Page 44 - January 2006

Echoes from Minneapolis
Thomas D. Rossing
Oh sun and skies and clouds of June And flowers of June together
You can not rival for one hour October's bright blue weather
This poem by Helen Hunt Jackson could easily have been written especially for the 150th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Minneapolis, October 17 to 21, 2005. With clear blue skies and brilliant fall foliage outside, it was hard to stay inside, except that there were many fascinating papers, lectures, concerts and demonstration experiments to keep us inside. This joint meeting with NOISE-CON 2005 was certainly one to be enjoyed.
I found the two musical events particularly enjoyable. On Tuesday, we were invited to attend a rehearsal of the Minnesota Orchestra under the baton of Osmo Vänskä with violinist Christian Tetzlaff as soloist. After the rehearsal, maestro Vänskä and Cyril Harris, the acoustical designer of Orchestra Hall, discussed its acoustics.
Minnesota orchestra rehearsal in Orchestra Hall. (Photo by Tom Rossing.)
Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis. (Photo by Tom Rossing.)
On Thursday, we heard a concert by the St. Olaf Cantorei, a ninety-voice liturgical choir directed by John Ferguson, in nearby Central Lutheran Church. The Cantorei, which earlier had made a unique recording in an anechoic room, was accompanied by Professor Ferguson at the organ, brass instruments, and handbells. During the panel discussion which preceded the concert, we had a chance to hear excerpts from the Cantorei’s anechoic recording played through the sound system in the highly reverberant church (“sonic convolution”).
Some 112 of the 779 technical papers have been post- ed by their authors, and these can be accessed through the ASA website as can lay language versions of a number of the papers. As a sampling, we have included two short arti- cles based on a paper and a tutorial presented at Minneapolis.
“Acts of Sound,” a hands-on workshop for high school students, exposed students from an inner-city high school to the excitement of doing acoustics experiments. Eight teams of three worked for 30 minutes at their own stations guided by ASA mentors. The students recorded data and tried to come up with their own “discoveries” and then prepared transparencies for a presentation to the other teams.
Another educational event was “The Physics Force,” a program of physics demonstrations (with an emphasis on acoustics), presented by a team from the University of Minnesota. Attendees will not soon forget a ping-pong ball passing through two soda cans or the implosion of a steel barrel with reduced air pressure inside.
Osmo Vänskä and Cyril Harris discuss the acoustics of Orchestra Hall. (Photo by Tom Rossing.)
42 Acoustics Today, January 2006