Page 7 - Fall2020

From the Editor
Arthur N. Popper
I want to thank the 758 Acoustical Society of America (ASA) members who responded to the recent Acous- tics Today (AT) survey. As promised in the survey, we awarded $50 gift
cards (using an online random number generator) to five ASA members. They are David Bonnett, Raymond H. Dye, Gordon Ebbitt, Zhe-chen Guo, and Guillermo Rus. The results from the survey are discussed on page 84 of this issue.
This issue contains a very important statement about the ASA and future meetings by President Diane Kewley- Port. Although I realize (from the survey) that only about
60% of members read the From the President column (and perhaps 70% read this column), I would like to encourage every member to see Diane’s column.
This issue of AT has seven articles. The first, by Kenneth Good Jr. and Neil Shaw, arose from my having dinner with Ken at a recent ASA meeting. Ken shared some of his work on speech privacy and particularly on issues of privacy in places like doctor’s offices and such. Ken’s description was really fascinating, and by the time the entrée was served, Ken had agreed to do this article.
AT has had a number of articles about function of the inner ear and hearing, an area (as you might expect) of particular interest to me. To round out discussions of the ear, Sunil Puria writes about the structure and function of the middle ear. The three-bone middle ear is a defining characteristic of mammals, and it is important for detec- tion of higher frequencies, as Sunil explains.
This is followed by an article by Timothy Leighton, Ben Lineton, Craig Dolder, and Mark Fletcher. Tim and his colleagues start with a fascinating case study from a school in Seattle, WA, and use that as the basis for dis- cussing human detection of ultrasonic sound. Human detection of ultrasound is not well-known, but this arti- cle shows that it may, in fact, be more pervasive than we think, especially for younger ASA members.
The fourth article is by J. Lauren Ruoss, Catalina Bazacliu, Daphna Yasova Barbeau, and Philip Levy. They discuss the value of using ultrasound in clinical diagnosis, with a focus on dealing with high-risk newborns in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Although the use of ultra- sound is widespread in medicine, its use in the NICU has special importance because of the fragility of the babies and their special needs.
Lately, I have been seeking out editors of some of the Special Issues that have been published or will be pub- lished in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
The goal of these articles is to provide summaries of the broad topic of the Special Issue to introduce the whole ASA membership to the topic. Thus, these articles focus less on the papers in the issue than on the overall topic.
One of the recent Special Issues was on the speech pat- terns in the United States South. The editors of the Special Issue, Irina Shport and Wendy Herd, provide wonderful insight into Southern speech and include excellent mul- timedia demonstrations of these speech patterns.
The sixth article in this issue is quite personal to me. Along with Bill Yost and Tony Hawkins, we write about the immense contributions of my very close friend and collaborator of almost 50 years (and 80 books), Richard (Dick) Fay, to auditory neuroscience. Dick was unable
to write an overview of his extraordinary work on verte- brate hearing, and so we decided to provide this for him. (But Dick has read the article and approved of what we say about his work.) We had great fun revisiting older papers and our interactions with Dick (I took Figure 1 in the article when I introduced Dick to great herring and aquavit in my favorite restaurant in Copenhagen).
The last article in this issue is by T. Christina Zhao and Patricia Kuhl. Christina and Pat discuss the value of early music training on the development of the human brain. I personally found this article totally fascinating. Indeed, I suspect that many other members will start to think of how they might want to introduce musical training to
Fall 2020 • Acoustics Today 7