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Tag Archives: acoustic
Justin Timberlake performs acoustic version of Selfish while ‘getting over the flu’ as he says ‘excuse my rasp – Daily Mail
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John Mayer announces solo acoustic tour
CNN
—
John Mayer has announced a first-ever solo acoustic tour.
The 19-date tour will stop at arenas across North America and is set to kick off on March 11 in New Jersey, according to a press release. The tour ends in Los Angeles on April 14. Tickets go on sale on February 3 at 9am in the ticket buyer’s time zone.
“I knew one day I’d feel it in my heart to do an entire run of shows on my own again, just like those early days,” the crooner said on Instagram. He added that while an acoustic solo tour has been decades in the making, “I feel it now.”
Mayer also said that he’ll be playing old songs and some “you haven’t heard yet” that will be performed on acoustic and electric guitars, as well as on the piano.
Best known for his breakout single “Your Body is a Wonderland” off his 2001 debut album “Room for Squares,” the singer-songwriter’s other hits include “Gravity,” “Waiting on the World to Change” and “New Light.”
The Grammy winner’s solo tour will wrap up just in time for the start of Dead and Company’s final tour, a band with which Mayer has toured since 2015. Dead and Company’s final tour begins on May 19 in Los Angeles.
New “Acoustic Fabric” Hears Your Heart’s Sounds
Inspired by the human ear, a new acoustic fabric converts audible sounds into electrical signals.
Having trouble hearing? Just turn up your shirt. That’s the idea behind a new “acoustic fabric” developed by engineers at
A study detailing the team’s design was published on March 16, 2022, in Nature. Lead author Wei Yan, who helped develop the fiber as an MIT postdoc, sees many uses for fabrics that hear.
“Wearing an acoustic garment, you might talk through it to answer phone calls and communicate with others,” says Yan, who is now an assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “In addition, this fabric can imperceptibly interface with the human skin, enabling wearers to monitor their heart and respiratory condition in a comfortable, continuous, real-time, and long-term manner.”
Yan’s co-authors include Grace Noel, Gabriel Loke, Tural Khudiyev, Juliette Marion, Juliana Cherston, Atharva Sahasrabudhe, Joao Wilbert, Irmandy Wicaksono, and professors John Joannopoulos and Yoel Fink at MIT, along with Anais Missakian and Elizabeth Meiklejohn at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Lei Zhu from Case Western Reserve University, Chu Ma from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Reed Hoyt of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine.
Sound layering
Fabrics are traditionally used to dampen or reduce sound; examples include soundproofing in concert halls and carpeting in our living spaces. But Fink and his team have worked for years to refashion fabric’s conventional roles. They focus on extending properties in materials to make fabrics more functional. In looking for ways to make sound-sensing fabrics, the team took inspiration from the human ear.
Audible sound travels through air as slight pressure waves. When these waves reach our ear, an exquisitely sensitive and complex three-dimensional organ, the tympanic membrane, or eardrum, uses a circular layer of fibers to translate the pressure waves into mechanical vibrations. These vibrations travel through small bones into the inner ear, where the cochlea converts the waves into electrical signals that are sensed and processed by the brain.
Inspired by the human auditory system, the team sought to create a fabric “ear” that would be soft, durable, comfortable, and able to detect sound. Their research led to two important discoveries: Such a fabric would have to incorporate stiff, or “high-modulus,” fibers to effectively convert sound waves into vibrations. And, the team would have to design a fiber that could bend with the fabric and produce an electrical output in the process.
With these guidelines in mind, the team developed a layered block of materials called a preform, made from a piezoelectric layer as well as ingredients to enhance the material’s vibrations in response to sound waves. The resulting preform, about the size of a thick marker, was then heated and pulled like taffy into thin, 40-meter-long fibers.
Lightweight listening
The researchers tested the fiber’s sensitivity to sound by attaching it to a suspended sheet of mylar. They used a laser to measure the vibration of the sheet — and by extension, the fiber — in response to sound played through a nearby speaker. The sound varied in decibel between a quiet library and heavy road traffic. In response, the fiber vibrated and generated an electric current proportional to the sound played.
“This shows that the performance of the fiber on the membrane is comparable to a handheld microphone,” Noel says.
Next, the team wove the fiber with conventional yarns to produce panels of drapable, machine-washable fabric.
“It feels almost like a lightweight jacket — lighter than denim, but heavier than a dress shirt,” says Meiklejohn, who wove the fabric using a standard loom.
