Category Archives: Music

The sound of dirt

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So you don’t get your hopes up, this acoustic story doesn’t offer any accompanying audio/acoustic files, i.e., I couldn’t find the sound of dirt.

In any event, there’s still an interesting story in an April 10, 2023 news item on phys.org,

U.K. and Australian ecologists have used audio technology to record different types of sounds in the soils of a degraded and restored forest to indicate the health of ecosystems.

Non-invasive acoustic monitoring has great potential for scientists to gather long-term information on species and their abundance, says Flinders University [Australia] researcher Dr. Jake Robinson, who conducted the study while at the University of Sheffield in England.

…

Photo: Pixabay

An April 8, 2023 Flinders University press release, which originated the news item, delves into the researcher’s work, Note: Links have been removed,

“Eco-acoustics can measure the health lf landscapes affected by farming, mining and deforestation but can also monitor their recovery following revegetation,” he says.  

“From earthworms and plant roots to shifting soils and other underground activity, these subtle sounds were stronger and more diverse in healthy soils – once background noise was blocked out.”   

The subterranean study used special microphones to collect almost 200 sound samples, each about three minutes long, from soil samples collected in restored and cleared forests in South Yorkshire, England. 

“Like underwater and above-ground acoustic monitoring, below-ground biodiversity monitoring using eco-acoustics has great potential,” says Flinders University co-author, Associate Professor Martin Breed. 

Since joining Flinders University, Dr Robinson has released his first book, entitled Invisible Friends (DOI: 10.53061/NZYJ2969) [emphasis mine], which covers his core research into ‘how microbes in the environment shape our lives and the world around us’. 

Now a researcher in restoration genomics at the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University, the new book examines the powerful role invisible microbes play in ecology, immunology, psychology, forensics and even architecture.  

“Instead of considering microbes the bane of our life, as we have done during the global pandemic, we should appreciate the many benefits they bring in keeping plants animals, and ourselves, alive.”  

In another new article, Dr Robinson and colleagues call for a return to ‘nature play’ for children [emphasis mine] to expose their developing immune systems to a diverse array of microbes at a young age for better long-term health outcomes. 

“Early childhood settings should optimise both outdoor and indoor environments for enhanced exposure to diverse microbiomes for social, cognitive and physiological health,” the researchers say.  

“It’s important to remember that healthy soils feed the air with these diverse microbes,” Dr Robinson adds.  

It seems Robinson has gone on a publicity blitz, academic style, for his book. There’s a May 22, 2023 essay by Robinson, Carlos Abrahams (Senior Lecturer in Environmental Biology – Director of Bioacoustics, Nottingham Trent University); and Martin Breed (Associate Professor in Biology, Flinders University) on the Conversation, Note: A link has been removed,

Nurturing a forest ecosystem back to life after it’s been logged is not always easy.

It can take a lot of hard work and careful monitoring to ensure biodiversity thrives again. But monitoring biodiversity can be costly, intrusive and resource-intensive. That’s where ecological acoustic survey methods, or “ecoacoustics”, come into play.

Indeed, the planet sings. Think of birds calling, bats echolocating, tree leaves fluttering in the breeze, frogs croaking and bush crickets stridulating. We live in a euphonious theatre of life.

Even the creatures in the soil beneath our feet emit unique vibrations as they navigate through the earth to commute, hunt, feed and mate.

…

Robinson has published three papers within five months of each other, in addition to the book, which seems like heavy output to me.

First, here’s a link to and a citation for the education paper,

Optimising Early Childhood Educational Settings for Health Using Nature-Based Solutions: The Microbiome Aspect by Jake M. Robinson and Alexia Barrable. Educ. Sci. 2023, 13 (2), 211 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13020211
Published: 16 February 2023

This is an open access paper.

For these two links and citations, the articles seem to be very closely linked.,

The sound of restored soil: Measuring soil biodiversity in a forest restoration chronosequence with ecoacoustics by Jake M. Robinson, Martin F. Breed, Carlos Abrahams. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.23.525240 Posted January 23, 2023

The sound of restored soil: using ecoacoustics to measure soil biodiversity in a temperate forest restoration context by Jake M. Robinson, Martin F. Breed, Carlos Abrahams. Restoration Ecology, Online Version of Record before inclusion in an issue e13934 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13934 First published: 22 May 2023

Both links lead to open access papers.

Finally, there’s the book,

Invisible Friends; How Microbes Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us by Jake Robinson. Pelagic Publishing, 2022. ISBN 9781784274337 DOI: 10.53061/NZYJ2969

This you have to pay for.

For those would would like to hear something from nature, I have a May 27, 2022 posting, The sound of the mushroom. Enjoy!

Music of the chemical elements

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It’s a little late since this work was presented at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Spring 2023 meeting but it’s a fascinating approach to the periodic table of elements that features a longstanding interest of mine, data sonification.

A March 26, 2023 news item on phys.org announces the then upcoming presentation abut a musical version of the periodic table of elements,

In chemistry, we have He [helium], Fe [iron] and Ca [calcium]—but what about do, re and mi? Hauntingly beautiful melodies aren’t the first things that come to mind when looking at the periodic table of the elements. However, using a technique called data sonification, a recent college graduate has converted the visible light given off by the elements into audio, creating unique, complex sounds for each one. Today [March 26, 2023], the researcher reports the first step toward an interactive, musical periodic table.

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A March 26, 2023 ACS news release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, provides more detail (the presentation abstract is included),

The researcher will present his results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person March 26–30 [2023], and features more than 10,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics.

…

Previously, W. Walker Smith, the project’s sole investigator, took his combined passions of music and chemistry and converted the natural vibrations of molecules into a musical composition. “Then I saw visual representations of the discrete wavelengths of light released by the elements, such as scandium,” says Smith. “They were gorgeous and complex, and I thought, ‘Wow, I really want to turn these into music, too.’”

