Forum is intended for communications that raise acoustical concerns, express acoustical viewpoints, or stimulate acoustical research and applications without necessarily including new findings. Publication will occur on a selective basis when such communications have particular relevance, importance, or interest to the acoustical community or the Society. Submit such items to an appropriate ass...

Noise exposure is known to cause hearing loss and a variety of disturbances, such as annoyance, hypertension and loss of sleep. It is generally accepted that these situations are caused by the acoustical events processed by the auditory system. However, there are acoustical events that are not necessarily processed by the auditory system, but that nevertheless cause harm. Infrasound and low fre...

The acoustical properties of the vocal tract, the air-filled cavity between the vocal folds and the mouth opening, are determined by its individual geometry, the physical properties of the air and of its boundaries. In this article, we address the necessity of complex impedance boundary conditions at the mouth opening and at the border of the acoustical domain inside the human vocal tract. Usin...

American National Standards (ANSI Standards) developed by Accredited Standards Committees S1, S2, S3, S3/SC 1, and S12 in the areas of acoustics, mechanical vibration and shock, bioacoustics, animal bioacoustics, and noise, respectively, are published by the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). In addition to these standards, ASA publishes a catalog of Acoustical American National Standards. To...

Deforming materials emit high-frequency acoustical waves. The mechanism or mechanisms responsible r^r the Initiation of these waves remains islatlvely unknown. Evidence has been produced to Indicate that the waves originate In the bulk of a body and are probably connected with the formation of mlcrocracks at stress concentrations and other crack nuclea-tlon sites. One of the most Important prob...

This paper describes a method for decomposing steady-state instrument data into excitation and formant filter components. The input data, taken from several series of recordings of acoustical instruments is analyzed in the frequency domain, and for each series a model is built, which most accurately represents the data as a source-filter system. The source part is taken to be a harmonic excitat...

This paper describes a method of constructing a musical instrument hierarchy reflecting the similarity of acoustical features. Although this acoustical hierarchy is useful for various purposes as well as investigating the timbres of musical instruments, it has not been reported in the literature. The main issues in constructing such a hierarchy are what feature space is used and how to obtain t...

Measurement of transfer functions is required for most applications dealing with source-path-contribution techniques often called transfer path analysis. Here the transfer function, typically measured as Frequency Response Function (FRF), takes the role of connecting an input (eg source position) with an output (eg receiver position). In this paper we will further investigate a previously descr...