On November 27th to December 1st 2007 the Acoustical Society of America held one of it’s two annual meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana. Interesting areas covered in the conference were Speech communication, Speech perception, Architectural Acoustics, Education in acoustics and Noise. Hot items in acoustics in US right now are privacy in healthcare and environmental oriented programs like LEED.
Around 700 papers in different fields of acoustics were presented and as usual many different working and standardisation groups (ANSI and ISO)had meetings. Some meetings started already at 7 a.m., others were finished as late as 10 p.m.
The ongoing standardization work on privacy in healthcare has the objective that none shall be able to hear and understand what’s being said, regardless of your role or where abouts. A very difficult issue to solve, but crucial for the privacy and integrity in US.
USGBS’s green building environmental programme LEED has now adopted acoustic credits in school premises. Under conditions that reverberation time is following the ANSI standard’s requirements and that the background noise level is below certain levels, you can achieve 2-3 points in the LEED evaluation. There is also proposals out for comment concerning getting points in LEED for privacy in healthcare.
More information can be found here