Elements emit visible light when they are energized. This light is made up of multiple individual wavelengths, or particular colors, with brightness levels that are unique for each element. But on paper, the collections of wavelengths for different elements are hard to tell apart visually, especially for the transition metals, which can have thousands of individual colors, says Smith. Converting the light into sound frequencies could be another way for people to detect the differences between elements.

However, creating sounds for the elements on the periodic table has been done before. For instance, other scientists have assigned the brightest wavelengths to single notes played by the keys on a traditional piano. But this approach reduced the rich variety of wavelengths released by some elements into just a few sounds, explains Smith, who is currently a researcher at Indiana University.

To retain as much of the complexity and nuance of the element spectra as possible, Smith consulted faculty mentors at Indiana University, including David Clemmer, Ph.D., a professor in the chemistry department, and Chi Wang, D.M.A., a professor in the Jacobs School of Music. With their assistance, Smith built a computer code for real-time audio that converted each element’s light data into mixtures of notes. The discrete color wavelengths became individual sine waves whose frequency corresponded to that of the light, and their amplitude matched the brightness of the light.

Early in the research process, Clemmer and Smith discussed the pattern similarities between light and sound vibrations. For instance, within the colors of visible light, violet has almost double the frequency of red, and in music, one doubling of frequency corresponds to an octave. Therefore, visible light can be thought of as an “octave of light.” But this octave of light is at a much higher frequency than the audible range. So, Smith scaled the sine waves’ frequencies down by approximately 10-12, fitting the audio output into a range where human ears are most sensitive to differences in pitch.

Because some elements had hundreds or thousands of frequencies, the code allowed these notes to be generated in real time, forming harmonies and beating patterns as they mixed together. “The result is that the simpler elements, such as hydrogen and helium, sound vaguely like musical chords, but the rest have a more complex collection of sounds,” says Smith. For example, calcium sounds like bells chiming together with a rhythm resulting from how the frequencies interact with each other. Listening to the notes from some other elements reminded Smith of a spooky background noise, similar to music used in cheesy horror movies. He was especially surprised by the element zinc, which despite having a large number of colors, sounded like “an angelic choir singing a major chord with vibrato.”

“Some of the notes sound out of tune, but Smith has kept true to that in this translation of the elements into music,” says Clemmer. These off-key tones — known musically as microtones — come from frequencies that are found between the keys of a traditional piano. Agreeing, Wang says, “The decisions as to what’s vital to preserve when doing data sonification are both challenging and rewarding. And Smith did a great job making such decisions from a musical standpoint.”

The next step is to turn this technology into a new musical instrument with an exhibit at the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health, and Technology in Bloomington, Indiana. “I want to create an interactive, real-time musical periodic table, which allows both children and adults to select an element and see a display of its visible light spectrum and hear it at the same time,” says Smith. He adds that this sound-based approach has potential value as an alternative teaching method in chemistry classrooms, because it’s inclusive to people with visual impairments and different learning styles.

…

Smith acknowledges support and funding from Indiana University’s Department of Chemistry, Center for Electronic and Computer Music, and Center for Rural Engagement; an Indiana University Undergraduate Research grant; the 2022 Annual Project Jumpstart Innovation Competition; and the Indiana University Hutton Honors College Grant Program.

A recorded media briefing on this topic will be posted Monday, March 27 [2023], by 10 a.m. Eastern time at www.acs.org/acsspring2023briefings. Reporters can request access to media briefings during the embargo period by contacting newsroom@acs.org. [The ACS 2023 Spring Meeting media briefings are freely available as of June 12, 2023. The “What do the elements sound like? Media Briefing” runs approximately 11 mins.]

…

If you keep going past the news release, you’ll find this presentation abstract,

Title
Designing an interactive musical periodic table: sonification of visible element emission spectra

Abstract
What does the element helium sound like? What about hydrogen? While these may seem like absurd questions, the process of data sonification can be used to convert the visible spectra of chemical elements into sounds. When stimulated by electricity or heat, elements release distinct wavelengths of light depending on their electron energy levels—a sort of “chemical footprint” unique to every element. These frequencies of light, which we perceive as different colors, can be scaled into the audio range to yield different sonic frequencies, allowing one to hear the different sounds of chemical elements. This research project involved the construction of an interactive musical periodic table, combining musical and visual representations of elemental spectra from high-resolution spectral datasets.

The interactive periodic table was designed using Max/MSP, a programming language that uses digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms to generate real-time audio and visual outputs. This allows all spectral lines of an element to be played simultaneously (as a “chord”) or for individual lines to be played in succession (as a “melody”). This highly interdisciplinary project has applications spanning data analysis, STEAM (STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] + Arts) education, and public science outreach. Sonification of scientific data provides alternative methods of analysis that can expand access of such data to blind and visually impaired people. Sonification can even enhance data analysis via traditional data visualization by providing a supplementary layer of auditory information, and sonification-based learning models have been shown to improve student engagement and understanding of scientific concepts like protein folding.

This program is currently being implemented in several middle and high school music and science classes, as well as a public music/science show titled “The Sound of Molecules” at WonderLab Museum of Science. Future work will focus on designing a free and open-source version of the program that does not require specialized DSP software.

Metacreation Lab’s greatest hits of Summer 2023

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I received a May 31, 2023 ‘newsletter’ (via email) from Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Metacreation Lab for Creative Artificial Intelligence and the first item celebrates some current and past work,

International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expressions | NIME 2023
May 31 – June 2 | Mexico City, Mexico

We’re excited to be a part of NIME 2023, launching in Mexico City this week! 