She sewed one panel to the back of a shirt, and the team tested the fabric’s sensitivity to directional sound by clapping their hands while standing at various angles to the shirt.
“The fabric was able to detect the angle of the sound to within 1 degree at a distance of 3 meters away,” Noel notes.
The researchers envision that a directional sound-sensing fabric could help those with hearing loss to tune in to a speaker amid noisy surroundings.
The team also stitched a single fiber to a shirt’s inner lining, just over the chest region, and found it accurately detected the heartbeat of a healthy volunteer, along with subtle variations in the heart’s S1 and S2, or “lub-dub” features. In addition to monitoring one’s own heartbeat, Fink sees possibilities for incorporating the acoustic fabric into maternity wear to help monitor a baby’s fetal heartbeat.
Finally, the researchers reversed the fiber’s function to serve not as a sound-detector but as a speaker. They recorded a string of spoken words and fed the recording to the fiber in the form of an applied voltage. The fiber converted the electrical signals to audible vibrations, which a second fiber was able to detect.
In addition to wearable hearing aids, clothes that communicate, and garments that track vital signs, the team sees applications beyond clothing.
“It can be integrated with spacecraft skin to listen to (accumulating) space dust, or embedded into buildings to detect cracks or strains,” Yan proposes. “It can even be woven into a smart net to monitor fish in the ocean. The fiber is opening widespread opportunities.”
“The learnings of this research offers quite literally a new way for fabrics to listen to our body and to the surrounding environment,” Fink says. “The dedication of our students, postdocs and staff to advancing research which has always marveled me is especially relevant to this work, which was carried out during the pandemic.”
Reference: “Single fibre enables acoustic fabrics via nanometre-scale vibrations” by Wei Yan, Grace Noel, Gabriel Loke, Elizabeth Meiklejohn, Tural Khudiyev, Juliette Marion, Guanchun Rui, Jinuan Lin, Juliana Cherston, Atharva Sahasrabudhe, Joao Wilbert, Irmandy Wicaksono, Reed W. Hoyt, Anais Missakian, Lei Zhu, Chu Ma, John Joannopoulos and Yoel Fink, 16 March 2022, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04476-9
This research was supported in part by the US Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, National Science Foundation, Sea Grant NOAA.
Rattlesnake Rattles Use Acoustic Trick To Fool Human Ears
Rattlesnakes increase their rattling rate as potential threats approach, and this abrupt switch to a high-frequency mode makes listeners, including humans, think they’re closer than they actually are, researchers report August 19th in the journal Current Biology.
“Our data show that the acoustic display of rattlesnakes, which has been interpreted for decades as a simple acoustic warning signal about the presence of the snake, is in fact a far more intricate interspecies communication signal,” says senior author Boris Chagnaud at Karl-Franzens-University Graz. “The sudden switch to the high-frequency mode acts as a smart signal fooling the listener about its actual distance to the sound source. The misinterpretation of distance by the listener thereby creates a distance safety margin.”
Rattlesnakes vigorously shake their tails to warn other animals of their presence. Past studies have shown that rattling varies in frequency, but little is known about the behavioral relevance of this phenomenon or what message it sends to listeners. A clue to this mystery came during a visit to an animal facility, where Chagnaud noticed that rattling increased in frequency when he approached rattlesnakes but decreased when he walked away.
Based on this simple observation, Chagnaud and his team conducted experiments in which objects appeared to move toward rattlesnakes. One object they used was a human-like torso, and another was a looming black disk that seemed to move closer by increasing in size. As the potential threats approached, the rattling rate increased to approximately 40 Hz and then abruptly switched to an even higher frequency range, between 60 and 100 Hz.
Additional results showed that rattlesnakes adapt their rattling rate in response to the approach velocity of an object rather than its size. “In real life, rattlesnakes make use of additional vibrational and infrared signals to detect approaching mammals, so we would expect the rattling responses to be even more robust,” Chagnaud says.
To test how this change in rattling rate is perceived by others, the researchers designed a virtual reality environment in which 11 participants were moved through a grassland toward a hidden snake. Its rattling rate increased as the humans approached and suddenly jumped to 70 Hz at a virtual distance of 4 meters. The listeners were asked to indicate when the sound source appeared to be 1 meter away. The sudden increase in rattling frequency caused the participants to underestimate their distance to the virtual snake.
