Reverb: The Evolution of Architectural Acoustics
There are two primary ways to control the sound of a space: active acoustics and passive acoustics. Passive acoustics are the materials in a space, like the padding in our studio or wooden floors or plaster walls. Materials like carpeting and drapery soak up sound, while materials like glass and porcelain make a room more echoey. Active acoustics are sound systems that use technology like speakers and microphones to boost or minimize certain sounds in a space…and the sonic control they offer can be dynamic and variable and quite dramatic.

Sophie Scott: Why we laugh
Did you know that you’re 30 times more likely to laugh if you’re with somebody else than if you’re alone? Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott shares this and other surprising facts about laughter in this fast-paced, action-packed and, yes, hilarious dash through the science of cracking up.

Audioset – A large-scale dataset of manually annotated audio events
AudioSet consists of an expanding ontology of 632 audio event classes and a collection of 2,084,320 human-labeled 10-second sound clips drawn from YouTube videos. The ontology is specified as a hierarchical graph of event categories, covering a wide range of human and animal sounds, musical instruments and genres, and common everyday environmental sounds.

The Physics of Music and Musical Instruments
From the introduction… This manual covers the physics of waves, sound, music, and musical instruments at a level designed for high school physics. However, it is also a resource for those teaching and learning waves and sound from middle school through college, at a mathematical or conceptual level. The mathematics required for full access to the material is algebra (to include
logarithms), although each concept presented has a full conceptual foundation that will be useful to those with even a very weak background in math.

Sound waves boost older adults’ memory, deep sleep
Gentle sound stimulation — such as the rush of a waterfall — synchronized to the rhythm of brain waves significantly enhanced deep sleep in older adults and tripled their ability to recall words, reports a new study. The goal is to make the new technology available for home use.