Fun with Acoustics

Did you know that acoustics involves so much more than music? I’ll be discussing a little about our amazing ears, tell you about my research and a few other areas in acoustics, and share a little about my life growing up with a visual impairment and being a single mom. Along the way, I’ll let you know about some free apps you can use to explore sounds around you. With one, you’ll be able to measure how loud sounds are. In another you can see how the pressure of sound waves changes over time and you can use this to visualize, for example, different speech sounds. With another app you’ll be able to know what pitches are present in sounds, so you could visualize, for example, the timbre of a note played on a musical instrument. With the last app, you’ll be able to see how timbre changes over time. Try saying a diphthong with this app! Now you have several tools to make your own experiments involving sound.

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