravignani and colleagues studied seal pups' vocal plasticity, or how well they can adjust their own voices to compensate for their environment, and found that seal pups can change the pitch and volume of their voices, much like humans can. Ravignani will discuss his work linking vocal learning with vocal plasticity and rhythmic capacity at the 183rd ASA Meeting.

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At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Kenton Hummel will describe how soundscape research in day cares can improve child and provider outcomes and experiences. He and his team collaborated with experts in engineering, sensing, early child care, and health to monitor three day care centers for 48-hour periods. High noise levels and long periods of loud fluctuating sound can negatively impact children and staff by increasing the effort it takes to communicate. In contrast, a low background noise level allows for meaningful speech, which is essential for language, brain, cognitive, and social/emotional development.

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At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Brendan Smith will describe how hydrophones can listen to the sounds of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, informing the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining and assisting with interplanetary exploration. He and his supervisor David Barclay have developed noninvasive ways to study the vents that are sustainable in the long term because they work from a safe distance. Understanding the acoustics in the vicinity could help predict and prevent environmental impacts.

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Modern movie sound mixing uses techniques like impulse responses to reproduce dialogue and other sounds. These methods are crucial to align what moviegoers see and hear and keep them engaged in the story. At the 183rd ASA meeting, Jeffrey Reed of Taproot Audio Design will demonstrate the behind-the-scenes audio engineering required to re-create the acoustics of movie sets and locations, sharing short clips of film to compare the original recording to the studio mixed product.

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"I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now." With these words, Alvin Lucier begins a fascinating recording where his voice warps and becomes indistinguishable over time, solely because of how sound reflects in the room. For physics students, this audio can be used to reveal details of the surrounding room and teach important lessons about acoustic resonance. Andy Piacsek, of Central Washington University, will discuss how he employs Lucier's project in the classroom during his talk, "Students are sitting in a room."

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For musicians, sound designers, and other audio professionals, a text-to-audio model opens avenues of creative application and exploration and provides workflow-enhancing tools. At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Zach Evans will present his team's early success in generating coherent and relevant music and sound from text. They employed data compression methods to generate the audio with reduced training time and improved output quality, and they plan to expand to larger data sets and release their model as open-source option for others to use and improve.

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Louis Urtecho and his team hope to study dust devils in the Mojave Desert on Earth, then extend the analysis to scale for the different atmosphere on Mars. Based on microbarometer data from the Mojave, they built an algorithm to look for the pressure activity indicative of a dust devil. The vortices have a distinct drop in pressure near their centers, and their pressure fluctuates to look like an electrocardiogram signal over time. The team hopes to learn more about the convective vortices and how they move, which will improve the accuracy of Martian weather models.

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AIP announced physicist Clifford V. Johnson as the winner of the 2022 Andrew Gemant Award "for portraying the humanistic dimensions of physics to the public through a creative array of artistic, performance, and educational methods." The annual prize recognizes the accomplishments of a person who has made significant contributions to the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimension of physics. In addition to a $5,000 prize for Johnson, $3,000 will be given to a Los Angeles elementary school and their annual science fair, where students, parents, and community members participate in physics demonstrations and experiments.

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At the 183rd ASA Meeting, researchers will describe "The evolution of Blackbird Studio C," a space designed to provide an accurate and immersive mixing and production environment. They wanted to create a unique, ambient anechoic space that would allow ambient sound to decay equally across different frequencies and be free from interfering reflections, making it sound like an indoor forest. So they covered the walls and ceiling with primitive root diffusers. This technology causes sound energy to diffuse and radiate in many directions.

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At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Markus Mueller-Trapet will describe experiments designed to simulate and measure the perceived annoyance experienced from noisy neighbors in multi-unit residential buildings. He and his team provided a living room-like situation and recorded impact sounds of objects dropping and people walking. They then presented the recordings to study participants, using different playback techniques and virtual reality, and created an online survey. The team hopes to provide guidance to architects and building code developers.

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In APL Bioengineering, researchers examine the local communication between endothelial cells and tumors cells and its effects on endothelial cell orientation. The approach uses co-cultured human umbilical vein endothelial cells and breast epithelial tumor cell lines to simulate the tumor-endothelial interaction. The group found the clockwise chirality of the hUVECs was less affected by local hormone signaling and more so by direct physical contact with tumor cells. Specific proteins on the tumor cell binding to others on endothelial cells appeared to play a role in changing the clockwise chirality of hUVECs.

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In Physics of Fluids, researchers have been studying the dynamics of how crescent-shaped sand dunes are formed. Known as barchans, these formations are commonly found in various sizes and circumstances, on Earth and on Mars. Using a computational fluid dynamics approach, the team carried out simulations by applying the equations of motion to each grain in a pile being deformed by a fluid flow, showing the ranges of values for the proper computation of barchan dunes down to the grain scale.

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At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Gautam Shah will discuss plans to test a supersonic aircraft with technology to alter how supersonic shock waves behave and reduce sonic booms. NASA will conduct a series of flights over various communities across the U.S., and Shah and his team will measure the sound of the aircraft and conduct public surveys to understand the public response to different noise levels. By providing this information to regulatory agencies, the group hopes to inform an overland supersonic sound standard.

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Creating 3D-printed, low-cost, durable violins for music students, researchers have explored the factors that result in the best violin sounds and performed a concerto composed specifically for 3D-printed instruments. The violin was created in two sections. The body is made of a plastic polymer material and designed to produce a resonant tone, while the neck and fingerboard are printed in smooth ABS plastic to be comfortable in the musician's hands. The result is a violin that produces a darker, more mellow sound than traditionally made instruments.

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Researchers describe how a noninvasive microphone sensor could identify bowel diseases without collecting any identifiable information. They tested the technique on audio data from online sources, transforming each audio sample of an excretion event into a spectrogram, which essentially captures the sound in an image. The images were fed to a machine learning algorithm that learned to classify each event based on its features. The algorithm's performance was tested against data with and without background noises.

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Researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm to identify cough sounds and determine whether the subject is suffering from pneumonia. Because every room and recording device is different, they augmented their recordings with room impulse responses, which measure how the acoustics of a space react to different sound frequencies. By combining this data with the recorded cough sounds, the algorithm can work in any environment.

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Researchers present an app that creates playlists to help listeners care for their emotions through music. The app could be used by people who may not want to receive counseling or treatment because of feelings of shame, inadequacy, or distrust and aims to leave them more positive and focused than they were when they began. Users take three self-led questionnaires to measure their emotional status and the app then creates a customized playlist of songs using one of three strategies: consoling, relaxing, or uplifting.

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In a crowded restaurant, the sounds of conversations bounce off walls, creating background noise. Each individual wants to be heard, so they end up talking a little bit louder, which increases the overall din. Eventually – barring an interruption – the system gets loud enough to reach the limit of the human voice. Braxton Boren will discuss this cycle, called the Lombard effect, and how it can be disrupted in his presentation, "A game theory model of the Lombard effect in public spaces."

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AIP Publishing is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 APL Materials Excellence in Research Award, a distinction for young researchers who publish exceptional research in the journal.

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The 183rd ASA Meeting will include an urban sound walk, in which media are invited to explore Nashville, its sounds, and efforts to design projects that enhance the sonic environment and mitigate noise. Following the walk, ASA will host a workshop on soundscape design and how planning can be used to create sustainable, walkable, livable urban environments. The walk is an opportunity for media and anyone interested in urban soundscapes, while the workshop is intended for city planners, architects, officials, and others whose work lies on the interface between sound and the community. All are welcome.