This comprehensive book presents all aspects of acoustic metamaterials and phononic crystals. The emphasis is on acoustic wave propagation phenomena at interfaces such as refraction, especially unusual refractive properties and negative refraction. A thorough discussion of the mechanisms leading to such refractive phenomena includes local resonances in metamaterials and scattering in phononic crystals.

The author gives a comprehensive overview of materials and components for noise control and acoustical comfort. Sound absorbers must meet acoustical and architectural requirements, which fibrous or porous material alone can meet. Basics and applications are demonstrated, with representative examples for spatial acoustics, free-field test facilities and canal linings. Acoustic engineers and construction professionals will find some new basic concepts and tools for developments in order to improve acoustical comfort. Interference absorbers, active resonators and micro-perforated absorbers of different materials and designs complete the list of applications.

This extensively reworked 2nd edition of the book includes ten new chapters. It also features an updated discussion of simulation software tools, covering topics such as simulating complex and / or expensive amplifier structures with the free LTspice software by developing a broad range of additional simulation models, especially those for triodes and transformers. The book adopts the structure used in The Sound of Silence books, with the first part, Basics - Calculations and Simulations, providing deep simulation-triggered insights into the gain and noise mechanisms of differential amplifiers, BJTs, resistors, and triodes. The second part then discusses the RIAA Phono-Amp Engine II, describing all the necessary design, simulation, calculation, construction and measurement processes for this multi-functional MC amplifier. The third part, Knowledge Transfer, presents new ideas on draft designs of the linear low-noise MC input stages (also an extremely low-noise one) and a range of practical measurement tools. Additionally, it includes a chapter on MM amplifiers and their noise production, and offers some surprising solutions. The brand new and extensive chapter on all the simulation models developed and used in the book rounds-out the voyage through the jungle of compromises, allowing best-in-class balanced MC phono-amplifiers to be produced. Lastly, the book also features an extensive index, and free downloads of all Mathcad worksheets are available on Springer's Extra Materials website (extra.springer.com).

Rhythm and Transforms is a book that explores rhythm in music, its structure and how we perceive it. The book will be bought by engineers interested in acoustic signal processing as well as musicians, composers and computer scientists. Anyone interested in the scientific basis of music from psychologists to the designers of electronic musical instruments will be interested in this book.

Acoustic Justice engages issues of recognition and misrecognition by mobilizing an acoustic framework. From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening, as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. As such, acoustic justice emerges as a compelling platform for engaging struggles over the right to speak and to be heard that extends toward a broader materialist and planetary view. This entails critically addressing questions of space, borders, community, and the acoustic norms defining capacities of listening, leading to what LaBelle terms “poetic ecologies of resonance.” Acoustic Justice works at issues of recognition and resistance, place and displacement, by moving across a range of pertinent references and topics, from social practices and sound art to the performativity of skin and the poetics of Deaf voice. Through such transversality, LaBelle captures acoustics as the basis for strategies of refusal and repair.

This book presents the theory of room acoustical fields and revises the Mirror Source Methods for practical computational use, emphasizing the wave character of acoustical fields. The presented higher methods include the concepts of "Mirror Point Sources" and "Corner sources which allow for an excellent approximation of complex room geometries and even equipped rooms. In contrast to classical description, this book extends the theory of sound fields describing them by their complex sound pressure and the particle velocity. This approach enables accurate descriptions of interference and absorption phenomena.

MOLECULAR MECHANISMS OF FUNCTIONAL FOOD Comprehensive resource for understanding state-of-the-art mechanisms behind food health effects This book provides information on the development and validation of functional foods towards their market and industrial application. It covers the available information on developments, efficacy, and testing and safety, while demonstrating the proven or potential effects of food on health and disease. With contributions from the foremost experts in the field, this book will bring readers up to speed on the state of the art in the mechanisms behind food health effects, from their physiological bases to their conception, current uses, and future developments. Sample topics covered by the authors include: The molecular mechanisms of action of antioxidant fibers, prebiotics, ginger, and cinnamon Saffron, a functional food with potential molecular effects Pseudocereals, ancestral grains that can serve as a source of bioactive compounds for functional foods Molecular effects of future functional foods - psychobiotics, chronobiotics, hempseed, opuntia, common and carioca beans, coffee and cocoa by-products Food industry professionals, government workers involved in projects related to food, and students in programs of study related to food can use this book as an up-to-date reference to fully understand the effects that many common and uncommon foods have on humans.

This book puts the focus on serving human listeners in the sound field synthesis although the approach can be also exploited in other applications such as underwater acoustics or ultrasonics. The author derives a fundamental formulation based on standard integral equations and the single-layer potential approach is identified as a useful tool in order to derive a general solution. He also proposes extensions to the single-layer potential approach which allow for a derivation of explicit solutions for circular, planar, and linear distributions of secondary sources. Based on above described formulation it is shown that the two established analytical approaches of Wave Field Synthesis and Near-field Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics constitute specific solutions to the general problem which are covered by the single-layer potential solution and its extensions.

