{"id":794,"date":"2013-09-06T17:37:15","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T21:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/?p=794"},"modified":"2016-03-15T10:55:30","modified_gmt":"2016-03-15T14:55:30","slug":"this-sound-is-on-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/archives\/794","title":{"rendered":"This sound is on fire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Many aspects of a firefighter&#8217;s work are not quite like the movies, and locating each other is one of them, <a title=\"KUT News: A Better Beacon\" href=\"http:\/\/kutnews.org\/post\/sounding-out-better-beacon-firefighters-danger\" target=\"_blank\">according to a recent story from KUT News<\/a> in Texas. \u00a0Visibility is poor or nonexistent in a real fire, so firefighters often have to rely on sound rather than vision. \u00a0A Personal Alert Safety System (<a title=\"Personal Alert Safety System (PASS)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/PASS_device\" target=\"_blank\">PASS<\/a>) is a device that emits a loud audible alarm if the wearer stops moving for more than a few seconds, allowing colleagues to come to the rescue. \u00a0Researchers at <a title=\"The University of Texas at Austin\" href=\"http:\/\/www.utexas.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\">the University of Texas at Austin<\/a> are working on ways to improve this system, which despite saving many lives doesn&#8217;t always work as well as it could.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F108855408&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>For starters, an active fireground is a loud, noisy place, from things like sirens, power tools, engines, and the fire itself. \u00a0But beyond that, heat can do funny things to sound\u2014hotter and colder parts of a room make sound travel faster or slower, and these changes in the speed of sound can actually bend sound waves that would otherwise travel in a straight line. \u00a0(Similar effects occur outdoors when the air temperature varies with height, such as being able to hear campers far away across a lake that cools the air.) \u00a0This heat refraction can wreak havoc with audibility and locating the source of a PASS beacon. \u00a0<a title=\"NFPA Fire Service Today\" href=\"http:\/\/fireservice.blog.nfpa.org\/2013\/07\/firefighter-pass-device-research.html\" target=\"_blank\">The current UT research<\/a> will provide valuable insight into the sensory environment within a fire scene, and how compensation might be made for some of these acoustic challenges.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many aspects of a firefighter&#8217;s work are not quite like the movies, and locating each other is one of them, according to a recent story from KUT News in Texas. \u00a0Visibility is poor or nonexistent in a real fire, so firefighters often have to rely on sound rather than vision. \u00a0A Personal Alert Safety System [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,5],"tags":[51,40,30],"class_list":["post-794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-technical","tag-demonstrations","tag-hearing","tag-noise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":892,"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions\/892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lallyacoustics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}