As part of the NIME Paper Sessions, some of Metacreation’s labs and affiliates will be presenting a study based on case studies of musicians playing with virtual musical agents. Titled eTu{d,b}e, the paper was co-authored by Tommy Davis, Kasey LV Pocius, and Vincent Cusson, developers of the eTube instrument, along with music technology and interface researchers Marcelo Wanderley and Philippe Pasquier. Learn about the project and listen to sessions involving human and non-human musicians.

This research project involved experimenting with Spire Muse, a virtual performance agent co-developed by Metacreation Lab members. The paper introducing the system was awarded the best paper award at the 2021 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). 

Learn more about the NIME2023 conference and program at the link below, which will also present a series of online music concerts later this week.

Learn more about NIME 2023

Coming up later this summer and also from the May 31, 2023 newsletter,

Evaluating Human-AI Interaction for MMM-C: a Creative AI System for Music Composition | IJCAI [2023 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence] Preview

For those following the impact of AI on music composition and production, we would like to share a sneak peek of a review of user experiences using an experimental AI-composition tool [Multi-Track Music Machine (MMM)] integrated into the Steinberg Cubase digital audio workstation. Conducted in partnership with Steinberg, this study will be presented at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI2023), as part of the Arts and Creativity track of the conference. This year’s IJCAI conference taking place in Macao from August 19th to Aug 25th, 2023.

…

The conference is being held in Macao (or Macau), which is officially (according to its Wikipedia entry) the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (MSAR). It has a longstanding reputation as an international gambling and party mecca comparable to Las Vegas.

Ada Lovelace’s skills (embroidery, languages, and more) led to her pioneering computer work in the 19th century

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This is a cleaned up version of the Ada Lovelace story,

A pioneer in the field of computing, she has a remarkable life story as noted in this October 13, 2014 posting, and explored further in this October 13, 2015 posting (Ada Lovelace “… manipulative, aggressive, a drug addict …” and a genius but was she likable?) published to honour the 200th anniversary of her birth.

In a December 8, 2022 essay for The Conversation, Corinna Schlombs focuses on skills other than mathematics that influenced her thinking about computers (Note: Links have been removed),

…

Growing up in a privileged aristocratic family, Lovelace was educated by home tutors, as was common for girls like her. She received lessons in French and Italian, music and in suitable handicrafts such as embroidery. Less common for a girl in her time, she also studied math. Lovelace continued to work with math tutors into her adult life, and she eventually corresponded with mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan at London University about symbolic logic.

Lovelace drew on all of these lessons when she wrote her computer program – in reality, it was a set of instructions for a mechanical calculator that had been built only in parts.

The computer in question was the Analytical Engine designed by mathematician, philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage. Lovelace had met Babbage when she was introduced to London society. The two related to each other over their shared love for mathematics and fascination for mechanical calculation. By the early 1840s, Babbage had won and lost government funding for a mathematical calculator, fallen out with the skilled craftsman building the precision parts for his machine, and was close to giving up on his project. At this point, Lovelace stepped in as an advocate.

To make Babbage’s calculator known to a British audience, Lovelace proposed to translate into English an article that described the Analytical Engine. The article was written in French by the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea and published in a Swiss journal. Scholars believe that Babbage encouraged her to add notes of her own.

In her notes, which ended up twice as long as the original article, Lovelace drew on different areas of her education. Lovelace began by describing how to code instructions onto cards with punched holes, like those used for the Jacquard weaving loom, a device patented in 1804 that used punch cards to automate weaving patterns in fabric.

Having learned embroidery herself, Lovelace was familiar with the repetitive patterns used for handicrafts. Similarly repetitive steps were needed for mathematical calculations. To avoid duplicating cards for repetitive steps, Lovelace used loops, nested loops and conditional testing in her program instructions.

…

Finally, Lovelace recognized that the numbers manipulated by the Analytical Engine could be seen as other types of symbols, such as musical notes. An accomplished singer and pianist, Lovelace was familiar with musical notation symbols representing aspects of musical performance such as pitch and duration, and she had manipulated logical symbols in her correspondence with De Morgan. It was not a large step for her to realize that the Analytical Engine could process symbols — not just crunch numbers — and even compose music.

…

… Lovelace applied knowledge from what we today think of as disparate fields in the sciences, arts and the humanities. A well-rounded thinker, she created solutions that were well ahead of her time.

If you have time, do check out Schlombs’ essay (h/t December 9, 2022 news item on phys.org).

For more about Jacquard looms and computing, there’s Sarah Laskow’s September 16, 2014 article for The Atlantic, which includes some interesting details (Note: Links have been removed),

…, one of the very first machines that could run something like what we now call a “program” was used to make fabric. This machine—a loom—could process so much information that the fabric it produced could display pictures detailed enough that they might be mistaken for engravings.

Like, for instance, the image above [as of March 3, 2023, the image is not there]: a woven piece of fabric that depicts Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the inventor of the weaving technology that made its creation possible. As James Essinger recounts in Jacquard’s Web, in the early 1840s Charles Babbage kept a copy at home and would ask guests to guess how it was made. They were usually wrong.

.. At its simplest, weaving means taking a series of parallel strings (the warp) lifting a selection of them up, and running another string (the weft) between the two layers, creating a crosshatch. …

The Jacquard loom, though, could process information about which of those strings should be lifted up and in what order. That information was stored in punch cards—often 2,000 or more strung together. The holes in the punch cards would let through only a selection of the rods that lifted the warp strings. In other words, the machine could replace the role of a person manually selecting which strings would appear on top. Once the punch cards were created, Jacquard looms could quickly make pictures with subtle curves and details that earlier would have take months to complete. …

… As Ada Lovelace wrote him: “We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

For anyone who’s very curious about Jacquard looms, there’s a June 25, 2019 Objects and Stories article (Programming patterns: the story of the Jacquard loom) on the UK’s Science and Industry Museum (in Manchester) website.

A fish baying at the moon?