This study focuses on the physical aspects of ultrasonic de-ashing and de-sulfurization, such as cavitation, streaming and their combined effects. Ambedkar Balraj proposes an ultrasound-assisted coal particle breakage mechanism and explores aqueous and solvent-based ultrasonic techniques for de-ashing and de-sulfurization. Ambedkar designs a Taguchi L-27 fractional-factorial matrix to assess the individual effects of key process variables. In this volume he also describes process optimization and scale-up strategies. The author provides a mechanism-based model for ultrasonic reagent-based coal de-sulfurization, proposes a flow diagram for ultrasonic methods of high-throughput coal-wash and discusses the benefits of ultrasonic coal-wash. Coal will continue to be a major fuel source for the foreseeable future and this study helps improve its use by minimising ash and sulfur impurities.

Digital sound synthesis has long been approached using standard digital filtering techniques. Newer synthesis strategies, however, make use of physical descriptions of musical instruments, and allow for much more realistic and complex sound production and thereby synthesis becomes a problem of simulation.

This book has a special focus on time domain finite difference methods presented within an audio framework. It covers time series and difference operators, and basic tools for the construction and analysis of finite difference schemes, including frequency-domain and energy-based methods, with special attention paid to problems inherent to sound synthesis. Various basic lumped systems and excitation mechanisms are covered, followed by a look at the 1D wave equation, linear bar and string vibration, acoustic tube modelling, and linear membrane and plate vibration. Various advanced topics, such as the nonlinear vibration of strings and plates, are given an elaborate treatment.

Key features: Includes a historical overview of digital sound synthesis techniques, highlighting the links between the various physical modelling methodologies. A pedagogical presentation containing over 150 problems and programming exercises, and numerous figures and diagrams, and code fragments in the MATLAB(R) programming language helps the reader with limited experience of numerical methods reach an understanding of this subject. Offers a complete treatment of all of the major families of musical instruments, including certain audio effects.

"Numerical Sound Synthesis" is suitable for audio and software engineers, and researchers in digital audio, sound synthesis and more general musical acoustics. Graduate students in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering or computer science, working on the more technical side of digital audio and sound synthesis, will also find this book of interest.

In the course of the years the volumes in the Acoustical Imaging Series have developedto become well-known and appreciated reference works. Offering both a broad perspective on the state of the art in the field as well as an in-depth look at its leading edge research, this Volume 30 in the Series contains again an excellent collection of contributions, presented in five major categories: "

With this all-in-one manual, students and teachers have an easy-to-read reference that provides a reliable and current rundown of the world of sound production, from planning a recording session to mastering the final product. Organized by four main topics - pre-production, recording various instruments, mixing theories and tools, and mastering - Audio Production Principles follows the actual flow of instruction given over the course of a student's tenure. Chapters address etiquette and basic operations for any recording session written in useful, tutorial style language, providing guidelines for beginner audio engineers on topics including pre-production, equipment selection, and mixing tips by instrument. Jumpstarting the mastering process, lessons delve into features unique to specific tools and techniques. All sections offer instructional scenarios of studio setups, asking students to brainstorm the best production technique for each situation. These exercises also help teachers generate new ideas for instruction and production projects of their own.

This is an up-to-date reference and textbook on modern acoustics from a signal-theoretic point of view, as well as a wave-theoretic approach for students, engineers, and researchers. It provides readers the fundamental basis of acoustics and vibration science and proceeds up to recent hot topics related to acoustic transfer functions and signal analysis including a perceptual point of view. In the first part, the work uniquely introduces into the fundamentals without using heavy mathematics The following, advanced chapters deal with new and deep insights into acoustic signal analysis and investigation of room transfer functions based on the poles and zeros.

Contemporary design in engineering and industry relies heavily on computer simulation and efficient algorithms to reduce the cost and to maximize the performance and sustainability as well as profits and energy efficiency. Solving an optimization problem correctly and efficiently requires not only the right choice of optimization algorithms and simulation methods, but also the proper implementation and insight into the problem of interest. This book consists of ten self-contained, detailed case studies of real-world optimization problems, selected from a wide range of applications and contributed from worldwide experts who are working in these exciting areas.

Optimization topics and applications include gas and water supply networks, oil field production optimization, microwave engineering, aerodynamic shape design, environmental emergence modelling, structural engineering, waveform design for radar and communication systems, parameter estimation in laser experiment and measurement, engineering materials and network scheduling. These case studies have been solved using a wide range of optimization techniques, including particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithms, artificial bee colony, harmony search, adaptive error control, derivative-free pattern search, surrogate-based optimization, variable-fidelity modelling, as well as various other methods and approaches. This book is a practical guide to help graduates and researchers to carry out optimization for real-world applications. More advanced readers will also find it a helpful reference and aide memoire.

