News tagged with acoustics
Metafluids: German researchers realize new material class
A research team lead by Professor Martin Wegener at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has succeeded in realizing a new material class through the manufacturing of a stable crystalline metafluid, a pentamode ...
May 08, 2012 |
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In future, phones can identify the Troubadour on the tree top
In spring, the sound of birds serenading fills the air. The Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics is developing a system that can recognize a bird species based on a song segment. The system can be ...
May 22, 2012 |
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Touchable Hologram Becomes Reality (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed 3D holograms that can be touched with bare hands. Generally, holograms can't be felt because they're made only of light. But the new ...
Technology / Hi Tech & Innovation
Aug 06, 2009 |
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Tiny Music Player Made from Wire Bridge (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- In 2008, scientists built a loudspeaker made of carbon nanotubes that produced sound and music based on the thermoacoustic effect. Now, a different team of scientists has built a loudspeaker ...
Nov 04, 2009 |
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Two-dimensional graphene metamaterials, one-atom-thick optical devices envisioned
Two University of Pennsylvania engineers have proposed the possibility of two-dimensional metamaterials. These one-atom-thick metamaterials could be achieved by controlling the conductivity of sheets of graphene, which is ...
Nanotechnology / Nanomaterials
Jun 09, 2011 |
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Low-Budget Fusion Reactor Could Generate Energy within a Decade
(PhysOrg.com) -- Currently, most nuclear fusion power plants are large, expensive projects that will take decades to benefit from. But a startup company in Vancouver, Canada, called General Fusion is taking ...
Aug 04, 2009 |
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Sound could save circuits: Researchers theorize acoustic waves may cool microelectronics
(PhysOrg.com) -- "Hot sounds" has one meaning to music fans and another to physicists. Count a team of researchers at Rice University among the latter, as they've discovered that acoustic waves traveling along ...
Apr 28, 2010 |
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Sound bullets could treat cancers and replace ultrasound (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Acoustic devices are used in a range of applications such as ultrasound scanners, but their performance is limited for some uses by their inaccurate focusing and low focal power. Now a group ...
Apr 07, 2010 |
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Moon's shadow, like a ship, creates waves
During a solar eclipse, the Moon's passage overhead blocks out the majority of the Sun's light and casts a wide swath of the Earth into darkness. The land under the Moon's shadow receives less incoming energy ...
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Oct 05, 2011 |
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Rap music powers rhythmic action of medical sensor
(PhysOrg.com) -- The driving bass rhythm of rap music can be harnessed to power a new type of miniature medical sensor designed to be implanted in the body.
Jan 26, 2012 |
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Acoustic tweezers can position tiny objects
(PhysOrg.com) -- Manipulating tiny objects like single cells or nanosized beads often requires relatively large, unwieldy equipment, but now a system that uses sound as a tiny tweezers can be small enough ...
Nanotechnology / Nanomaterials
Aug 28, 2009 |
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Rainforest plant developed sonar dish to attract pollinating bats
The researchers discovered that a rainforest vine, pollinated by bats, has evolved dish-shaped leaves with such conspicuous echoes that nectar-feeding bats can find its flowers twice as fast by echolocation. The study is ...
Jul 28, 2011 |
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Network turns soldiers' helmets into sniper location system
(PhysOrg.com) -- Imagine a platoon of soldiers fighting in a hazardous urban environment who carry personal digital assistants that can display the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately ...
Mar 24, 2009 |
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Music and speech based on human biology (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- A pair of studies by Duke University neuroscientists shows powerful new evidence of a deep biological link between human music and speech.
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Dec 03, 2009 |
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Perfect Pitch: Language Wins Out Over Genetics
Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Sinatra and Hendrix -- these and many other of the world's most famous musicians have had "perfect" or "absolute" pitch. The ability, defined as recognizing the pitch of a musical note ...
May 19, 2009 |
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Acoustics
Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical engineer. The application of acoustics can be seen in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.
Hearing is one of the most crucial means of survival in the animal world, and speech is one of the most distinctive characteristics of human development and culture. So it is no surprise that the science of acoustics spreads across so many facets of our society—music, medicine, architecture, industrial production, warfare and more. Art, craft, science and technology have provoked one another to advance the whole, as in many other fields of knowledge. Lindsay's 'Wheel of Acoustics' is a well accepted overview of the various fields in acoustics.
The word "acoustic" is derived from the Greek word ἀκουστικός (akoustikos), meaning "of or for hearing, ready to hear" and that from ἀκουστός (akoustos), "heard, audible", which in turn derives from the verb ἀκούω (akouo), "I hear".
The Latin synonym is "sonic", after which the term sonics used to be a synonym for acoustics and later a branch of acoustics. Frequencies above and below the audible range are called "ultrasonic" and "infrasonic", respectively.
For more information about Acoustics, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