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It seems to be GLUBS time again (GLUBS being the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds). In fact it’s an altogether acoustical time for the ocean. First, a mystery fish,

That sounds a bit like a trumpet to me. (I last wrote about GLUBS in a March 4, 2022 posting where it was included under the ‘Marine sound libraries’ subhead.)

The latest about GLUBS and aquatic sounds can be found in an April 26, 2023 Rockefeller University news release on EurekAlert, Note 1: I don’t usually include the heads but I quite like this one and even stole part of it for this posting; Note 2: There probably should have been more than one news release; Note 3: For anyone who doesn’t have time to read the entire news release, I have a link immediately following the news release to an informative and brief article about the work,

Do fish bay at the moon? Can their odd songs identify Hawaiian mystery fish? Eavesdropping scientists progress in recording, understanding ocean soundscapes

Using hydrophones to eavesdrop on a reef off the coast of Goa, India, researchers have helped advance a new low-cost way to monitor changes in the world’s murky marine environments.

Reporting their results in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), the scientists recorded the duration and timing of mating and feeding sounds – songs, croaks, trumpets and drums – of 21 of the world’s noise-making ocean species.

With artificial intelligence and other pioneering techniques to discern the calls of marine life, they recorded and identified

Some species within the underwater community work the early shift and ruckus from 3 am to 1.45 pm, others work the late shift and ruckus from 2 pm to 2.45 am, while the plankton predators were “strongly influenced by the moon.”

Also registered: the degree of difference in the abundance of marine life before and after a monsoon.

The paper concludes that hydrophones are a powerful tool and “overall classification performance (89%) is helpful in the real-time monitoring of the fish stocks in the ecosystem.”

The team, including Bishwajit Chakraborty, a leader of the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE), benefitted from archived recordings of marine species against which they could match what they heard, including:

Also captured was a “buzz” call of unknown origin (https://bit.ly/3GZdRSI), one of the oceans’ countless marine life mysteries.

With a contribution to the International Quiet Ocean Experiment, the research will be discussed at an IQOE meeting in Woods Hole, MA, USA, 26-27 April [2023].

Advancing the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS)

That event will be followed April 28-29 by a meeting of partners in the new Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS), a major legacy of the decade-long IQOE, ending in 2025.

GLUBS, conceived in late 2021 and currently under development, is designed as an open-access online platform to help collate global information and to broaden and standardize scientific and community knowledge of underwater soundscapes and their contributing sources.

It will help build short snippets and snapshots (minutes, hours, days long recordings) of biological, anthropogenic, and geophysical marine sounds into full-scale, tell-tale underwater baseline soundscapes.

Especially notable among many applications of insights from GLUBS information: the ability to detect in hard-to-see underwater environments and habitats how the distribution and behavior of marine life responds to increasing pressure from climate change, fishing, resource development, plastic, anthropogenic noise and other pollutants.

“Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is an effective technique for sampling aquatic systems that is particularly useful in deep, dark, turbid, and rapidly changing or remote locations,” says Miles Parsons of the Australian Institute of Marine Science and a leader of GLUBS.

He and colleagues outline two primary targets:

  • Produce and maintain a list of all aquatic species confirmed or anticipated to produce sound underwater;
  • Promote the reporting of sounds from unknown sources

Odd songs of Hawaii’s mystery fish

In this latter pursuit, GLUBS will also help reveal species unknown to science as yet and contribute to their eventual identification.

For example, newly added to the growing global collection of marine sounds are recent recordings from Hawaii, featuring the baffling

now part of an entire YouTube channel (https://bit.ly/3H5Ly54) dedicated to marine life sounds in Hawaii and elsewhere (e.g. this “complete and total mystery from the Florida Keys”: https://bit.ly/41w1Xbc (Annie Innes-Gold, Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology; processed by Jill Munger, Conservation Metrics, Inc.)

Says Dr. Parsons: “Unidentified sounds can provide valuable information on the richness of the soundscape, the acoustic communities that contribute to it and behavioral interactions among acoustic groups. However, unknown, cryptic and rare sounds are rarely target signals for research and monitoring projects and are, therefore, largely unreported.”

The many uses of underwater sound

Of the roughly 250,000 known marine species, scientists think all fully-aquatic marine mammals (~146, including sub-species) emit sounds, along with at least 100 invertebrates, 1,000 of the world’s ~35,000 known fish species, and likely many thousands more.

GLUBS aims to help delineate essential fish habitat and estimate biomass of a spawning aggregation of a commercially or recreationally important soniferous species.

In one scenario of its many uses, a one-year, calibrated recording can provide a proxy for the timing, location and, under certain circumstances, numbers of ‘calling’ fishes, and how these change throughout a spawning season.

It will also help evaluate the degradation and recovery of a coral reef.

GLUBS researchers envision, for example, collecting recordings from a coral reef that experienced a cyclone or other extreme weather event, followed by widespread bleaching. Throughout its restoration, GLUBS audio data would be matched with and augment a visual census of the fish assemblage at multiple timepoints.

Oil and gas, wind power and other offshore industries will also benefit from GLUBS’ timely information on the possible harms or benefits of their activities.

Other IQOE legacies include: 

  • Manta (bitbucket.org/CLO-BRP/manta-wiki/wiki/Home), a mechanism created by world experts from academia, industry, and government to help standardize ocean sound recording data, facilitating its comparability, pooling and visualization.
  • OPUS, an Open Portal to Underwater Sound being tested at Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany to promote the use of acoustic data collected worldwide, providing easy access to MANTA-processed data, and
  • The first comprehensive database and map of the world’s 200+ known hydrophones recording for ecological purposes 

Marine sounds and COVID-19

The IQOE’s early ambition of humanity’s maritime noise being minimized for a day or week was unexpectedly met in spades when the COVID-19 pandemic began.     

