Zhi Zhou gave his first presentation at a national Acoustical Society of America held in Seattle, 11/29-12/3/21! His presentation entitled, Perception and Task Performance under Two Simulated Office Background Noise Conditions, was well received. Well done, Zhi!

Several members of SPRAL also attended the meeting and met up with a SPRAL alum, Matthew Neal!

Top row L-R: Michelle Vigeant and Matthew Neal, PhD ’19

Lower row L-R: Zane Rusk, Zhi Zhou, and Bharat Rajagopalan

 

Zane and Bharat also joined other Penn State students to play in a band at the ASA jam on Wednesday evening, 12/1/21. Was a pleasure to watch them play and hear the wonderful music!

Bharat on drums and Zane on base (left). Zane and Bharat swapped instruments for a later song.

Bharat Rajagopalan officially joined SPRAL on November 15, 2021 as a visiting undergraduate scholar through the Fulbright Visiting Non-U.S. Citizen Scholar Program. Bharat is working on a dual degree with an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering and graduate degree in Physics through his home institution, BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus. Bharat is working on a research project on the topic of speech intelligibility under different room acoustic conditions for his honor’s thesis. Welcome, Bharat!

Zane was appointed as the new chair of the Acoustical Society of America’s Student Council in November 2021 shortly before the ASA Meeting in Seattle 11/29-12/3/21. Congratulations, Zane! Immediately preceding his new appointment, Zane served as the student council representative for the Technical Committee on Engineering Acoustics. The photo on the right is Zane at the ASA Students table at the ASA Seattle Meeting in late November 2021 with Mark Langhirt, also a Penn State PhD student and on the ASA Student Council.

                                                         

Olivia was elected as secretary for Penn State’s Student Chapter of the Acoustical Society of America in September 2021 and in this role serves as a member of the executive board. A new initiative started by Olivia is to prepare a monthly newsletter – here’s a link to the inaugural publication! Well done, Olivia!

Zane Rusk passed his Ph.D. comprehensive exam August 19, 2021! Congratulations, Zane on advancing to a Ph.D. Candidate in Architectural Engineering!

Welcome Olivia Heuiyoung Park and Peter Riccardi to SPRAL starting Fall 2020!

     

Olivia received a Penn State University Graduate Fellowship for AY 2020-21. She earned both a Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from The Cooper Union in New York City in May 2020. Her master’s thesis research focused on using a microphone array for active noise under the supervision of Martin Lawless, who is a SPRAL Alum (Ph.D. in Acoustics ’18) and is currently a visiting assistant professor at Cooper.

Peter was selected for the Graduate Program in Acoustics laboratory Teaching Assistant position. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in electrical engineering and computer science from Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ in May 2018. He has experience working as a consultant on research projects and also as a laboratory TA in the EE department at Rowan University.

We are very excited to welcome both Peter and Olivia to SPRAL!

Michelle presented as a co-keynote speaker at Internoise 2020 with Dr. Bosun Xie of South China University of Technology (SCUT). The topic of the talk was Spatial Hearing and Virtual Auditory Display. Dr. Xie has written a book entitled Head-related Transfer Functions and Virtual Auditory Display (2013). The presentation was on Monday, August 24, 2020 11 am local time in Korea (10 pm ET on Sunday, August 23, 2020). About 100 viewed the presentation and a good Q&A session followed after the 45 minute presentation.

Dr. Martin Lawless, a SPRAL alum, just published a third peer-reviewed paper on his dissertation work in JASA!

Sensitivity of the human auditory cortex and reward network to reverberant musical stimuli

A room’s acoustics can alter subjective impressions of music, including preference. However, little research has characterized the brain’s response to room conditions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the auditory and reward responses to concert hall stimuli. Before the fMRI testing, 18 participants rated their preferences to a solo-instrumental passage and an orchestral motif simulated in eight room acoustic conditions outside an MRI scanner to identify their most liked and disliked conditions. In the MRI, the most-liked (reverberation time, RT = 1.0–2.8 s) and most-disliked (RT = 7.2 s) conditions, along with the [anechoic and scrambled versions] anechoic and scrambled versions of the musical passages were presented. The auditory cortex was found to be sensitive to the temporal coherence of the stimuli as it exhibited stronger activations for simpler stimuli, i.e., the solo-instrumental and anechoic conditions, than for stimuli containing temporally incoherent auditory objects—the orchestral and reverberant conditions. In contrasts between liked and disliked reverberant stimuli, a reward response in the basal ganglia was detected in a region of interest analysis using a temporal derivative model of the hemodynamic response function. This response may indicate differences in preference between subtle variations in room acoustics applied to the same musical passage.

The International Year of Sound is upon us – an year-long initiative to disseminate knowledge and appreciation of sound, acoustics and related issues!

Matthew Neal successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation this morning! His defense was well attended, including many of his family members and friends. The audience was treated to an array of breads (middle-class brioche, cinnamon rolls, and pane Siciliano) that he and his girlfriend, Natalie baked! Congratulations, Dr. Neal!