"

Principles of Musical Acoustics focuses on the basic principles in the science and technology of music. Musical examples and specific musical instruments demonstrate the principles. The book begins with a study of vibrations and waves, in that order. These topics constitute the basic physical properties of sound, one of two pillars supporting the science of musical acoustics. The second pillar is the human element, the physiological and psychological aspects of acoustical science. The perceptual topics include loudness, pitch, tone color, and localization of sound. With these two pillars in place, it is possible to go in a variety of directions. The book treats in turn, the topics of room acoustics, audio both analog and digital, broadcasting, and speech. It ends with chapters on the traditional musical instruments, organized by family. The mathematical level of this book assumes that the reader is familiar with elementary algebra. Trigonometric functions, logarithms and powers also appear in the book, but computational techniques are included as these concepts are introduced, and there is further technical help in appendices.

This work deals with the instrumental measurement methods for the perceived quality of transmitted speech. These measures simulate the speech perception process employed by human subjects during auditory experiments. The measure standardized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), called "Wideband-Perceptual Speech Quality Evaluation (WB-PESQ)", is not able to quantify all these perceived characteristics on a unidimensional quality scale, the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) scale. Recent experimental studies showed that subjects make use of several perceptual dimensions to judge about the quality of speech signals. In order to represent the signal at a higher stage of perception, a new model, called "Diagnostic Instrumental Assessment of Listening quality (DIAL)", has been developed. It includes a perceptual and a cognitive model which simulate the whole quality judgment process. Except for strong discontinuities, DIAL predicts very well speech quality of different speech processing and transmission systems, and it outperforms the WB-PESQ.

In this work, the authors present a fully statistical approach to model non--native speakers' pronunciation. Second-language speakers pronounce words in multiple different ways compared to the native speakers. Those deviations, may it be phoneme substitutions, deletions or insertions, can be modelled automatically with the new method presented here.

The methods is based on a discrete hidden Markov model as a word pronunciation model, initialized on a standard pronunciation dictionary. The implementation and functionality of the methodology has been proven and verified with a test set of non-native English in the regarding accent.

The book is written for researchers with a professional interest in phonetics and automatic speech and speaker recognition.

The International Symposium on Acoustical Imaging is a unique forum for advanced research, covering new technologies, developments, methods and theories in all areas of acoustics. This interdisciplinary Symposium has been taking placecontinuously since 1968. In the course of the years the proceedings volumes in the Acoustical Imaging Series have become a reference for cutting-edge research in the field. In 2011 the 31st International Symposium on Acoustical Imaging was held in Warsaw, Poland, April 10-13. Offering both a broad perspective on the state-of-the-art as well as in-depth research contributions by the specialists in the field, this Volume 31 in the Series contains an excellent collection of papers insix major categories:
Biological and Medical Imaging
Physics and Mathematics of Acoustical Imaging
Acoustic Microscopy
Transducers and Arrays
Nondestructive Evaluation and Industrial Applications
Underwater Imaging"

NANOTECHNOLOGY IN INTELLIGENT FOOD PACKAGING This book is a state-of-the-art exposition of nanotechnology and food packaging which is undergoing rapid advancement. This book is specially designed with an emphasis on the state-of-the-art in nanotechnology and food packaging. It offers fascinating techniques for producing smart and active food packaging and also discusses its toxicity and the role that nanosensors play in detecting different pathogens in food packaging. The concluding chapters also explain recent developments concerning the incorporation of health supplements in food packaging and their future role in producing intelligent food packaging. The 16 chapters of this book were contributed by academic and industry experts working in their respective areas of research and are thoughtfully arranged in a systematic fashion that preserves the flow of knowledge. An attempt has been made to include all the information in a single monograph to better understand the topics and technologies involved in the application of nanotechnology in intelligent food packaging. Audience The book is aimed at researchers, industry scientists such as chemists, biologists, polymer technologists, food packaging industrialists, biotechnologists, health experts, quality/food safety officials, and policymakers. It will also be helpful to graduate students in the fields of materials science, polymer science, and biotechnology to better understand the fundamental concepts involved in food packaging in relation to extending shelf life.

Digital measurement of the analog acoustical parameters of a music performance hall is difficult. The aim of such work is to create a digital acoustical derivation that is an accurate numerical representation of the complex analog characteristics of the hall. The present study describes the exponential sine sweep (ESS) measurement process in the derivation of an acoustical impulse response function (AIRF) of three music performance halls in Canada. It examines specific difficulties of the process, such as preventing the external effects of the measurement transducers from corrupting the derivation, and provides solutions, such as the use of filtering techniques in order to remove such unwanted effects. In addition, the book presents a novel method of numerical verification through mean-squared error (MSE) analysis in order to determine how accurately the derived AIRF represents the acoustical behavior of the actual hall.

