Jennifer K. Whiting

Acoustics for the Deaf: Can You See Me Now?

Although acoustics examples and demonstrations can be an effective tool for engaging students in introductory physics classes and outreach, teaching principles of sound and vibration to the deaf and hard of hearing needs to be approached carefully. The deaf and hard of hearing have less intuition with sound but are no strangers to some of the effects of pressure, vibrations, and other basic principles that are related to sound. We recently expanded our “Sounds to Astound” outreach program and developed an acoustics demonstration program for 80 visiting deaf students mostly between the ages of 13 and 18. Both this experience, which had a “See and Feel” approach, similar to what was proposed by Lang, and a specialized planetarium program helped reinforce for the students the opportunities that exist for them in higher education. This paper describes some of the pedagogical underpinnings, the demonstrations, their implementation and lessons learned, and student responses.

High-resolution directivities of musical instruments and the human voice: Recent research collaborations of Bill Strong

Over the past few years, Bill Strong has worked with other researchers at Brigham Young University to develop a feasible method to assess high-resolution directivities of played musical instruments and the human voice. The approach has produced numerous directivity balloons with 5-degree angular resolution and variable bandwidths, meeting the requirements of the AES56-2008 standard for loudspeaker measurements. This presentation will give an overview of the method, its validation, and some interesting results for several musical instruments and talkers. Data from the measurements are intended to enhance theoretical and practical efforts of professionals seeking to better understand and work with these live sources of sound.

The sound of STEAM: Acoustics as the bridge between the arts and STEM

This paper describes the development and presentation of a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) workshop for elementary school teachers designed to provide ideas and tools for using acoustics in the classroom. The abundant hands-on activities and concepts in acoustics naturally link science and music in an intuitive way that can assist teachers in moving forward on the STEAM initiative. Our workshop gave teachers an introduction to acoustics principles and demonstrations that can be used to tie in STEAM techniques with Utah State Education Core standards. These hands-on demonstrations and real-world applications provide an avenue to engage students and support learning outcomes. Feedback indicated that the participants learned from and enjoyed the initial implementation of this workshop, though many elementary school teachers did not immediately see how they could integrate it into their curriculum. While additional efforts might be made to better focus the training workshop for the K-...

@BYUAcoustics: Using social media to enhance research and outreach at BYU

Social media has become an increasingly common method of attracting the attention of fellow researchers and promoting interest in acoustics worldwide. A concerted effort has been recently made by the Acoustics Research Group at Brigham Young University to promote acoustics with various methods of enhanced communications. Web page articles were developed with lay-language introductions to the group’s research activities, which can be shared directly to social media sites. The group’s Facebook page and research Twitter account @BYUacoustics provide information about current research meetings, publications, and acoustics in the news, which help network with students who may be interested in joining the acoustics program and which keep alumni informed of current events. In addition, our outreach efforts have been augmented by use of social media. A YouTube channel has been created that contains videos of acoustical demonstration from our outreach show. A general audience Twitter account @Sounds2Astound has be...

Classroom acoustics for vocal health of elementary school teachers

School teachers have an elevated risk of voice problems due to vocal demands in the workplace. ANSI SI2.60-2002 provides a standard for classroom acoustics, but it focuses primarily on students and unoccupied classroom settings. This presentation explores a preliminary study of six elementary school teachers that included measurements of architectural acoustics parameters and noise-levels of their classrooms, as well as their speech levels and fundamental frequencies over the course of a school day. The measurement methods and speech trends are discussed for the various cases, demonstrating that classroom acoustics standards may benefit from greater attention to teacher vocal health.