“Snakes do not just rattle to advertise their presence, but they evolved an innovative solution: a sonic distance warning device similar to the one included in cars while driving backwards,” Chagnaud says. “Evolution is a random process, and what we might interpret from today’s perspective as elegant design is in fact the outcome of thousands of trials of snakes encountering large mammals. The snake rattling co-evolved with mammalian auditory perception by trial and error, leaving those snakes that were best able to avoid being stepped on.”
Reference: “Frequency modulation of rattlesnake acoustic display affects acoustic distance perception in humans” by Michael Forsthofer, Michael Schutte, Harald Luksch, Tobias Kohl, Lutz Wiegrebe and Boris P. Chagnaud, 19 August 2021, Current Biology.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.07.018
Funding was provided from the Munich Center for Neurosciences.
‘Shadow waveguide’ casts complex acoustic patterns to control particles
Engineers at Duke University have devised a new approach to using sound waves to manipulate tiny particles suspended in liquid in complex ways. Dubbed a “shadow waveguide,” the technique uses only two sound sources to create a tightly confined, spatially complex acoustic field inside a chamber without requiring any interior structure. The technology offers a new suite of features to the fast-developing platform of acoustic tweezers that has applications in fields such as chemical reaction control, micro-robotics, drug delivery, and cell and tissue engineering.
The research appears online August 18 in the journal Science Advances.
Acoustic tweezers are an emerging technology that uses sound waves to manipulate small particles suspended in liquid. Because no physical object is touching the particles, the technique is gentle, offers no biocompatibility issues and requires no labels, making it an enticing choice for working with delicate biomolecules.
In the biomedical realm, acoustic tweezers can trap, rotate and move particles or organisms for inspection, sorting or other applications. They can keep certain reagents and chemicals separated before allowing them to mix in precise amounts to control reactions. The technology also provides an avenue for patterning different materials before using any number of techniques to fix them in place to create new types of materials.
Despite all of its potential, the technology does have its limitations. Most current setups use multiple sound sources placed around a liquid-filled chamber that creates a checkerboard pattern of areas that can trap and move particles in lockstep with one another. This makes it difficult to manipulate particles independently of one another or through complex patterns. The latter can be achieved by including solid channel structures within the chamber, but this can damage delicate particles and limit how quickly samples can be moved through the system.
To overcome these limitations, Steve Cummer, the William H. Younger Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Duke, turned to ideas inspired by metamaterials. Metamaterials are synthetic materials composed of many individual engineered features, which together produce properties not found in nature.
“We wanted to inject acoustic wave energy into the chamber and use a structure just outside of the chamber to control the shape of the sound waves inside,” said Cummer. “The result is sort of like an optical fiber for sound that shapes the sound propagation and intentionally leaks some of its energy into the chamber—a sort of sound shadow—to control the particles inside with virtual channels.”
In the new paper, Cummer and Junfei Li, a postdoctoral researcher working in his lab, in collaboration with longtime acoustic tweezer innovator Tony Huang, the William Bevan Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Duke, demonstrate various capabilities of their shadow waveguide approach. Each shadow waveguide is created by 3D printing a mold with features specific to how particles inside the chamber are to be controlled. A type of silicone called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is poured into each half-tube mold with features that create channels within the finished product.
The PDMS has acoustic properties very similar to water, which allows sound waves to easily travel from the shadow waveguide into the chamber. The pattern of the air-filled channels within the PDMS dictates where and how the sound waves enter the chamber, allowing the researchers to create a wide range of complex acoustic fields to control particles.
Cummer and Li use this setup to trap and move individual microparticles along multiple complex paths through the chamber. And by setting up two sound sources—one at either end of the shadow waveguide—the researchers show they can pump particles along a slowly bending arc with precisely controlled speed.
With this demonstration in hand, the researchers are now looking to add complexity to their invention, either by making the waveguides dynamically reconfigurable or by merging it with other existing approaches to acoustic tweezers.
“Acoustic devices are very difficult to make reconfigurable, but we would love to figure out a way to make that possible because it would be a dramatic improvement in this technique’s usability,” said Li. “For now, we’re looking for specific challenges that we could adapt these shadow waveguides to address to move it from a proof-of-concept demonstration to a more sophisticated application.”
“The path to application might be to merge this with multiple concepts in the field,” added Cummer. “Adding multiple sound sources and structures to create more complexity might be what nudges us over the edge in some applications.”
Sound-induced electric fields control the tiniest particles
Acoustic tweezer with complex boundary-free trapping and transport channel controlled by shadow waveguides, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi5502
Duke University
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‘Shadow waveguide’ casts complex acoustic patterns to control particles (2021, August 18)
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