New IQOE research to be considered at the April meeting includes a paper, Impact of the COVID‑19 pandemic on levels of deep‑ocean acoustic noise (https://bit.ly/3KZTaIt) documenting a pandemic-related drop of 1 to 3 dB even in the depths of the abyss. With a 3 dB decrease, sound energy is halved.

Virus control measures led to “sudden and sometimes dramatic reductions in human activity in sectors such as transport, industry, energy, tourism, and construction,” with some of the greatest reductions from March to June 2020 – a drop of up to 13% in container ship traffic and up to 42% in passenger ships.

Other IQOE accomplishments include achieving recognition of ocean sound as an Essential Ocean Variable (EOV) within the Global Ocean Observing System, underlining its helpfulness in monitoring 

  • climate change (the extent and breakup of sea ice; the frequency and intensity of wind, waves and rain)
  • ocean health (biodiversity assessments: monitoring the distribution and abundance of sound-producing species)
  • impacts of human activities on wildlife, and
  • nuclear explosions, foreign/illegal/threatening vessels, human activities in protected areas, and underwater earthquakes that can generate tsunamis

The Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (POGO) funded an IQOE Working Group in 2016, which quickly identified the lack of ocean sound as a variable measured by ocean observing systems. This group developed specifications for an Ocean Sound Essential Ocean Variable (EOV) by 2018, which was approved by the Global Ocean Observing System in 2021. IQOE has since developed the Ocean Sound EOV Implementation Plan, reviewed in 2022 and ready for public debut at IQOE’s meeting April 26.

One of IQOE’s originators, Jesse Ausubel of The Rockefeller University’s Programme for the Human Environment, says the programme has drawn attention to the absence of publicly available time series of sound on ecologically important frequencies throughout the global ocean.

“We need to listen more in the blue symphony halls. Animal sounds are behavior, and we need to record and understand the sounds, if we want to know the status of ocean life,” he says.

The program “has provided a platform for the international passive acoustics community to grow stronger and advocate for inclusion of acoustic measurements in national, regional, and global ocean observing systems,” says Prof. Peter Tyack of the University of St. Andrew’s, who, with Steven Simpson, guide the IQOE International Scientific Steering Committee.

“The ocean acoustics and bioacoustics communities had no experience in working together globally, and coverage is certainly not global; there are many gaps. IQOE has begun to help these communities work together globally, and there is still progress to be made in networking and in expanding the deployment of hydrophones, adds Prof. Ausubel.

A description of the project’s history and evaluation to date is available at https://bit.ly/3H7FCbN.

Encouraging greater worldwide use of hydrophones

According to Dr. Parsons, “hydrophones are now being deployed in more locations, more often, by more people, than ever before,” 

To celebrate that, and to mark World Oceans Day, June 8 [2023], GLUBS recently put out a call to hydrophone operators to share marine life recordings made from 7 to 9 June, so far receiving interest from 124 hydrophone operators in 62 organizations from 29 countries and counting. The hydrophones will be retrieved over the following months with the full dataset expected sometime in 2024.

They also plan to make World Oceans Passive Acoustic Monitoring (WOPAM) Day an annual event – a global collaborative study of aquatic soundscapes, salt, brackish or freshwater – the marine world’s answer to the U.S. Audubon Society’s 123-year-old Christmas Bird Count.

Interested researchers with hydrophones [emphasis mine] already planned [sic] to be in the water on June 8 [2023] are invited to contact Miles Parsons (m.parsons@aims.gov.au) or Steve Simpson (s.simpson@bristol.ac.uk).

Becky Ferreira has written April 26, 2023 article for Motherboard that provides more insight into the work being done offshore in Goa and elsewhere,

…

To better understand the rich reef ecosystems of Goa, a team of researchers at the Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s National Institute of Oceanography (CSIR-NIO) placed a hydrophone near Grande Island at a depth of about 65 feet. Over the course of several days, the instrument captured hundreds of recordings of the choruses of “soniferous” (sound-making)fish, the high-frequency noises of shrimp, and the rumblings of boats passing near the area.

…

“Our research, for the longest time, predominantly involved active acoustics systems in understanding habitats (bottom roughness, etc., using multibeam sonar),” said Bishwajit Chakraborty, a marine scientist at CSIR-NIO who co-authored the study, in an email to Motherboard. “By using active sonar systems, we add sound signals to water media which severely affects marine life.” 

…

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper mentioned at the beginning of the news release,

Biodiversity assessment using passive acoustic recordings from off-reef location—Unsupervised learning to classify fish vocalization by Vasudev P. Mahale, Kranthikumar Chanda, Bishwajit Chakraborty; Tejas Salkar, G. B. Sreekanth. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Volume 153, Issue 3 March 2023 [alternate: J Acoust Soc Am 153, 1534–1553 (2023)] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0017248

This paper appears to be open access.

And, one more time,

Interested researchers with hydrophones [emphasis mine] already planned [sic] to be in the water on June 8 [2023] are invited to contact Miles Parsons (m.parsons@aims.gov.au) or Steve Simpson (s.simpson@bristol.ac.uk).

Canadian copyright quietly extended

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As of December 30, 2022, Canadian copyright (one of the three elements of intellectual property; the other two: patents and trademarks) will be extended for another 20 years.

Mike Masnick in his November 29, 2022 posting on Techdirt explains why this is contrary to the intentions for establishing copyright in the first place, Note: Links have been removed,

… it cannot make sense to extend copyright terms retroactively. The entire point of copyright law is to provide a limited monopoly on making copies of the work as an incentive to get the work produced. Assuming the work was produced, that says that the bargain that was struck was clearly enough of an incentive for the creator. They were told they’d receive that period of exclusivity and thus they created the work.

Going back and retroactively extending copyright then serves no purpose. Creators need no incentive for works already created. The only thing it does is steal from the public. That’s because the “deal” setup by governments creating copyright terms is between the public (who is temporarily stripped of their right to share knowledge freely) and the creator. But if we extend copyright term retroactively, the public then has their end of the bargain (“you will be free to share these works freely after such-and-such a date”) changed, with no recourse or compensation.

