The Slovenian Acoustical Society
The Slovenian Acoustical Society (Slovensko društvo za akustiko, SDA) was founded in 1997 in Ljubljana by fifty sound, noise, and vibration professionals led by Professor Mirko Čudina, its first and current president. SDA is a nonprofit scientific society dedicated to helping Slovenian engineers respond to the increasing demands for control of environmental noise and noisy products. Membership has grown to eighty-five individuals and seven liaisons representing the scientific disciplines of physics, mechanical, architectural, electrical and environmental engineering, medicine, psychology, and musical and speech acoustics.
Among the most prominent and active of Slovenia’s professional societies, SDA maintains strong ties with the university and industrial communities in Slovenia and abroad. SDA is a member of I-INCE, EAA, IIAV, ICA, and AAAA. The society’s activities comprise education, lectures, seminars, workshops, interlaboratory comparison of noise measurements, publications, and legislative and regulatory affairs.
SDA organizes a congress on sound, noise, and vibration every two years. The first two congresses drew national and international participants to Portorož, Slovenia, in 1998 and 2000. The second congress saw three regional presidents—professors Mirko Čudina as president of the SDA, Bojan Ivančević as president of the Acoustical Society of Croatia (HAD), and Ewald Benes as president of Austrian Acoustics Association (AAA)—and founded the Alps-Adria Acoustics Association (AAAA). Čudina was elected as the first president of AAAA, and during his term they organized the first congress of AAAA (2003) in Portorož, Slovenia. The second congress of the AAAA was in Opatija, Croatia, and the third congress (2005) was in Graz, Austria. The fourth congress of the AAAA, EAA EUROREGIO Congress, was organized in 2010 by SDA in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was a joint meeting of the SDA, HAD, AAA, and AAAA under the sponsorship of the European Acoustics Association (EAA). The first EAA EUROREGIO 2010 included an integrated summer school with seven courses: soundscape, voice and musical acoustics, building acoustics, hydroacoustics, numerical acoustics, psychoacoustics, and ultrasound. The EUROREGIO became the third product of the EAA and is now organized every three years after Forum Acusticum and Euronoise. The fifth congress of the AAAA was in Petrčane, Croatia, and the sixth congress (2014) was in Graz, Austria. The seventh congress of the AAAA will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in September 2016. You can find out more about this congress on the congress home page:http://lab.fs.uni-lj.si/AAAA2016/.
The congresses covered all aspects of acoustics, noise, and vibration in which the members of SDA and AAAA are active: from sound generation and radiation to low frequency noise and vibration, techniques for noise reduction at the source, active noise and vibration control, passive noise control elements, community noise, the effects of noise and vibration on people and animals, occupational noise, noise and vibration measuring techniques, numerical methods in acoustics modeling (FEM/BEM, SEA, MA), technical diagnostics, architectural and buildings acoustics, electroacoustics, hydroacoustics, bioacoustics, signal processing and statistical methods, musical acoustics, auditory and speech acoustics, and legislative acoustics.
The papers presented at the congresses have been published in the Congress Proceedings or CD-ROM, and the best papers have been published in the Journal of Mechanical Engineering – Strojniški vestnik, which currently has IF 0.821. Abstracts of the EAA EUROREGIO 2010 and programs of the integrated summer school have been published in a special issue (supplement) of the Acta Acustica united with Acustica.
SDA also produced four-day seminars on noise and vibration for domestic and international participants in 2000 and 2009. The next seminar will be organized in September 2016. In addition, SDA organized six interlaboratory comparison measurements over the last five years concerning site measurements of the airborne sound insulation, impact sound insulation of floors, environmental noise, and sound power of noise sources.