'Fifty years into my life journey I realise that, while I love remote wild places and the peoples I meet there, it is in forests that I find the greatest joy. Of all the forests that I have explored, it is the great circumpolar Boreal forest of the North that calls to me most. Here is a landscape where bush knowledge really counts and where experience counts even more ... This book has been thirty years in the making.' Out on the Land is an absorbing exploration of, and tribute to, the circumpolar Boreal forest of the North: its landscape, its people, their cultures and skills, the wilderness that embodies it, and its immense beauty. The book is vast in scope and covers every aspect of being in the wilderness in both winter and summer (clothing, kit, skills, cooking, survival), revealing the age-old traditions and techniques, and how to carry them out yourself. It also includes case studies of early explorers, as well as modern-day adventurers who found themselves stranded in the forest and forced to work out a way to survive. So much more than a bushcraft manual, this book goes deeper, to the traditions and cultures that gave us these skills, as well as focusing on the detail itself. Ray and Lars's practical advice is wound around a deep love for the forest, respect and admiration for the people who live there and sheer enjoyment of the stunning scenery.

Sensors, Instrumentation and Special Topics, Volume 6. Proceedings of the 29th IMAC, A Conference and Exposition on Structural Dynamics, 2011, the sixth volume of six from the Conference, brings together 27 contributions to this important area of research and engineering. The collection presents early findings and case studies on fundamental and applied aspects of Structural Dynamics, including papers on Structural Health Monitoring, High Intensity Noise Generation and other Special Topics.

As speech processing devices like mobile phones, voice controlled devices, and hearing aids have increased in popularity, people expect them to work anywhere and at any time without user intervention. However, the presence of acoustical disturbances limits the use of these applications, degrades their performance, or causes the user difficulties in understanding the conversation or appreciating the device. A common way to reduce the effects of such disturbances is through the use of single-microphone noise reduction algorithms for speech enhancement. The field of single-microphone noise reduction for speech enhancement comprises a history of more than 30 years of research. In this survey, we wish to demonstrate the significant advances that have been made during the last decade in the field of discrete Fourier transform domain-based single-channel noise reduction for speech enhancement.Furthermore, our goal is to provide a concise description of a state-of-the-art speech enhancement system, and demonstrate the relative importance of the various building blocks of such a system. This allows the non-expert DSP practitioner to judge the relevance of each building block and to implement a close-to-optimal enhancement system for the particular application at hand. Table of Contents: Introduction / Single Channel Speech Enhancement: General Principles / DFT-Based Speech Enhancement Methods: Signal Model and Notation / Speech DFT Estimators / Speech Presence Probability Estimation / Noise PSD Estimation / Speech PSD Estimation / Performance Evaluation Methods / Simulation Experiments with Single-Channel Enhancement Systems / Future Directions

This practical introduction focuses on how to design integrated solutions for industrial vision tasks from individual algorithms. The book is now available in a revised second edition that takes into account the current technological developments, including camera technology and color imaging processing. It gives a hands-on guide for setting up automated visual inspection systems using real-world examples and the NeuroCheck® standard software that has proven industrial strength integrated in thousands of applications in real-world production lines. Based on many years of experience in industry, the authors explain all the essential details encountered in the creation of vision system installations. With example material and a demo version of the software found on "extras.springer.com" readers can work their way through the described inspection tasks and carry out their own experiments.

Adaptive 3D Sound Systems focuses on creating multiple virtual sound sources in 3D reverberant spaces using adaptive filters. Adaptive algorithms are introduced and explained, including the multiple-error filtered-x algorithm and the adjoint LMS algorithm. The book covers the physical, psychoacoustical, and signal processing aspects of adaptive and non-adaptive 3D sound systems. Included is an introduction to spatial hearing, sound localization and reverberation, frequency selectivity of the human auditory system, the state of the art in HRTF-based 3D sound systems, binaural synthesis, and loudspeaker displays. The adaptive approach to HRTF-based 3D sound systems is examined in detail for the general case of creating multiple virtual sound sources at the ears of multiple listeners in a reverberant 3D space. The derived solution can be applied to other applications, such as cross-talk cancellation, loudspeakers and room equalization, concert hall simulation, and active sound control. Several solutions for the problem of moving listeners are introduced. Strategies for enlarging the zones of equalization around the listeners' ears, correct loudspeakers positioning, and using multiresolution filters are proposed. Fast multiresolution spectral analysis using non-uniform sampling is developed for implementation of multiresolution filters. The well-focused topics, along with implementation details for adaptive algorithms, make Adaptive 3D Sound Systems suitable for multimedia applications programmers, advanced level students, and researchers in audio and signal processing.