On Friday, August 31st, the Penn State chapter of the Acoustical Society of America will be hosting our first annual Matlab Bootcamp. Matlab has become an indispensable for acousticians because of its mathematical syntax and rapid code iteration. Many classes in Penn State’s acoustics curriculum expect some familiarity with Matlab, but not all students have a background in programming with this language. The Matlab Bootcamp is a great opportunity to get hands on experience, and learn from fellow students.
The Matlab Bootcamp is highly encouraged for incoming first-year acoustics students, but is open to anyone wanting to beef-up their skills. Interested students should meet in the Applied Science Building at 8:30 AM on Friday; the bootcamp will run until 3 PM (Breakfast and lunch provided). Computers with Matlab installed will also be provided for your use.
Full details follow after the break.
On August 27th the new semester at Penn State starts in earnest, and with it comes new members for the Penn State chapter of the Acoustical Society of America! If you’ve made it to this site, then odds are you are aware of who we are and what we do. In short, though, we are a student chapter for the Acoustical Society of America, a professional organization for those who study and use the science of sound. If you haven’t already, I recommend you sign up for our listserv and consider applying for membership to our parent organization. In addition, check back here regularly for event updates and announcements, interesting articles from around the web, and original content catered specifically to students of acoustics!
We hope to have a great semester with all of our new members, and we look forward to seeing you all throughout the coming year!
Andrew Christian - winner, 2012 Royster Competition at PSU
Thank you to everyone for your participation in our very successful ASA day last Friday!
A special thank you to the Royster Competition Poster entrants; everyone put in a great effort and the posters looked great!
It is our pleasure to announce the judges decisions on the winners of this year’s competition:
First place: Andrew Christian
Second place: Samuel Anderson
Third Place: Matthew Shaw
Thank you again to everyone who came out in support of the poster competition and for everyone’s hard work throughout this year making Penn State ASA a success.
It is my pleasure to announce the results of the PSU ASA officer elections for the 2012-2013 school year:
President: Matt Shaw
Vice-president: Derek Olson
Secretary: Dan Domme
Treasurer: Steve Wells
Chapter Representative: Anand Swaminathan
Webmaster: Andrew Pyzdek
Education: Randy Ali
Faculty co-advisors: Matt Poese and Dan Russell
Please join me in congratulating and welcoming these folks into their new positions. We look forward to their leadership this next year!
It has been a pleasure to serve as your president this past year — thank you all for your help in planning events and your interest shown by your attendance!
All the best,
Jason
Last Spring, PSU ASA teamed up with PSU AES to offer a speaker building project for students at Penn State. This wasn’t any speaker, but rather a low-cost speaker made out of a shoebox! (OK, and some other materials as well.) Penn State students Scott Porter, Dan Domme, and Jeff Whalen designed this project as an educational tool to help get students excited about acoustics. Since the project’s conception, it has gone through several iterations and builds with student groups of different ages. (We’ll have to post the details of how to make this speaker later…)
This Spring, we’ve been offered another opportunity to share this project with students in our community. We plan to team up with a local Physics teacher from Bellefonte High School on June 4 before the end of their school year. Contact Randall Ali or Dan Domme for more information.
The first session of Penn State ASA’s previously announced Computational Acoustics Workshop will be held at 11AM this Friday, March 30th, in Applied Science Building room 214. The session will be given by Sumedh Joshi, a graduate student from Cornell University in Applied Mathematics.
In this session, Sumedh will examine the mathematical underpinnings that allow us to take continuous partial differential equations, discretize them, and still be able to derive meaningful physical results. The goal is to gain an intuitive understanding of the mathematics, so no proofs will be given, instead focusing on examples and explanations. A full abstract for this talk is available in PDF form.
Lunch will be provided between lectures. Please contact Derek Olson () to RSVP, so we can have enough food on hand for everyone.
The date for the previously announced Royster Competition to be hosted at Penn State has been decided. On April 27th at 3:30 PM, on the second floor of the Applied Science building, the Penn State ASA will be proud to host this year’s annual Royster Scholarship Competition. The Royster Scholarship Competition is a poster competition open to full time students of senior or graduate standing with awards totaling $2,500. The posters must focus on Noise Control or Hearing Conservation. Please see the full guidelines for more information. The project that a participant chooses may be their main research or a side project that they have interest in. There will be three judges for the competition; expect to be present with your poster for about 1.5 hours on April 27th prepared to deliver a short presentation to each judge individually.
If you are interested in participating please send a topic statement (a few sentences about your project) to Whitney Coyle () by Friday, April 13, 2012. To secure your position in the competition, please send an abstract (250 words or less) no later than April 20, 2012. The winning poster(s) will be required to submit a 3-5 page summary of their project, method and results after the competition before awards will be dispersed. The awards will be dispursed to the graduate school that the winner attends or will attend to be used towards graduate education and therefore only seniors intending to enter graduate school in Fall 2012 and graduate students who will complete studies August 2012 or beyond are eligible for the award.
Feel free to email Whitney Coyle atif you have any further questions.
According to measurements taken by the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health, the average level at this year’s Superbowl, played just a few weeks ago in Indianapolis, clocked in at 107 dB(A). It’s interesting to compare those levels with those from our own Beaver Stadium during a Penn State game, which saw levels of about 110 dB when the opposing team was in a huddle. For a full rundown of the measurement setup and results, click through to the report by Cirrus Research.
I want to make some sciencey comment about the physics of sound, but honestly this is just too cool.
Continuing our trend of posting interesting acoustic technology from bygone eras, we have the “speaking tube” or “voicepipe.” A rather simple concept, a long metal tube is fitted with a short horn on either end, and is used to carry sound from one area to another. They are basically waveguides, with about a 30 dB loss per 100 meters.
Once again, this invention found a lot of use in WW2, where they carried sound through warships and helped airplane gunners talk to their pilots over the rushing wind and turbulence of early open-pit fliers. Aside from that, speaking tubes found some use in large homes, where they often came equipped with a whistle to get the attention of a listener on the other end.
Ultimately, telephones supplanted the use of voice pipes, but they served as an important stepping stone to our modern telecommunication systems.