Acuity to noise and occupational voice risks in simulated acoustical environments

School teachers are known to have an elevated risk of voice problems due to the vocal demands in their work environments. Forty-five participants (20 females, 25 males, 7 elementary school teachers, and 38 college-age adults) performed a short vocal task in two different rooms: a variable-acoustics room and an anechoic chamber. The subjects were taken back and forth between the two rooms using a deception protocol. Each time they entered the variable-acoustics room, the acoustical characteristics (two background noise conditions and two reverberation conditions) had been changed without a visual appearance of change. Analysis was conducted on recorded second and third sentences of the first paragraph of the Rainbow Passage. Results revealed that differences in response to reverberation was gender specific. Additionally, school teachers seemed to be more susceptible to the noise condition.

Identifying vocal changes due to environmental changes: Real-time Lombard effect

School teachers are known to have an elevated risk of voice problems due to speaking demands in the workplace, as well as noise conditions in the classroom. Six elementary school teachers were recorded for a full school day using a neck-worn accelerometer and microphone. Classroom noise levels were also recorded using seven stationary microphones distributed randomly throughout the room. A method was developed that used the accelerometer signal to identify when a teacher is speaking, subsequently calculating a speech-to-noise ratio from six hours of teaching. Speech levels and fundamental frequencies were assessed through the accelerometer signal. The former were compared to temporally and spatially proximate noise levels from the neck-worn microphone when the teacher was not speaking. The speech data was also compared to spatially averaged and temporally proximate classroom noise levels when the teacher was not speaking. While unique in the duration of the observation for the various teachers, the speech...

High-resolution measurements of speech directivity

Directivity patterns of loudspeakers are often included in room acoustics simulation packages, but those of live sources are less common, partly because of the scarcity of reliable high-resolution data. In recent years, researchers at Brigham Young University have explored high-resolution directivities of musical instruments. Their methods have now been adapted to directivity measurements of live speech. The approach uses a semicircular array of 37 microphones spaced with five-degree polar-angle increments. A subject sits on a computer-controlled rotating chair with his or her mouth aligned at the axis of rotation and circular center of the microphone array. He or she repeats a phonetically balanced passage at each of 72 five-degree azimuthal-angle increments. Transfer functions between a reference microphone signal from the rotating reference frame and every array microphone signal enable computations of high-resolution frequency-dependent directivity balloons. Associated coherence functions allow judgme...

Evaluation of a real-time convolution system for perception of self-generated speech in simulated rooms

A real-time convolution system has been developed to quickly manipulate the auditory experiences of human subjects. The system is used to study perceptions of self-generated speech and music, and responses of talkers and musicians to varying acoustical conditions. It allows talkers in an anechoic environment to experience simulated room responses excited by their own voices. While their direct sound travels directly to their ears, they hear convolved room responses via specialized headphones spaced away from their heads. This presentation discusses the system’s development, as well as its objective and subjective validations. Several existing rooms were modeled using EASE. Oral-binaural room impulse responses (OBRIRs) from these models were generated and implemented with the convolution system. Binaural recordings and measurements from the rooms were also made using a G.R.A.S. KEMAR mannequin. Objective comparisons of the OBRIRs from the measurements and simulations were explored in the investigation. Sub...

@BYUAcoustics and @SoundstoAstound: Using social media to enhance research and outreach at Brigham Young University

Social media is increasingly used to attract the attention of the public to research activities and to promote interest in science worldwide. A concerted effort has been made by the Acoustics Research Group at Brigham Young University to promote acoustics with various methods of enhanced communications. Web page articles were developed with lay-language introductions to the groups research activities, which can be shared directly to social media sites. The groups Facebook page and research Twitter account @BYUAcoustics provide information about current research meetings, publications, and acoustics in the news, which help network with students who may be interested in joining the acoustics program and which keep alumni informed of current events. In addition, local outreach efforts have been expanded through use of social media. A general audience Twitter account @SoundstoAstound has been utilized to connect with students in our descriptive class and K-12 teachers who bring their students to tour our facilities. The overall effectiveness of each system is assessed using webpage statistics, analytics, and perceived success in reaching target audiences. Successes, limitations, and lessons learned are summarized.