Do you find the sound of people chewing unbearably annoying? Or perhaps you can't stand to be near folks who are typing on noisy keyboards, fidgeting with their pens, or rustling a plastic bag of chips. The term for this sort of aversion is misophonia. Even if you don't personally deal with this issue, you may know someone who does. In this episode, we talk with Benjamin Kirby (Wichita State University) and Olivia Zant (University of North Texas), whose recent JASA Express Letters article, “Psychoacoustic Assessment of Misophonia,” touches on this topic.

Associated paper: Benjamin J. Kirby, Alaina Cunningham, and Olivia Montou Zant. "Psychoacoustic assessment of misophonia." JASA Express Lett. 5, 094401 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039238.

Read more from JASA Express Letters.
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Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay.

Manipulating the scattering of waves can allow engineers to achieve numerous goals, like reducing unwanted noise or eliminating potentially destructive vibrations in structures. In this episode, we talk to Vladislav Sorokin (University of Auckland) and Luke Bennetts (University of Melbourne), two guest editors of the recent Special Issue on Wave Phenomena in Periodic, Near-Periodic, and Locally Resonant Systems about recent advances in research regarding vibroacoustic systems.

Read all the articles from the special issue here!

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
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Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay.

In this episode, find out what the next generation of acousticians is researching! In this episode, we talk to the latest round of POMA Student Paper Competition winners, from the joint 188th meeting of the ASA and the 25th International Congress on Acoustics held in New Orleans in May 2025. Their topics include:

- Using the spatial decomposition method to parameterize acoustic reflections in a room (Lucas Hocquette, L-Acoustics)

- Visualizing nonlinearities in a bolted plate system with digital image correlation (Nicholas Pomianek, Boston University)

- Analyzing the how people pronounce the word "just" in casual speech (Ki Woong Moon, University of Arizona)

- Modeling strings of historical instruments that no longer make sound (Riccardo Russo, University of Bologna)

- Improving automatic music mashup generators (Yu Foon Darin Chau, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Associated papers:

Lucas Hocquette, Philip Coleman, and Frederic Roskam. "Acoustic reflection parameterization based on the spatial decomposition method." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 055004 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002037.

Nicholas Pomianek, Trevor Jerome, Enrique Gutierrez-Wing, and J. Gregory McDaniel. "Visualizing contact area dependent nonlinearity in a bolted plate system through digital image correlation." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 065001 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002099.

Ki Woong Moon and Natasha Warner. "Realization of just: Speech reduction in a high-frequency word." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 060005 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002080

Riccardo Russo, Craig J. Webb, Michele Ducceschi, and Stefan Bilbao. "Convergence analysis and relaxation techniques for modal scalar auxiliary variable methods applied to nonlinear transverse string vibration." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 035007 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002073.

Yu Foon Darin Chau, Andrew Brian Horner, Joshua Chang, Chun Yuen Chan, and Harris Lau. "Retrieval-based automatic mashup generation with deep learning-guided features." Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 56, 035006 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0002071.

Learn more about entering the POMA Student Paper Competition for the Fall 2025 meeting in Honolulu

Read more from Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA).

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