New Florence. New Renaissance.

The God of Silence

According to the U.S. National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division, which has sent researchers to measure the acoustics of more than 600 outdoor American sites for the past 15 years, noise pollution is growing faster than the U.S. population and is more than doubling every 30 years. One writer’s calculations even show that more than 145 million Americans—roughly 44 percent of the population—are exposed to noise exceeding the recommended limits. Anything over 85 decibels can harm a person’s ears, like lawn mowers (90 decibels), trains (90 to 115 decibels), the wail of a siren (120 to 140 decibels), and loud concerts, at around 110 to 120 decibels. All told, more than 97 percent of the U.S. population is constantly exposed to noise from planes and highways at around 50 decibels—comparable to the buzz of a humming refrigerator—but the loudest sounds appear most frequently in low-income neighborhoods.

Though noise really is all around us, from rustling leaves (20 to 30 decibels) to a thunderclap (120 decibels), it is this man-made noise that affects human health, leading to hypertension, stress, and heart disease. Alarmingly, according to Hempton, there are now fewer than 10 places in the U.S. where you can avoid noise pollution for longer than 15 minutes.

Afar

 

 

A musical - and technological - wonder in Tampa

The University of Tampa will soon be home to a 105-foot musical tower of bells at the center of campus, a structure that school officials say will be the first of its kind in the United States.

The tower, called an Ars Sonora, will contain 6 miles of wiring, 147 lights and 61 bronze bells that will sound notes controlled from an electronic keyboard. It also will have four swinging bells, including a 6-foot-tall, 5,000-pound bell etched with the names of philanthropists Susan and John Sykes.

Tampa Bay Times

More in the video below - where they also mention the iconic Bok Tower. That is a National Historic Landmark, about 70 miles away.  Its 60-bell carillon will allow for a contrast to technology designed a century ago.

Facebook smart glasses and audio

Facebook's future plans for AR smartglasses are still in the works, but one part of the equation that could soon see the light of day is smart audio. Spatial audio and augmented audio reality are two arenas in which Facebook is actively interested, and the company's newest Facebook Reality Labs research update details how the company plans to make devices that can tune out the real world and make virtual objects sound like they're right next to you, even if they're not really there.

CNET

Travel tech accessories

The gadgets you pack can make or break a big trip—so if something is going to take up precious space in your carry-on, you need to be sure it's not going to fail on you. We put a number of travel tech accessories, from portable LTE hotspots to gadgets that'll keep you from losing your Airbnb's keys, to the test and came up with this list of the gear that'll make your life easier, no matter where your travels might take you.

Conde Nast Traveler

The list includes a tiny white noise machine, the Marpac Go

 

 

Sonic Travel Wonders

In a world dominated by spectacle, what are the auditory equivalents of the Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge, or the Grand Canyon? If your ears chose your next holiday destination, where would they go? National Geo Traveler lists 15 places to visit for extraordinary sounds.

 

Includes “The Great Stalacpipe Organ,” the largest musical instrument in the world, built into Virginia’s Luray Caverns.

 

 

Now these are excellent listeners

Harman develops premium audio systems for 25 automakers under nine brand names. To ensure each sounds both excellent and brand-unique, the company has trained 100 expert listeners in five countries. Each must pass a hearing test and demonstrate an ability to identify variations in seven bands of audio (such as on an equalizer). That's spectral analysis. Spatial performance is a system's ability to place each instrument or vocal input on a soundstage. Dynamics is about clarity at varying volume levels. Integrity has to do with buzzing, squeaks, and rattles in the system installation. Experts assess these four attributes as they listen to seven audio tracks per car on 200 cars per year, comparing each against 400 reference cars.

Motor Trend

The Sound of Silence

Noise is at once basic and devilishly complex. By definition, noise is simply unwanted sound. But to the community of experts who attempt to measure it, control it, and hunt it down in the products we use every day, noise can be a problem that requires extraordinary engineering diligence, sophisticated instruments, and, occasionally, a bit of imagination.

John Galeotafiore, the engineer who oversees Consumer Reports’ testing of outdoor power equipment, has spent a considerable amount of time rigging up sound meters in interesting ways to simulate the position of the human ear. “We clip a microphone to a baseball cap when we’re testing lawn mowers,” he says. “That’s important because it captures what the consumer will experience in their own backyard.”

Consumer Reports

 

The New York Times adds how music has progressively become "louder"

"In the predigital era, compression required a mastering engineer whose job is to create the physical master for the manufacturing process, to employ restraint and finesse. With digital audio, a few mouse clicks can compress the dynamic range with brute force. The result is music that sounds more aurally aggressive — like the television commercial.

During the 1990s, as digital technology infiltrated the recording process, some mastering engineers wielded compression like a cudgel, competing to produce the loudest recordings. This recording industry “loudness war” was driven by linked aesthetic and economic imperatives. A louder record grabs your attention — and will often be perceived, at least at first, to have better sound quality than a less compressed album — and musicians didn’t want their product to sound weak by comparison. Maximum loudness, it was thought, was a prerequisite for commercial success."

Machines and voice learning

(intelligent Voice)’s CEO Nigel Cannings says the breakthrough came when he decided to see what would happen if he pointed a machine-learning system at the waveform of the voice data – its pattern of spikes and troughs – rather than the audio recording directly. It worked brilliantly.

Training his system on this visual representation let him harness powerful existing techniques designed for image classification. “I built this dialect classification system based on pictures of the human voice,” he says.

New Scientist

 

Here earbuds

In design, they’re simple. They’re very traditional earbuds, with a small circular bulb that holds a few microphones and a processor. All the processing of sound is done individually on each bud, and they can be calibrated to each user's individual separate ears. Their software leverages tried-and-true acoustic techniques for noise cancellation and effects, but also machine learning algorithms able to adapt to your surroundings.

The app associated with the Here buds has three tabs: a volume knob, which is the master switch for the volume of your world; an equalizer, coupled with effects like echo and reverberation; and a tab split into Tune In and Tune Out, which are pre-made filters meant to either enhance the soundscape or cut it out tailored to certain situations.

Popular Science

 

Voices for those unable to speak

For people rendered unable to speak by cerebral palsy, stroke, or traumatic brain injury, VocaliD’s software creates custom speech patterns that sound like the original person’s voice.

After recording whatever sounds a person can produce, VocaliD’s software sifts through its database of 15,000 volunteers’ voice samples for the closest match, based on factors like age and accent. The software blends the subject’s sample with the surrogate voice’s thousands of prerecorded sentences to turn typed text into speech.

BusinessWeek