Page 8 - Summer2022

From the Editor Arthur N. Popper This issue of Acoustics Today (AT) introduces a new series of “Sound Perspectives” essays, “Conversation with a Colleague” (CwC). Edited by AT Associate Editor Micheal Dent, CwC focuses on mid- and senior-career Acoustical Society of America (ASA) members who have made a substantial contribution to their field. The individuals may be from academia, industry, and/or government. The purpose of CwC is to introduce the broad ASA audi- ence to leaders in acoustics and to teach about diverse areas of the discipline. CwC essays will be shorter and much more informal than articles in AT. Most importantly, and unlike regular articles, the essays will focus on the contributions of a single person rather than on a broader field. We also want to “drive” CwC essays to have roughly the same information, and so our colleagues will be asked to answer a specific set of “prompts” in their responses. We plan on one essay for each issue of AT, with the goal of representing each technical committee (TC) at least once in the next three years. To do this, we will invite each TC to nominate two or three people as potential participants in the series. The individual will be selected by the AT editor and associate editor, with a focus on topics that, hopefully, will be of interest to the broad ASA membership. Normally, I do not discuss our regular “From the Presi- dent” article, but I do want to remind readers to look at it and also a special “Sound Perspectives” essay by ASA Executive Director Susan E. Fox. In her last column as president of the ASA, Maureen Stone talks about some of the history of the ASA and ties it nicely to its future. As part of the essay, Maureen shares several links to the first issue of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA). This is great fun to look at! In the first article, Mitra Aliabouzar and Mario Fabiilli dis- cuss the healing of wounds and how bubbles can be used to help build tissues in the body. They demonstrate that these bubbles, which are used for building new blood vessels, can be controlled using ultrasound, giving us another way in which ultrasound is used in biomedical applications. (Foradditionalbiomedicalapplicationsofultrasound,see “AT Collections” at tinyurl.com/mtmturra.) The second article by Daniel Butko focuses on education inacoustics,withadiscussionoftheapproachesheusesin teaching architectural acoustics. Dan’s approaches are quite interesting, and they should be of value to for teaching most any STEM subject. Thus, I encourage everyone who teaches, both formally or informally, to take a look at this article. The next article is by Erin Fischell who shares insight into how one might get “weird” data when doing underwa- ter acoustic sensing. Erin makes it clear that one cannot just accept data as recorded but that it is imperative to be very careful in interpreting and understanding the data. Indeed, although the article focuses on underwater sound, the broader message is that no matter how we record data, it is important to ensure that there are no artifacts and that any artifacts are very well hidden and hard to figure out. (For other AT articles on underwater acoustics, see “AT Collections” at tinyurl.com/exppd4fd.) I was quite surprised, in reading the fourth article by Susanne Fuchs and Aleksandra Ćwiek, that there are well over 4,000 extant languages. They share this informa- tion in the context of talking about relationships between language sounds and meaning. They also consider the evolution of language and make a case that vocal sounds are related to information about the meaning of the sounds from other sensory stimuli such as vision. (AT has many articles on language; see tinyurl.com/2p8rmdxz.) Our fifth article, by Miriam A. Kolar, Carole Fritz, and Gilles Tosello, discusses music archaeology by focus- ing on the sounds from an 18,000-year-old conch shell that was found in a French cave. The authors share how they worked out that the shell is a musical instrument, and they discuss the relationships between the sounds of ancient instruments and the acoustics of the caves in which they have been found. (For more articles about archaeology and acoustics, see our “AT Collections” at tinyurl.com/4tcpf9ez.) 8 Acoustics Today • Summer 2022