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#acoustics

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Public
Nicole Sharp

Clapping Hands

Although often associated with applause, hand clapping is more universal than that. The distinctive sound can mark rhythms, draw attention, and even test the surrounding acoustics. But how exactly does hand clapping work? A recent study shows that the acoustics of hand clapping come from more than just the collision of hands. Especially in a cupped configuration, clapping hands act like a Helmholtz resonator (think blowing across a bottle top), producing a resonant jet that squeezes out between the forefinger and thumb of the impacted hand. Check out the images above to see how that jet appears in various clapping configurations. (Image and research credit: Y. Fu et al.; via Physics Today)

Black and white image of human hands clapping fingers-to-palm. Baby powder is jetted out from the hands, revealing the flow created.
#acoustics#applause#flowVisualization
Public
J—dV

I have a mini-essay thing about violin acoustics that I have started writing n+1 times now. It's nothing that profound, but slightly orthogonal to the usual approaches. Partly I am just bad at finishing things and partly I am afraid that the folks in the violin acoustics world are going to go “no, you're being unfair/unreasonable/naive.” I have brought up some of these ideas within that community before. It's not that people disagreed with me, but I think the full import, the full break, I was trying to get at never quite came across or was taken entirely seriously. Telling a bunch of people who think they are doing hard science that we should actually be doing anthropology gets polite self-satisfied chuckles. And for me, it's actually not just about acoustics but about the violin world more broadly, and—at least in my mind—about music making under capitalism. But I'm afraid I'm overreaching and won't be able to motivate, let alone land that part of it, or at least not in a way that will get it taken seriously by folks not already open to it.

Of course, the best way to find out if any of it makes sense and can be properly explained would be to finally move past just a sparse outline… so, um. Here's to that!

#violin#Acoustics
Public
michael

21-May-2025
Can #plants hear their #pollinators? #ASA188
Research suggests pollinator buzzing sounds lead plants to increase their nectar production.

- the meeting highlights from the
Acoustical Society of America are always interesting!

eurekalert.org/news-releases/1 #science #acoustics

EurekAlert!Can plants hear their pollinators? #ASA188When pollinators visit flowers, they produce various sounds, from wing flapping during hovering, to landing and takeoff. Francesca Barbero studied these vibroacoustic signals to develop noninvasive and efficient methods for monitoring pollinator communities and their influences on plant biology and ecology. The researchers found that the bee sounds led the snapdragons to increase their sugar and nectar volume, and even alter their gene expression that governs sugar transport and nectar production.
Public
getmisch

Plants can #hear. Study proved "in response to the bee #noises, the snapdragons increased the volume of nectar & its sugar content" wow. "There is growing evidence that both insects & plants can sense & transmit" #sound. The #plants also altered their "#genes that govern sugar transport & nectar production." #Research announced at internat'l convention in New Orleans (25th Internat'l Convention on #Acoustics/ 188th Meeting of the #Acoustical Society of America) this week.
theguardian.com/environment/20

The Guardian · Plants produce more nectar when they ‘hear’ bees buzzing, scientists findBy Hannah Devlin
Public
Clemens Pitschke

The people at Cornell are doing fantastic work on everything #birds. I realy love their projects and how they share knwoledge.
Some time ago I joined the mailing list for their Bioacoustalks, which are always interesting and give a good insight on current research in the field of #bioacoustics .
You can find previos talks on their YouTube channel. Here is the link to the Bioacoustalks: birds.cornell.edu/ccb/bioacous
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#acoustics #research #education #science #sound

www.birds.cornell.eduBioacousTalks – K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics
Public
Nicole Sharp

Quietening Drones

A drone’s noisiness is one of its major downfalls. Standard drones are obnoxiously loud and disruptive for both humans and animals, one reason that they’re not allowed in many places. This flow visualization, courtesy of the Slow Mo Guys, helps show why. The image above shows a standard off-the-shelf drone rotor. As each blade passes through the smoke, it sheds a wingtip vortex. (Note that these vortices are constantly coming off the blade, but we only see them where they intersect with the smoke.) As the blades go by, a constant stream of regularly-spaced vortices marches downstream of the rotor. This regular spacing creates the dominant acoustic frequency that we hear from the drone.

Animation of wingtip vortices coming off a drone rotor with blades of different lengths. This causes interactions between the vortices, which helps disrupt the drone’s noise.

To counter that, the company Wing uses a rotor with blades of different lengths (bottom image). This staggers the location of the shed vortices and causes some later vortices to spin up with their downstream neighbor. These interactions break up that regular spacing that generates the drone’s dominant acoustic frequency. Overall, that makes the drone sound quieter, likely without a large impact to the amount of lift it creates. (Image credit: The Slow Mo Guys)

GIF
GIF
#acoustics#flowVisualization#fluidDynamics
Public
MPI for the Science of Light

Photonic computing needs more nonlinearity — #acoustics can help

Researchers from #MPL, @unihannover & #MIT demonstrate an all-optically controlled activation function using traveling sound waves. This optoacoustic approach enables nonlinear signal processing in the synthetic frequency dimension and could pave the way for more efficient, scalable optical neural networks — compact, fast, and energy-saving.

Read more 👉
mpl.mpg.de/news/article/photon

📸 © Grigorii Slinkov

The image shows a schematic representation of how an optoacoustic activation function can be employed in an all-optical multi-frequency neural network.
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