The 156th Acoustical Society of America Meeting, Nov. 10-14, M...( November 7 2008 -- The 156th Acousti...)

November 7, 2008 -- The 156th Acoustical Society of America (ASA) meeting convenes next week in Florida at the Doral Golf Resort and Spa in Miami. Reporters are invited to visit the ASA World Wide Press Room: (http://www.acoustics.org/press).

On this site are posted news releases and dozens of lay language papers selected from among the 660 talks and posters. They relate to a cross-section of diverse disciplines, including architecture, underwater research, psychology, physics, animal bioacoustics, medicine, music, noise control, and speech.

Lay-language papers detail some of the most newsworthy results at the meeting. They are roughly 500-word summaries written for a general audience by the authors of individual presentations with accompanying graphics and multimedia files. They serve as starting points for journalists who are interested in covering the meeting but cannot attend in person. An index of all the lay language papers on the ASA World Wide Press Room is at: http://www.acoustics.org/press/156th/lay_lang.html.

SOME SPECIFIC HIGHLIGHTS:

THE SPEECH-TO-SONG ILLUSION
"This paper reports the first formal investigation of a striking illusion: A spoken phrase is made to be heard convincingly as sung rather than spoken, and this perceptual transformation occurs without altering the signal in any way, or adding any musical context, but simply by repeating the phrase several times over." http://www.acoustics.org/press/156th/deutsch.html (Includes Sound Clips)

HOW WHALES FIND THE SALMON THEY PREFER TO EAT
"Killer whales use their biosonar when hunting for prey, often detecting the prey at distances greater than about 50 yards... We theorized that the echoes from these biosonar pulses are different when reflecting off differ
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