Regional News (Mar 2018)

Pan-American Updates

INTER-NOISE 2018

The 47th International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering, INTER-NOISE 2018, will be held at the Chicago Marriot Downtown Magnificent Mile from August 26 to 29. Detailed information regarding submission of abstracts, technical tracks and sessions, student sponsorship opportunities, short courses, and exhibitions can be found at https://internoise2018.org.

Dr. Christopher Fuller Receives ASME’s Rayleigh Lecture Award

At IMECE 2017, Dr. Christopher Fuller, Professor and Director of Vibration and Acoustics Lab at Virginia Tech University, received the 2017 Rayleigh Lecture Award. He gave a very informative seminar on “Acoustic Metamaterials.” His seminar provided a basis to understand acoustic metamaterials fundamentals and applications. The Rayleigh Lecture is an American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) division‐level award given by the Noise Control and Acoustics Division in recognition of the lecturer’s pioneering contributions to the fields of noise control and acoustics.

ASA Student Video Challenge

The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) has announced details for the ASA Student Video Challenge. The purpose of the ASA is to generate, disseminate, and promote the knowledge and practical applications of acoustics. With this purpose in mind, the ASA are challenging student members to grab a camera, recruit friends, and create a 4-to-7-minute original video aimed at teaching the public about acoustics. More details are available here.

Europe-Africa Updates

Noise Pollution Will Not Decrease Significantly by 2020

On November 30, 2017, the European Environment Agency (EEA) published the Annual Indicator Report (AIR) for 2017. This report, which is part of a long series of annual reports, gives an overview of the EU’s progress toward 29 environmental policy objectives. These are relevant to the achievement of the 7th Environment Action Program’s (EAP) three key priority objectives: (1) natural capital, (2) resource-efficient, low-carbon economy, (3) and people’s health and well-being.

Priority objective 3 is related to safeguarding the Union’s citizens from “environment-related pressures and risks to health and well-being” and indicators refer to outdoor air quality in urban areas, air pollutant emissions, quality of bathing waters, and environmental noise, among others.

For environmental noise, the AIR 2017 is pessimistic about the possibility of meeting the 2020 objective of a significant decrease in noise pollution. It states: “Efforts to reduce the noise from individual sources were offset by the higher numbers of people being exposed to high noise levels, mainly due to increasing passenger road and aviation traffic and increasing numbers of city inhabitants. The construction of new roads may have also exposed new areas and populations to road traffic noise. Finally, it is unlikely that noise pollution will decrease significantly by 2020, given that transport demand is expected to increase, air traffic noise has been predicted to increase and the number of city inhabitants is also set to increase.”

Details of the AIR 2017 (with analysis for country, references, and tables) are available here.

NEW ERC Projects

The fundamental activity of the European Research Council (ERC) is to provide attractive long-term funding to support excellent investigators and their research teams to pursue groundbreaking, high-gain/high-risk research. Several research projects dealing with noise control and acoustics have been recently funded under the program H2020-EU.1.1.—EXCELLENT SCIENCE—European Research Council (ERC) and are ongoing. Herein is reported a short but interesting list of them:

VirBAcous

Virtual building acoustics: a robust and efficient analysis and optimization framework for noise transmission reduction. Project ID: 714591
From 2017-08-01 to 2022-07-31, ongoing project
Beneficiary: KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN BELGIUM
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/209704_en.html

SMARTSOUND

Pre-Commercialisation of Sound Recognition for Surveillance Applications. Project ID: 737472
From 2017-09-01 to 2019-02-28, ongoing project
Beneficiary: TTY-SAATIO, TAMPERE, FINLAND
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/210948_en.html

IBiDT

Individualized Binaural Diagnostics and Technology. Project ID: 716800
From 2018-01-01 to 2022-12-31, ongoing project
Beneficiary: CARL VON OSSIETZKY UNIVERSITAET OLDENBURG GERMANY
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/209479_en.html

MobiliSense

Air pollution and noise exposure related to personal transport behaviour: short-term and longer-term effects on health. Project ID: 647000
From 2015-07-01 to 2020-06-30, ongoing project
Beneficiary: INSTITUT NATIONAL DE LA SANTE ET DE LA RECHERCHE MEDICALE, PARIS, FRANCE
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194481_en.html

SSID

Soundscape Indices. Project ID: 740696
From 2018-02-01 to 2023-01-31, ongoing project
Beneficiary: THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD UNITED KINGDOM
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/211802_en.html

RobSpear

Robust Speech Encoding in Impaired Hearing. Project ID: 678120
From 2016-10-01 to 2021-09-30, ongoing project
Beneficiaries: UNIVERSITEIT GENT BELGIUM and CARL VON OSSIETZKY UNIVERSITAET OLDENBURG, GERMANY
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/200387_en.html

Asia-Pacific Updates

Acoustics 2018

The annual conference of the Australian Acoustical Society, Acoustics 2018, will be held in Adelaide, at the Adelaide Conventional Centre from November 6 to 9, 2018. The theme of this conference is “Hear to Listen.” More details are available at https://www.acoustics2018.com.