…

Canada has quietly done it: extending copyrights on literary, dramatic or musical works and engravings from life of the author plus 50 years year to life of the author plus 70 years. [emphasis mine]

…

Masnick pointed to a November 23, 2022 posting by Andrea on the Internet Archive Canada blog for how this will affect the Canadian public,

… we now know that this date has been fixed as December 30, 2022, meaning that no new works will enter the Canadian public domain for the next 20 years.

A whole generation of creative works will remain under copyright. This might seem like a win for the estates of popular, internationally known authors, but what about more obscure Canadian works and creators? With circulation over time often being the indicator of ‘value’, many 20th century works are being deselected from physical library collections. …

Edward A. McCourt (1907-1972) is an example of just one of these Canadian creators. Raised in Alberta and a graduate of the University of Alberta, Edward went on to be a Rhodes Scholar in 1932. In 1980, Winnifred Bogaards wrote that:

“[H]e recorded over a period of thirty years his particular vision of the prairies, the region of Canada which had irrevocably shaped his own life. In that time he published five novels and forty-three short stories set (with some exceptions among the earliest stories) in Western Canada, three juvenile works based on the Riel Rebellion, a travel book on Saskatchewan, several radio plays adapted from his western stories, The Canadian West in Fiction (the first critical study of the literature of the prairies), and a biography of the 19th century English soldier and adventurer, Sir William F. Butler… “

In Bogaards’ analysis of his work, “Edward McCourt: A Reassessment” published in the journal Studies in Canadian Literature, she notes that while McCourt has suffered in obscurity, he is often cited along with his contemporaries Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies and Irving Layton; Canadian literary stars. Incidentally, we will also wait an additional 20 years for their works to enter the public domain. The work of Rebecca Giblin, Jacob Flynn, and Francois Petitjean, looking at ‘What Happens When Books Enter the Public Domain?’ is relevant here. Their study shows concretely and empirically that extending copyright has no benefit to the public at all, and only benefits a very few wealthy, well known estates and companies. This term extension will not encourage the publishers of McCourt’s works to invest in making his writing available to a new generation of readers.

…

This 20 year extension can trace its roots to the trade agreement between the US, Mexico, and Canada (USMCA) that replaced the previous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as of July 1, 2020. This is made clear in Michael Geist’s May 2, 2022 Law Bytes podcast where he discusses with Lucie Guibault the (then proposed) Canadian extension in the context of international standards,

…

Lucie Guibault is an internationally renowned expert on international copyright law, a Professor of Law and Associate Dean at Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, and the Associate Director of the school’s Law and Technology Institute.

…

It’s always good to get some context and in that spirit, here’s more from Michael Geist’s May 2, 2022 Law Bytes podcast,

… Despite recommendations from its own copyright review, students, teachers, librarians, and copyright experts to include a registration requirement [emphasis mine] for the additional 20 years of protection, the government chose to extend term without including protection to mitigate against the harms.

…

Geist’s podcast discussion with Guibault, where she explains what a ‘registration requirement’ is and how it would work plus more, runs for almost 27 mins. (May 2, 2022 Law Bytes podcast). One final comment, visual artists and musicians are also affected by copyright rules.

FrogHeart’s 2022 comes to an end as 2023 comes into view

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I look forward to 2023 and hope it will be as stimulating as 2022 proved to be. Here’s an overview of the year that was on this blog:

Sounds of science

It seems 2022 was the year that science discovered the importance of sound and the possibilities of data sonification. Neither is new but this year seemed to signal a surge of interest or maybe I just happened to stumble onto more of the stories than usual.

This is not an exhaustive list, you can check out my ‘Music’ category for more here. I have tried to include audio files with the postings but it all depends on how accessible the researchers have made them.

Aliens on earth: machinic biology and/or biological machinery?

When I first started following stories in 2008 (?) about technology or machinery being integrated with the human body, it was mostly about assistive technologies such as neuroprosthetics. You’ll find most of this year’s material in the ‘Human Enhancement’ category or you can search the tag ‘machine/flesh’.

However, the line between biology and machine became a bit more blurry for me this year. You can see what’s happening in the titles listed below (you may recognize the zenobot story; there was an earlier version of xenobots featured here in 2021):

This was the story that shook me,

Are the aliens going to come from outer space or are we becoming the aliens?

Brains (biological and otherwise), AI, & our latest age of anxiety

As we integrate machines into our bodies, including our brains, there are new issues to consider:

  • Going blind when your neural implant company flirts with bankruptcy (long read) April 5, 2022 posting
  • US National Academies Sept. 22-23, 2022 workshop on techno, legal & ethical issues of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) September 21, 2022 posting

I hope the US National Academies issues a report on their “Brain-Machine and Related Neural Interface Technologies: Scientific, Technical, Ethical, and Regulatory Issues – A Workshop” for 2023.

Meanwhile the race to create brainlike computers continues and I have a number of posts which can be found under the category of ‘neuromorphic engineering’ or you can use these search terms ‘brainlike computing’ and ‘memristors’.

