Acoustic Mapping on Radio 4

Hello, heard this driving home today, thought some of you might like to hear it. The address gives the webpage but you can listen also, by clicking 'Listen Again'. Has some good 'effects' with virtual acoustics enabling the reconstruction of the acoustics of buildings long gone. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml Cheers Ben.

 

Very interesting - thanks.

I design buildings for a living, and fortunately acoustics is one of the things where this silly audio pastime turns 'work' into 'fun'. Pity they didn't do quite such interesting things at Nottingham's School of the Built Environment when I was there 12 yrs ago.

...Though I did spend time modelling buildings in the Uni's windtunnel and anechoic room* - a very odd experience; the first 20mins were mostly spent waiting to get used to your own internal gurglings!

*you can build scale models and then 'scale' the fullsize acoustic behaviour from them; there's a couple of famous BBC papers on the subject. It's what we did before CPU horsepower became so cheap - and I'm only 35...!

 

I used to get contract work in for acoustic modelling from Ove Arup.

we used to take their cad models, applying material values to the geometry and then use the chips we used to sell for making pretty 3d pictures to calculate sound propagation through the scenes rather than light propagation.

you choose the brick texture the density, stiffness, young modulus of the material etc add a sound source and the silicon did the rest..