These and other questions will be addressed at the 141st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), to be held June 4-8 at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago, Illinois.

Over 1,000 papers will be presented. The ASA is the largest scientific organization in the United States devoted to acoustics, with over 7,000 members worldwide.

Here are some highlights from among the many papers being given at the meeting. Full abstracts of the papers mentioned below can be viewed by typing in the last name of the author or the appropriate paper code at the ASA Meeting Abstracts database.

(The first number of the paper code indicates the day of the talk, with "1" denoting Monday, "2" denoting Tuesday, and so on, up to "5" for Friday.)

The Acoustics of Baseball

Bats cracking, umpires growling, fans cheering -- our national pastime provides no greater joys than its sounds. An entire session on the acoustics of baseball is planned for the Chicago meeting. Baseball's sounds can provide helpful cues for the players -- and an education on basic science concepts as well.

Yale University's Robert K. Adair, a well-known expert on the physics of baseball, will describe the different kinds of information imparted by the "cracks" and "clunks" of balls hitting a wooden bat in helping a baseball player to judge where the ball is going (Paper 5pAA1).

Dartmouth's Robert Collier, who has designed hard-to-break bats made of composite materials, will explain how the efficiency of energy transfer to the batted ball is affected by such things as the vibrations of the bat and the sound it produces (5pAA2).

Knowledge of acoustical science can help stadium builders get the sound right the first time and prevent costly renovations for poorly designed acoustics. Acoustical consultant David Marsh will discuss the challenges of designing good acoustics in baseball stadiums, including strategies for minimizing undesired echoes in both open-air and enclosed stadiums (5pAA3).

Jim Brown of Audio Systems Group in Chicago will discuss the design of sound systems for ballparks. Atmospheric conditions, such as wind and temperature variations, can greatly affect how the sound is transmitted in a ballpark and surrounding areas, where it is necessary to minimize the intrusion of noise (5pAA4).

Boosting The IQs of Violins

Violins and other stringed instruments have been the subjects of extensive study for the past 350 years. Wood quality, structural acoustics and various physical characteristics have often been at the center of research seeking to reveal the secrets of instrument designers such as the legendary violin maker Antonius Stradivarius.

Saytha Hanagud and Xia Lu of the Georgia Institute of Technology, however, have taken a different approach from that of their scientific predecessors -- they are attempting to duplicate the sound quality of great violins with actively controlled smart structures.

Piezoelectric crystals, magnetostrictive materials and certain types of gels are often at the heart of structures deemed "smart" because they can change shape, size, stiffness or other characteristics in response to various stimuli such as electrical current, temperature, magnetic fields or the acidity of a control fluid. The researchers will present procedures they have developed to modify the structural dynamics of a "smart violin" that can potentially replicate the elegant passive designs of master instrument craftsmen. (5aMU7)

Extraterrestrial Acoustics

Sounds of the universe and what we can learn from them are the topic of session 2pPAa. The uneven distribution of matter in the early universe created pressure variations in the cosmos, and therefore sound waves. These sound waves are revealed by the Cosmic Microwave Background, ripples in the sky that provide a snapshot of the universe at 400,000 years of age.

Michael Turner of the University of Chicago and Fermilab will explain how these early acoustic waves can provide information on the age of the universe, its curvature, and the amount of normal matter and invisible "dark" matter (2pPAa1).

Jupiter's moon Europa promises to have conditions favorable for life, with the possibility of a liquid ocean under its surface of water ice. Inspired by evidence for regularly occurring ice fractures that generate significant amounts of sound, Aaron Thode and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will suggest the possibility of probing Europa's interior, such as its ice thickness, by deploying an array of surface microphones that listen to naturally occurring sound (2pPAa6).

In efforts to learn more about Jupiter's atmosphere, Joseph Lingevitch of the Naval Research Lab will discuss how Galileo observations and new models are providing important insights into not-fully-explained circular waves that were created by Comet Shoemaker-Levy when it crashed into Jupiter (2pPAa3).

On Mars, no one may be able to easily hear middle C. Calculations which may hold importance for future space missions suggest that the Mars atmosphere absorbs 100-500 times more sound in the mid-audio frequencies (around 500 Hz, which is near middle C), depending on the relative humidity (Paper 2pPAa5, James P. Chambers, University of Mississippi.

(Editor's Note: These descriptions were prepared by Ben Stein, Rory McGee and James Riordon of the American Institute of Physics in cooperation with the Acoustical Society of America.)

[Contact: Ben Stein]

22-May-2001