On the artificial intelligence (AI) side of things, I finally broke down and added an ‘artificial intelligence (AI) category to this blog sometime between May and August 2021. Previously, I had used the ‘robots’ category as a catchall. There are other stories but these ones feature public engagement and policy (btw, it’s a Canadian Science Policy Centre event), respectively,

  • “The “We are AI” series gives citizens a primer on AI” March 23, 2022 posting
  • “Age of AI and Big Data – Impact on Justice, Human Rights and Privacy Zoom event on September 28, 2022 at 12 – 1:30 pm EDT” September 16, 2022 posting

These stories feature problems, which aren’t new but seem to be getting more attention,

While there have been issues over AI, the arts, and creativity previously, this year they sprang into high relief. The list starts with my two-part review of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s AI show; I share most of my concerns in part two. The third post covers intellectual property issues (mostly visual arts but literary arts get a nod too). The fourth post upends the discussion,

  • “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Artificial Intelligence at the Vancouver (Canada) Art Gallery (1 of 2): The Objects” July 28, 2022 posting
  • “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Artificial Intelligence at the Vancouver (Canada) Art Gallery (2 of 2): Meditations” July 28, 2022 posting
  • “AI (artificial intelligence) and art ethics: a debate + a Botto (AI artist) October 2022 exhibition in the Uk” October 24, 2022 posting
  • Should AI algorithms get patents for their inventions and is anyone talking about copyright for texts written by AI algorithms? August 30, 2022 posting

Interestingly, most of the concerns seem to be coming from the visual and literary arts communities; I haven’t come across major concerns from the music community. (The curious can check out Vancouver’s Metacreation Lab for Artificial Intelligence [located on a Simon Fraser University campus]. I haven’t seen any cautionary or warning essays there; it’s run by an AI and creativity enthusiast [professor Philippe Pasquier]. The dominant but not sole focus is art, i.e., music and AI.)

There is a ‘new kid on the block’ which has been attracting a lot of attention this month. If you’re curious about the latest and greatest AI anxiety,

  • Peter Csathy’s December 21, 2022 Yahoo News article (originally published in The WRAP) makes this proclamation in the headline “Chat GPT Proves That AI Could Be a Major Threat to Hollywood Creatives – and Not Just Below the Line | PRO Insight”
  • Mouhamad Rachini’s December 15, 2022 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) online news overs a more generalized overview of the ‘new kid’ along with an embedded CBC Radio file which runs approximately 19 mins. 30 secs. It’s titled “ChatGPT a ‘landmark event’ for AI, but what does it mean for the future of human labour and disinformation?” The chat bot’s developer, OpenAI, has been mentioned here many times including the previously listed July 28, 2022 posting (part two of the VAG review) and the October 24, 2022 posting.

Opposite world (quantum physics in Canada)

Quantum computing made more of an impact here (my blog) than usual. it started in 2021 with the announcement of a National Quantum Strategy in the Canadian federal government budget for that year and gained some momentum in 2022:

  • “Quantum Mechanics & Gravity conference (August 15 – 19, 2022) launches Vancouver (Canada)-based Quantum Gravity Institute and more” July 26, 2022 posting Note: This turned into one of my ‘in depth’ pieces where I comment on the ‘Canadian quantum scene’ and highlight the appointment of an expert panel for the Council of Canada Academies’ report on Quantum Technologies.
  • “Bank of Canada and Multiverse Computing model complex networks & cryptocurrencies with quantum computing” July 25, 2022 posting
  • “Canada, quantum technology, and a public relations campaign?” December 29, 2022 posting

This one was a bit of a puzzle with regard to placement in this end-of-year review, it’s quantum but it’s also about brainlike computing

It’s getting hot in here

Fusion energy made some news this year.

There’s a Vancouver area company, General Fusion, highlighted in both postings and the October posting includes an embedded video of Canadian-born rapper Baba Brinkman’s “You Must LENR” [L ow E nergy N uclear R eactions or sometimes L attice E nabled N anoscale R eactions or Cold Fusion or CANR (C hemically A ssisted N uclear R eactions)].

BTW, fusion energy can generate temperatures up to 150 million degrees Celsius.

Ukraine, science, war, and unintended consequences

Here’s what you might expect,

These are the unintended consequences (from Rachel Kyte’s, Dean of the Fletcher School, Tufts University, December 26, 2022 essay on The Conversation [h/t December 27, 2022 news item on phys.org]), Note: Links have been removed,

…

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has reverberated through Europe and spread to other countries that have long been dependent on the region for natural gas. But while oil-producing countries and gas lobbyists are arguing for more drilling, global energy investments reflect a quickening transition to cleaner energy. [emphasis mine]

Call it the Putin effect – Russia’s war is speeding up the global shift away from fossil fuels.

In December [2022?], the International Energy Agency [IEA] published two important reports that point to the future of renewable energy.

First, the IEA revised its projection of renewable energy growth upward by 30%. It now expects the world to install as much solar and wind power in the next five years as it installed in the past 50 years.

The second report showed that energy use is becoming more efficient globally, with efficiency increasing by about 2% per year. As energy analyst Kingsmill Bond at the energy research group RMI noted, the two reports together suggest that fossil fuel demand may have peaked. While some low-income countries have been eager for deals to tap their fossil fuel resources, the IEA warns that new fossil fuel production risks becoming stranded, or uneconomic, in the next 20 years.

…

Kyte’s essay is not all ‘sweetness and light’ but it does provide a little optimism.

Kudos, nanotechnology, culture (pop & otherwise), fun, and a farewell in 2022

This one was a surprise for me,

Sometimes I like to know where the money comes from and I was delighted to learn of the Ărramăt Project funded through the federal government’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF). Here’s more about the Ărramăt Project from the February 14, 2022 posting,

…

“The Ărramăt Project is about respecting the inherent dignity and interconnectedness of peoples and Mother Earth, life and livelihood, identity and expression, biodiversity and sustainability, and stewardship and well-being. Arramăt is a word from the Tamasheq language spoken by the Tuareg people of the Sahel and Sahara regions which reflects this holistic worldview.” (Mariam Wallet Aboubakrine)

Over 150 Indigenous organizations, universities, and other partners will work together to highlight the complex problems of biodiversity loss and its implications for health and well-being. The project Team will take a broad approach and be inclusive of many different worldviews and methods for research (i.e., intersectionality, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary). Activities will occur in 70 different kinds of ecosystems that are also spiritually, culturally, and economically important to Indigenous Peoples.

