Posts Tagged ‘audio’

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INTER-NOISE 2012 in NYC

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!

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219 West / Subcat Studios Wins 2012 AIANY Architecture Merit Award!

We had the pleasure of working on this project with all of the cool cats at SubCat and Fiedler Marciano Architecture!  The studios are right next to a freight train and heavy traffic but with floated constructions, careful tuning of the interiors and close coordination with Fiedler Marciano Architecture, the studios sound and look great!

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FFFFT (the fast fast fast Fourier transform)

No, it’s not the sound of the air being let out of your tires!

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just published a ground-breaking computational method for analyzing digital signals, including sounds and images.

The Fourier Transform is a way to break a complicated signal down into its most basic components, and it’s how computers manipulate things like acoustic and visual information—everything from your jpeg and mp3 files up to complicated acoustic measurement and analysis gear that consultants like ourselves use daily.

The last major improvement in the efficiency of the Fourier Transform came in the 1960s, with the advent of the “Fast” Fourier Transform (often denoted FFT).  That was a long time ago, but the FFT is still the method of choice for on-the-fly number crunching in everything from cellphones to video games to high-end audio and graphics workstations.

The new algorithm that MIT has devised (a “nearly optimal sparse Fourier transform”) is substantially faster than the FFT for a large range of realistic and useful cases—up to 10 times faster.  It isn’t hard to imagine that such a major leap in efficiency will lead to smaller, cheaper, and more powerful electronics, since the work they do under the hood just got a whole lot easier!

[via MIT News]

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Putting the rev back in your engine

A great deal of engineering effort has gone into quieting the automobile over the past century.  In most major cities, transportation noise is a huge contributor to environmental noise both outdoors and in (who doesn’t live near a road?)  Vehicle acoustics is a primary focus of many current applied acoustics research programs, with the enthusiastic support of the auto industry.

Even so, some would argue that these great successes in reducing vehicle noise have come at the expense of exhilaration; gunning your engine at a stop light just doesn’t give the thrill that it did in the days of the big block V8.

For those of us that would occasionally like to hear what we’re driving (which yes, sometimes includes even noise-averse acousticians), a Swedish company has developed the SoundRacer.  This gizmo fits into your cigarette lighter socket, and using the socket voltage to sense engine RPM, broadcasts real-time sports car engine sound through your car stereo.  Even if your “sports car” happens to be less than sporting!

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just in time for Superbowl Sunday…

Squareheard Technology has a new microphone system, AudioScope, that allows broadcasters to zoom in on sounds as well as sights, to pick out a single conversation. The device is made up of around 300 microphones used in conjunction with a wide-angle camera that can zoom in to any position.  The AudioScope software then calculates the time it would take for sound emanating from that point to reach each microphone, and digitally corrects each audio feed to synchronize them with that spot.

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