With the development of automatic speech recognition has come a new type of technology, designed to give the user advice on how to speak better. In this episode, we talk with Nicole Holliday (University of California, Berkeley) about some of the issues that can arise with the use of these technologies, from their nebulous definitions of "good communication" to the impact they could have at businesses that use these technology to evaluate employees.

Associated paper: Nicole R. Holliday. "Socially prescriptive speech technologies: Linguistic, technical, and ethical issues." J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 158, 4361–4369 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039685.

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Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

Do you find the sound of people chewing unbearably annoying? Or perhaps you can't stand to be near folks who are typing on noisy keyboards, fidgeting with their pens, or rustling a plastic bag of chips. The term for this sort of aversion is misophonia. Even if you don't personally deal with this issue, you may know someone who does. In this episode, we talk with Benjamin Kirby (Wichita State University) and Olivia Zant (University of North Texas), whose recent JASA Express Letters article, “Psychoacoustic Assessment of Misophonia,” touches on this topic.

Associated paper: Benjamin J. Kirby, Alaina Cunningham, and Olivia Montou Zant. "Psychoacoustic assessment of misophonia." JASA Express Lett. 5, 094401 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039238.

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Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

Manipulating the scattering of waves can allow engineers to achieve numerous goals, like reducing unwanted noise or eliminating potentially destructive vibrations in structures. In this episode, we talk to Vladislav Sorokin (University of Auckland) and Luke Bennetts (University of Melbourne), two guest editors of the recent Special Issue on Wave Phenomena in Periodic, Near-Periodic, and Locally Resonant Systems about recent advances in research regarding vibroacoustic systems. 

Read all the articles from the special issue here!

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
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Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

In this episode, find out what the next generation of acousticians is researching! In this episode, we talk to the latest round of POMA Student Paper Competition winners, from the joint 188th meeting of the ASA and the 25th International Congress on Acoustics held in New Orleans in May 2025. Their topics include:

- Using the spatial decomposition method to parameterize acoustic reflections in a room (Lucas Hocquette, L-Acoustics)

- Visualizing nonlinearities in a bolted plate system with digital image correlation (Nicholas Pomianek, Boston University)

- Analyzing the how people pronounce the word "just" in casual speech (Ki Woong Moon, University of Arizona)

- Modeling strings of historical instruments that no longer make sound (Riccardo Russo, University of Bologna)

- Improving automatic music mashup generators (Yu Foon Darin Chau, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Associated papers:

Lucas Hocquette, Philip Coleman, and Frederic Roskam. "Acoustic reflection parameterization based on the spatial decomposition method." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 055004 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002037.

Nicholas Pomianek, Trevor Jerome, Enrique Gutierrez-Wing, and J. Gregory McDaniel. "Visualizing contact area dependent nonlinearity in a bolted plate system through digital image correlation." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 065001 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002099. 

Ki Woong Moon and Natasha Warner. "Realization of just: Speech reduction in a high-frequency word." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 060005  (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002080

Riccardo Russo, Craig J. Webb, Michele Ducceschi, and Stefan Bilbao. "Convergence analysis and relaxation techniques for modal scalar auxiliary variable methods applied to nonlinear transverse string vibration." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 035007 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002073.

Yu Foon Darin Chau, Andrew Brian Horner, Joshua Chang, Chun Yuen Chan, and Harris Lau. "Retrieval-based automatic mashup generation with deep learning-guided features." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56,  035006 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002071.

Learn more about entering the POMA Student Paper Competition for the Fall 2025 meeting in Honolulu

Read more from Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA).

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Studying bats' hearing can be tricky due to their small size, making certain styles of measurement used for larger echolocating mammals unavailable to researchers. In this episode, we talk to Victoria Fouhy and Michael Smotherman (Texas A&M University) about their work to develop a noninvasive method to study cortical auditory evoked potentials in bats, thereby allowing scientists to better understand how these animals process echolocation information.

Associated paper:
- Victoria Fouhy, Sam Ellis, and Michael Smotherman. "Subcutaneous cortical auditory evoked potentials in echolocating bats." J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 158, 3390-3399 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039659.

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications.

Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

You may have heard of the "ghost army" of World War II—a set of rubber tanks used by the US Army to mimic active battlefields in Europe. What you may not know was the tanks were accompanied by an equally fake soundtrack of battle noises. Even more surprising? This "sonic deception" was developed by a team of the ASA's founding members whose contributions were almost lost to history. In this episode, we talk with Walter Montano (ARQUICUST Argentina Peru) about the innovations that helped save thousands of lives during the war.

Read the associated article: Walter A. Montano and Gary W. Elko. (2025) “Sonic Deception During the Second World War,” Acoustics Today 21(2). https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2025.21.2.38

Learn more about the ASA Committee on Archives and History.

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Intro/Outro Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

The traditional Chinese structure of the interlocked timber-arched covered bridge serves multiple purposes within Chinese culture—both as a physical connection between communities, but also as a function space for various rituals and performances. Because of these structures multiple uses, the acoustics are different from other bridges or event spaces. In this episode, we talk with Dongxu Zhang (Guangzhou University) and Jian Kang (University College London) about their work to better understand the unique acoustics of these structures.

Associated paper:
- Dongxu Zhang, Guanyu Ren, Fei Cheng, Dong Xiao, Mei Zhang, and Jian Kang. "Sound field characteristics and influencing factors of traditional Chinese interlocked timber-arched covered bridges." J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 158, 1156-1176 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0038959

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications.

Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

Longitudinal studies of how an individual's accent changes over the course of their life are hard to come by. Fortunately, Taylor Swift's decade-plus career-- and the numerous interviews she's given over those years-- has opened a window into our understanding of how and why dialect changes may occur on an individual level. We talk to Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn (University of Minnesota) about their work analyzing the shifts in Taylor Swift's speech over the years.

Associated paper:
- Miski Mohamed and Matthew B. Winn. "Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift's dialect changes across different eras of her career." J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 158, 2278–2289 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039052

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications.

Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

In an effort to develop renewable energy, scientists have turned to the sun, the wind, and now the ocean. With these new forms of energy harvesting, considerations need to be made about how the new technologies will impact the surrounding environments. In this episode, we talk with Joseph Haxel (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Christopher Bassett (University of Washington), Brian Polagye (University of Washington), and Kaus Raghukumar (Integral Consulting) about their research related to the noise produced by marine energy converters.

Read the associated article: Joseph Haxel, Christopher Bassett, Brian Polagye, Kaustubha Raghukumar, and Cailene Gunn. (2023) “Listening to the Beat of New Ocean Technologies for Harvesting Marine Energy,” Acoustics Today 19(4). https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2023.19.4.23.

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Intro/Outro Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

A lot has changed in the twelve years since JASA's first special issue on soundscape research. This episode, we talk to the editors of the recent special issue on  Advances in Soundscape: Emerging Trends and Challenges in Research and Practice, Francesco Aletta (University College London), Cynthia Tarlao (McGill University), Tin Oberman (University College London), and Andrew Mitchell (University College London), to discuss these changes, which range from developments in understanding indoor soundscapes, cultural dimensions of soundscape assessment, perceptual assessment tools, and the use of virtual technologies. 

Read all the articles from the special issue here!

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications.

Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay.