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From the Editor | Arthur N. Popper
Welcome to the Fall 2016 issue of Acoustics Today (AT). I want to thank the many people who came up to me at the Salt Lake City meeting and made posi- tive comments about AT. This
is always pleasing, and my colleagues in the Acoustical So- ciety of America (ASA) Publications Office and I appreci- ate hearing that our efforts are valued. Of course, although positive comments are great, if anyone has ideas about how we can further improve the magazine, we’d like to hear that as well. I also thank those people who suggested potential articles for AT; I have already “commissioned” a number of these topics and you will see the papers in future issues of the magazine.
There has been a change in leadership in the AT Publications Committee (now the Editorial Board). Since its inception, the Committee was chaired by Brenda Lonsbury-Martin. Brenda is absolutely great to work with, and she has been an invaluable guide and colleague (and she has become a good friend). She has been highly instrumental in many of our initiatives, and I am very pleased that she is going to stay on the committee. But Brenda is moving on to chair the very important Medals and Awards Committee where, I trust, she will provide the same outstanding leadership that she has with AT.
I am delighted to announce that the new chair of the Edito- rial Board is Laura Kloepper. Many of you will recall that Laura was our first AT intern and a driving force in moving AT and ASA forward in social media. Laura is full of energy, has many great ideas, and has a real dedication to ASA and the success of the ASA and its publications. I very much look forward to working with Laura in the coming years.
I also want to acknowledge and thank our second intern An- drew (Pi) Pyzek for his really unique contributions to AT. As many of you know, one of our goals for AT is not only to help educate our membership about broad areas of acoustics but also to reach out to help the general public learn about acoustics and the many contributions of ASA members to the field. Pi has been instrumental in this effort by writing a series of 12 articles, see http://acousticstoday.org/wts-pi/, on various aspects of acoustics. The articles, which will, of
course, remain on our site, are models of science journalism and provide a great deal of information in very accessible ways to the public.
I think having such material on the AT Web site to help us educate a broader public is very important. Thus, I would like to continue having sets of articles written for Acoustics Today.org. Although this would be a great opportunity for another AT intern, I am open to discussing the idea with anyone who has an interest in writing for the AT site. The focus of the articles would be for a broad audience. Please contact me if you would like to contribute to our Web page.
This issue of AT has five articles that should, I hope, appeal across the ASA membership. The first article, by George Brock-Nannestad, deals with the history of commercial sound recording. George focuses on the history of analog re- cordings, starting in the 19th century and going through the early 1960s when recording started to go digital. I suspect that some of the material will be new and fascinating for our younger readers who were raised on CDs and iPODs, but people closer to my age will recognize some the instruments George describes and the wonderful sounds they produced.
In the second article, Grace Clark takes a different, and very personal, approach to signal processing. She discusses her topic from the perspective of advice on doing research. I think that many of our readers will recognize any number of the points that Grace makes and can readily relate these to their own research experience. Indeed, the article is relevant to anyone doing research today on any topic.
Michael Haberman and Andrew Norris follow up on articles they have (individually) written for AT over the past few years on various aspects of metamaterials. The article in this issue summarizes the field and gives a broad overview of the topic. I asked Michael and Andy to do this article after see- ing a special issue of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) that they wrote together focusing on meta- materials. Because this is a highly specialized area, I real- ized that we needed a more “lay” approach to the topic for a broader audience. If others are developing special issues for JASA, I would be pleased to discuss having an overview article on the topic in a future issue of AT.
Another article that comes out of the special programs at
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