Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical engineer. The application of acoustics is present in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.
Acoustical engineering is the branch of engineering dealing with sound and vibration. It includes the application of acoustics, the science of sound and vibration, in technology. Acoustical engineers are typically concerned with the design, analysis and control of sound.
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary organization of about 7500 members and attracts the interest, commitment, and service of many professionals.
Dale Vance Holliday was an American physicist and acoustician.
Gerhard M. Sessler is a German inventor and scientist. He is Professor emeritus at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.
Whitlow W. L. Au was a leading expert in bioacoustics specializing in biosonar of odontocetes. He is author of the widely known book The Sonar of Dolphins (1993) and, with Mardi Hastings, Principles of Marine Bioacoustics (2008). Au was honored as a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 1990 and awarded the ASA's first Silver Medal in Animal Bioacoustics in 1998. He was graduate advisor to MacArthur Fellow Kelly Benoit-Bird, who credits Au for discovering how sophisticated dolphin sonar is, developing dolphin-inspired machine sonars to separate different species of fish with the goal of protecting sensitive species, and for making numerous contributions to the description of Humpback whale song, which helped protect these whales from ship noise and ship traffic.
Katherine Safford Harris is a noted psychologist and speech scientist. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Speech and Hearing at the CUNY Graduate Center and a member of the Board of Directors Archived 2006-03-03 at the Wayback Machine of Haskins Laboratories. She is also the former President of the Acoustical Society of America and Vice President of Haskins Laboratories.
Peter Westervelt was an American physicist, noted for his work in nonlinear acoustics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at Brown University.
Floyd Dunn was an American electrical engineer who made contributions to all aspects of the interaction of ultrasound and biological media. Dunn was a member of Scientific Committee 66 of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements as well as many FDA, NIH, AIUM, and ASA committees. He collaborated with scientists in the UK, Japan, China and Post-Soviet states.
Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition. Kuhl currently serves as an associate editor for the journals Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science.
William M. Hartmann is a noted physicist, psychoacoustician, author, and former president of the Acoustical Society of America. His major contributions in psychoacoustics are in pitch perception, binaural hearing, and sound localization. Working with junior colleagues, he discovered several major pitch effects: the binaural edge pitch, the binaural coherence edge pitch, the pitch shifts of mistuned harmonics, and the harmonic unmasking effect. His textbook, Signals, Sound and Sensation, is widely used in courses on psychoacoustics. He is currently a professor of physics at Michigan State University.
Mathias Fink, born in 1945 in Grenoble, is a French physicist, professor at ESPCI Paris and member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Andrea Prosperetti is the Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, the Berkhoff Professor of Applied Physics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2012. He is known for his work in the field of multiphase flows including bubble dynamics and cavitation.
David E. Weston was an English physicist, who worked at the Admiralty Research Establishment. During his early career he worked with A B Wood, and is best known for his contributions to underwater acoustics. He published more than 65 papers, including 32 in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and was awarded the Rayleigh Medal by the Institute of Acoustics in 1970 and the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal by the Acoustical Society of America in 1998. Weston was president of the UK Institute of Acoustics between 1982 and 1984.
Timothy Grant Leighton is the Professor of Ultrasonics and Underwater Acoustics at the University of Southampton. He is the inventor-in-chief of Sloan Water Technology Ltd., a company founded around his inventions. He is an academician of three national academies. Trained in physics and theoretical physics, he works across physical, medical, biological, social and ocean sciences, fluid dynamics and engineering. He joined the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at the University of Southampton in 1992 as a lecturer in underwater acoustics, and completed the monograph The Acoustic Bubble in the same year. He was awarded a personal chair at the age of 35 and has authored over 400 publications.
The Pioneers of Underwater Acoustics Medal is awarded by the Acoustical Society of America in recognition of "an outstanding contribution to the science of underwater acoustics, as evidenced by publication of research results in professional journals or by other accomplishments in the field". The award was named in honor of H. J. W. Fay, Reginald Fessenden, Harvey Hayes, G. W. Pierce, and Paul Langevin.
Brian C.J. Moore FMedSci, FRS is an Emeritus Professor of Auditory Perception in the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. His research focuses on psychoacoustics, audiology, and the development and assessment of hearing aids.
Christine Erbe is a German-Australian physicist specializing in underwater acoustics. She is a professor in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and director of the Centre for Marine Science and Technology (CMST)—both at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, Australia. Erbe is known for her research on acoustic masking in marine mammals, investigating how man-made underwater noise interferes with animal acoustic communication.
Jennifer Miksis-Olds is an American marine scientist known for her research using acoustics to track marine mammals.
Elizabeth Ann ("Betsy") Cohen is a Brooklyn-born California-based acoustician and engineer for the arts. She is known as a scholar of music perception, digital archiving, and advocate for music therapy.
