Author: Jonathan South
I'm a professional acoustician, acoustic engineer/scientist/consultant chasing the carrot of an interesting and niche career in the world of sound, audio and acoustics.
With everything online anyway, I took the opportunity at the start of the 2021 to enrol myself in Berklee Online’s Architectural, Acoustic and Audio System Design for the Modern Production Studio, offered as part of their Music Production coursework. Being somewhat underwhelmed with Australia’s offerings for furthering acoustic knowledge in an academic framework, this course’s
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Previously, we used finite element analysis to visualise the modal patterns and frequencies of the simple percussive instrument, the “Tongue Drum”. For this analysis, we’re going to switch from the frequency domain, to the time domain, with the ultimate goal of “hearing” our fully simulated drum! We’re back in MATLAB’s pde toolbox, this time leveraging
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[EDIT]: Updated to a later version of MATLAB (2019a), so code has been updated to suit. Also, see the follow up for time domain simulations! We’ve had a look at using finite element analysis to solve the wave equation in 2D geometries to find room modes and resonances (here), so the next step up is
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Once you’ve dealt with them for a while, working with values in decibels (dB) becomes second nature, and warrants little further thought. Sometimes though, the process of getting to that stage can pose a few hurdles, some of which I was exposed to recently via an undergraduate course I had to re-take as part of
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So, it’s been a pretty hectic time since I last posted – moving house (again) and also beginning my Masters and figuring out how to balance it with work while remaining sane (I have no advice sorry!) I thought I’d do a short post on the first iteration of a fun little personal project born
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To facilitate one of my next projects, I’m spending a bit of time wrapping my head around 3D Modelling in Blender. While its quite interesting for me, there’s not anything worth posting about, there is plenty of great basic tutorials and guides out there. As well as 3D acoustic models, you will likely see some Python
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I’m very excited to begin my writing about venues and their acoustics with what is probably my new “hometown” venue – Hamer Hall in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia). After moving from Brisbane at the beginning of 2018, I’ve only managed to see a handful of shows in what has turned out to be a hectic start
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Lets put some theory to the test by finding the room resonances of simple (and maybe not so simple) 2D polygonal rooms using computational methods. I’ll explain the code, and provide a file for download as well. The Problem To find room resonances, we need to solve the Helmholtz Eigenvalue problem (see here for why)
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You are hopefully well aware of room modes and resonances. As the bane of home recording spaces, they have the ability to wreak havoc on small, untreated rooms. Physically, they are the result of standing waves, sound reflecting between surfaces in such a way that they reinforce themselves. They are based on the geometry of
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FOREWORD While this is a derivation involving somewhat involved maths and physical concepts, I have purposefully made it quite “verbose” and explanatory in nature. Hopefully (if you are at least at the undergraduate physics level), there should not be too many stumbling points and should make logical progression without large leaps of faith. As such,
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