Page 8 - Summer2020

From the Editor
Arthur N. Popper
As many members of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) know, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and other ASA journals have recently adopted new styles and covers.
These changes did not include Acoustics Today (AT) because our style is rather different from those of the ASA peer- reviewed publications.
However, about six months ago, we decided to try to make the magazine more readable, have it incorpo- rate ASA publication standards (e.g., colors, fonts), and improve the way that the various parts of the magazine tie together. At the same time, we did not want to do anything to alter the content of the magazine or what it contributes to the ASA and its members.
This issue reflects these changes. We are very grateful to the Opus Design team and to the many members of the ASA who gave us feedback and additional ideas as we moved forward. We hope you like the changes and that you find the magazine even more readable than in the past. Of course, if you have other ideas to improve the look and feel and, most of all, the readability of AT, please share them with us.
I want to also point out a few new things on the AT website (see acousticstoday.org). First, we have a new AT intern, Hilary Kates Varghese, a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire (Durham). Over the course of the year, Hilary is going to interview a number of past ASA presidents about their careers and their work with the ASA. The first of these is now online at acousticstoday.org/meet-asa-presidents and more will come over the course of 2020. Please visit the site and
learn more about a group of really interesting colleagues.
Second, AT collaborated with the ASA International Year of Sound Committee to produce a Special Issue of AT that is aimed at teaching about acoustics to high-school and college students, teachers, politicians, regulators, and others. You can see the issue at acousticstoday.org/IYS2020. Feel free to share the link to the issue with students and
teachers you know (including your children’s teachers). And, in the future, AT would be interested in collaborat- ingwithotherASAgroupsandactivitiestodevelopspecial
issues that focus on a particular topic.
As you can see, this is a large issue of AT, filled with excit- ing articles and a number of very interesting essays. I want to point out that the first four articles have as a theme (although specifically only a focus of the second article) using acoustic computation to solve big problems. This was not intentional but is an interesting occurrence that reflects the growing importance of computation in science and technology, including in acoustics (and in the ASA).
The first article by Jennifer Amaral, Kathleen Vigness- Raposa, James Miller, Gopu Potty, Arthur Newhall, and Ying-Tsong Lin is about the sound from offshore windfarms. Although AT has had articles about onshore windfarms, this is the first article that explores the under- water sounds from what will be a vastly growing number of offshore devices.
One of the issues arising in this article is the way that under- water sound propagates. In a way, this issue is addressed in our second article by Gregory Bunting, Clark Dohrmann, Scott Miller, and Timothy Walsh. They consider that many acoustic problems are extremely complex and require exten- sive computations. In their article, the authors discuss the methods now available for such computations.
Again, related to the idea of analysis of complex acoustics, in the third article, Richard (Dan) Costley Jr. provides fascinating insight into how the military used acoustics to locate enemy artillery in World War I (WWI). The methods used seem “crude” by today’s standards, but they were very effective.
The fourth article by Orest Diachok continues with compu- tational acoustics in the sense that Orest writes about using sound to find and identify fish. Using sound to find fish comes out of WWI, and there is a continuing quest to use acoustics and computation to improve fisheries methods.
8 Acoustics Today • Summer 2020