Saturday 28 December 2013

London School of Economics Project Completed

The Acoustics Group is happy to announce that Szabolc Vagvolgyi, was conferred with a 1st class degree from the London School of Economics in December 2013.  His thesis, "Residents' willingness to pay for aircraft noise reduction - the case for London City Airport" formed part of his degree in Environmental Policy. Dr Dance suggested the idea of implementing a scheme where runways could be built and the residents paid in shares based on the noise exceeding the statutory noise contours. Let's see what happens!

Monday 23 December 2013

Student from Polytechnic of Turin Graduates

On the 20th December 2013 visiting Masters' student Elena Vercellone successfully defended her thesis, "Teachers' vocal effort in different acoustic environments". Elena was the second visiting academic to graduate from the Polytechnic of Turin. We all wish her well in her architectural career!


Saturday 21 December 2013

Luis visits Mumbai University

For Christmas 2013 Dr Gomez-Agustina visited ex Masters student Rolins Roy in Mumbai. Luis was invited to give a lecture to 100 students of Mumbai College of Architecture on acoustics, in particular on the work of the Acoustics Group, hence, the outfit!

Friday 20 December 2013

Summary of 2013

Thanks for all your support over 2013. We won four key awards: Dr Luis Gomez was the recipient of the Institute of Acoustics Peter Barnett Award, Dr Stephen Dance and the Acoustics Group received the  LSBU Enterprise team award, Dr Bob Peters received the Institute of Acoustics R W B Stephens Medal, and two of our MSc students were awarded Acoustical Society of America Newman medals: Shane Sugrue and Rob Burrell. Peter Mapp submitted and successfully defended his doctoral thesis. International links were furthered with the Politecnico of Turin and Federal University of Minas Gerais. Links with the Institute of Acoustics were also furthered with LSBU hosting a meeting on the Principles of Uncertainty, Dr Gomez gave an evening seminar as did two of the  MSc students. After a break of 17 years the Institute of Acoustics Diploma was reinitiated with 17 new students now in attendance.  Four papers were published in the Journal of Sound and Vibration, Applied Acoustics and the Journal of Building Acoustics and presentations given at the following conferences: Birmingham, Manchester, London, Southampton, Bangkok, Montreal, and Innsbruck. A new three year research project commenced with Baykam of Turkey. Significant investment was gratefully received for the refurbishment of the reverberation chamber, and cutting edge instrumentation: an impedance gun, a standing wave tube and four XL2 meters. For the Research Exercise Framework the Acoustics Group contributed two of the five engineering case studies. We look forward to 2014 in particular Melbourne for Inter-noise 2014 and the Musical Acoustics seminar at the Royal Academy of Music, but especially to two visiting PhD students from South America. Best wishes for the New Year

Monday 16 December 2013

New Microflown Impedance Gun

On the 16th December 2013 the new Microflown In-situ Impedance Gun arrived from Campbell Associates. The first of 2014 will be to test the device on a range of Anne Kyyro Quinn's textile panels, compare the absorption results against those of the new BSWA impedance tube and the reverberation chamber measurements.


Musical Group's Summer Conference 2014

On the 4th July 2014 the Royal Academy of Music has agreed to host the 2nd Institute of Acoustics Musical Acoustics Group conference. Our PhD students should put their thinking caps on, as the programme has yet to be arranged!


Friday 13 December 2013

Acoustics Group Students Christmas Party


On the 12th December 2013 the postgraduate acoustics students had their final lecture of the year. To celebrate this the IOA Diploma and MSc students decided to have a Christmas celebratory drink to end the year on a happy note. Well done all.

Tuesday 10 December 2013

Acoustics Group Winter Party

It's that time of year for the lecturers, guest speakers and PhD students winter gathering. This year we had an Italian Christmas. Special thanks go to Bridget, Salih, Peter, Nick and Ken for coming along and being so helpful over the entirety of 2013. All good fun!

Wednesday 4 December 2013

Sound screener calibrated for Harvard Medical School

On the 29th November 2013 the tablet based self assessment automated health screener was calibrated at the Acoustics laboratory. The Sound Screener was developed by Audio3 for use by the Royal College of Music lead AHRC funded Musical Impact project. The screener will be used by Harvard Medical School to inform the public workers of the dangers of excessive noise exposure.

LMS DSP Course

On the 2nd and 3rd December 2013, Dr Luis Gomez attended LMS International (Siemens) seminar series. The course was entitled, "DSP for noise and vibration engineering". It is hoped that next year LMS will come down n to LSBU to give a one day course as a Master Class!