blog - lally acoustical consulting

Keep it quiet

Martin — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:20:14 +0000

The New York Times’ City Room Blog is putting together a presentation of New Yorkers’ favorite quiet oases, and they’re looking for suggestions. Public places submitted to the blog’s interactive map will be considered for the piece later this spring. Of course, your favorite quiet place may not stay that way once it’s discovered by eight million New Yorkers (and our 50 million annual tourists), so you may want to keep your favorite quiet place, well, quiet!

Don’t don’t honk

Martin — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:02:51 +0000

In what some might some might take as an admission of defeat (or at least a concession to reality), the New York City Department of Transportation has begun removing each and every “Don’t Honk” road sign from the city streets. According to the New York Times, “the move is part of an effort to declutter the streets of often ignored signs.” The signs also give the impression that unneeded honks were only a violation where the signage was installed; with or without a sign, unnecessary honking remains illegal throughout the city with fines starting at $350.

Enforcement is another matter; last year the NYPD issued only 206 summonses. Most New Yorkers could count that many car horns in a day, if they were paying attention to them—of course, for most New Yorkers, ignoring the din of constant honking is a quickly learned survival skill.

A new record

Martin — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:56:25 +0000

Putting a new spin on the long-playing vinyl record, an editor at Instructables has devised a new method for producing LP records using a rapid prototyping “3D printer”. Working directly from a digital audio file, Amanda Ghassaei uses the waveform profile to create a 3D computer model of the familiar LP groove, which is then built up in physical form by a UV-cured resin printer.

Despite the cutting-edge 16-micron resolution of the printer, the end result is rather crude, with a frequency response and audio quality as yet far beneath a typical analog vinyl record. The all-digital noise introduced by the discrete print (in time, aliasing, and in amplitude, quantization) is also harsh compared with the traditional “warm” analog distortion sought after by vinyl enthusiasts and audiophiles. Even so, one could foresee a niche market for one-off, just-in-time pressing of records to keep alive long out-of-print material (or new material that might be in limited demand). Even though this can be accomplished with .mp3 files or CD-R discs, sometimes there’s simply nothing like setting needle to vinyl!

[via Wired]

Safe and sound

Martin — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:04:03 +0000

We are glad to report that our office is reopen and fully functional, after the extended power outage caused by Hurricane Sandy on October 29. We would like to wish all of our clients, colleagues, and friends a speedy and safe recovery from the hurricane and its lingering effects.

Drop-less droplets

Martin — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:34:53 +0000

In a setup that’s equal parts science and Harry Potter, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory acoustically levitate liquids in midair to further critical pharmaceutical reasearch. Using a technology originally developed by NASA to simulate microgravity conditions, the pharmaceutical droplets are suspended in midair using standing waves of inaudible ultrasound generated by small speakers above and below.

By suspending a drug this way—free from any container or other physical contact—scientists can study its various forms and the ways it might be absorbed by the body. Not to mention putting on a pretty cool show in the process!

INTER-NOISE 2012 in NYC

Martin — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:01:36 +0000

This coming Sunday through Wednesday (August 19-22, 2012) brings INTER-NOISE 2012 to New York City, the 41st International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering. We are excited to be presenting two of our favorite projects during the conference: our Subcat Music Studios project in Syracuse, and our contributions to an ongoing study of wind turbine noise in western New York State.

The theme of this year’s conference (the largest ever held!) is Quieting the World’s Cities, an especially relevant topic for a conference held in the heart of Times Square. A free Community Noise Public Outreach workshop will be held on Wednesday 8/22 from 8:30 am – 1:45 pm at the Marriott Marquis, including presentations and discussion on the NYC Noise Control Code and noise in general as a community concern. A top-notch panel of experts and officials has been assembled for this free workshop, and anyone with an interest in community noise (which should include almost anyone living in New York City) will find it enlightening!

Just how speedy is sound at the Olympics?

Emily — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 17:57:52 +0000

Well, it turns out not fast enough! Years ago, in addition to a traditional starters pistol, Olympic officials started placing loudspeakers behind the athletes so that the sound would reach each athlete at the same time. It turned out however that the athletes would continue to wait for the sound from the actual starters pistol to arrive. Even with the loudspeakers, the speed of sound was still slowing down the athletes furthest from the starter pistol. While we are talking about tiny fractions of a second, with Olympic runners and swimmers, it really makes a difference. Starting at the Vancouver winter games and this summer in London, they are using a silent pistol that is completely electronic and generates a beep from the loudspeakers only (although it does make a flash).

[via The Atlantic, dailymail.co.uk]

Things that go thump in the night…

Emily — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 02:19:38 +0000

Maybe you are familiar with images of the northern lights or perhaps have been lucky enough to see them yourself, but did you know that apparently they also make a sound? According to space.com, acoustic researchers at Alto University in Finland have identified a clapping sound associated with the aurora borealis that occurs 230 ft above the ground! Just as is true with most mystery noises, they are brief and faint, require very careful listening as well as very low background noise in order to be heard. There is an audio recording on here if you want to listen…

[via space.com, photo: shawn malone www.lakesuperiorphoto.com]

Frozen spring

Martin — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 21:05:58 +0000

One of the things one learns studying acoustics (and many other physics topics) is that the behavior of a complicated physical system can often be simplified into an analogy of masses and springs. The gobs of air that surround us have elasticity and they have mass, and these are the properties that allow waves to travel through the air as sound.

Perhaps a more intuitive example of a spring-mass system can be found in any toy store: the classic Slinky. The familiar coil toy can be used to demonstrate lots of different wave phenomena (longitudinal waves, transverse waves, standing waves), and when that gets boring, it is more commonly used to demonstrate walking down stairs.

We recently came across this high-speed video of the very interesting spring-mass behavior of an extended Slinky at rest, dropped from height, in which the bottom end of the Slinky seems frozen in mid-air. There are excellent technical explanations of what is going on out there (and probably on a tricky physics midterm or two), but suffice it to say that it all goes back to the interplay between mass and elasticity as the Slinky simultaneously contracts and falls.

[Via kottke.org, @jenvalentino]

JetBlue lands on the cover of Interior Design!

Emily — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 21:34:56 +0000

We had the pleasure of working with HLW on the design of JetBlue’s new headquarters in Long Island City and are happy to share the news that the project is featured in the new issue of Interior Design. You can read the full article here.