The project is led by Indigenous scholars and activists …

Kudos to the federal government and all those involved in the Salmon science camps, the Ărramăt Project, and other NFRF projects.

There are many other nanotechnology posts here but this appeals to my need for something lighter at this point,

  • “Say goodbye to crunchy (ice crystal-laden) in ice cream thanks to cellulose nanocrystals (CNC)” August 22, 2022 posting

The following posts tend to be culture-related, high and/or low but always with a science/nanotechnology edge,

Sadly, it looks like 2022 is the last year that Ada Lovelace Day is to be celebrated.

… this year’s Ada Lovelace Day is the final such event due to lack of financial backing. Suw Charman-Anderson told the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] the reason it was now coming to an end was:

You can read more about it here:

In the rearview mirror

A few things that didn’t fit under the previous heads but stood out for me this year. Science podcasts, which were a big feature in 2021, also proliferated in 2022. I think they might have peaked and now (in 2023) we’ll see what survives.

Nanotechnology, the main subject on this blog, continues to be investigated and increasingly integrated into products. You can search the ‘nanotechnology’ category here for posts of interest something I just tried. It surprises even me (I should know better) how broadly nanotechnology is researched and applied.

If you want a nice tidy list, Hamish Johnston in a December 29, 2022 posting on the Physics World Materials blog has this “Materials and nanotechnology: our favourite research in 2022,” Note: Links have been removed,

“Inherited nanobionics” makes its debut

The integration of nanomaterials with living organisms is a hot topic, which is why this research on “inherited nanobionics” is on our list. Ardemis Boghossian at EPFL [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne] in Switzerland and colleagues have shown that certain bacteria will take up single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). What is more, when the bacteria cells split, the SWCNTs are distributed amongst the daughter cells. The team also found that bacteria containing SWCNTs produce a significantly more electricity when illuminated with light than do bacteria without nanotubes. As a result, the technique could be used to grow living solar cells, which as well as generating clean energy, also have a negative carbon footprint when it comes to manufacturing.

…

Getting to back to Canada, I’m finding Saskatchewan featured more prominently here. They do a good job of promoting their science, especially the folks at the Canadian Light Source (CLS), Canada’s synchrotron, in Saskatoon. Canadian live science outreach events seeming to be coming back (slowly). Cautious organizers (who have a few dollars to spare) are also enthusiastic about hybrid events which combine online and live outreach.

After what seems like a long pause, I’m stumbling across more international news, e.g. “Nigeria and its nanotechnology research” published December 19, 2022 and “China and nanotechnology” published September 6, 2022. I think there’s also an Iran piece here somewhere.

With that …

Making resolutions in the dark

Hopefully this year I will catch up with the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) output and finally review a few of their 2021 reports such as Leaps and Boundaries; a report on artificial intelligence applied to science inquiry and, perhaps, Powering Discovery; a report on research funding and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Given what appears to a renewed campaign to have germline editing (gene editing which affects all of your descendants) approved in Canada, I might even reach back to a late 2020 CCA report, Research to Reality; somatic gene and engineered cell therapies. it’s not the same as germline editing but gene editing exists on a continuum.

For anyone who wants to see the CCA reports for themselves they can be found here (both in progress and completed).

I’m also going to be paying more attention to how public relations and special interests influence what science is covered and how it’s covered. In doing this 2022 roundup, I noticed that I featured an overview of fusion energy not long before the breakthrough. Indirect influence on this blog?

My post was precipitated by an article by Alex Pasternak in Fast Company. I’m wondering what precipitated Alex Pasternack’s interest in fusion energy since his self-description on the Huffington Post website states this “… focus on the intersections of science, technology, media, politics, and culture. My writing about those and other topics—transportation, design, media, architecture, environment, psychology, art, music … .”

He might simply have received a press release that stimulated his imagination and/or been approached by a communications specialist or publicists with an idea. There’s a reason for why there are so many public relations/media relations jobs and agencies.

Que sera, sera (Whatever will be, will be)

I can confidently predict that 2023 has some surprises in store. I can also confidently predict that the European Union’s big research projects (1B Euros each in funding for the Graphene Flagship and Human Brain Project over a ten year period) will sunset in 2023, ten years after they were first announced in 2013. Unless, the powers that be extend the funding past 2023.

I expect the Canadian quantum community to provide more fodder for me in the form of a 2023 report on Quantum Technologies from the Council of Canadian academies, if nothing else otherwise.

I’ve already featured these 2023 science events but just in case you missed them,

  • 2023 Preview: Bill Nye the Science Guy’s live show and Marvel Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N. (Scientific Training And Tactical Intelligence Operative Network) coming to Vancouver (Canada) November 24, 2022 posting
  • September 2023: Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand set to welcome women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) November 15, 2022 posting

Getting back to this blog, it may not seem like a new year during the first few weeks of 2023 as I have quite the stockpile of draft posts. At this point I have drafts that are dated from June 2022 and expect to be burning through them so as not to fall further behind but will be interspersing them, occasionally, with more current posts.

Most importantly: a big thank you to everyone who drops by and reads (and sometimes even comments) on my posts!!! it’s very much appreciated and on that note: I wish you all the best for 2023.

World’s smallest record features Christmas classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”

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Scientists like to have a little fun too as this December 23, 2022 news item on Nanowerk shows,

Measuring only 40 micrometres in diameter, researchers at DTU Physics have made the smallest record ever cut. Featuring the first 25 seconds of the Christmas classic “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” [sic], the single is cut using a new nano-sculpting machine – the Nanofrazor – recently acquired from Heidelberg Instruments. The Nanofrazor can engrave 3D patterns into surfaces with nanoscale resolution, allowing the researchers to create new nanostructures that may pave the way for novel technologies in fields such as quantum devices, magnetic sensors and electron optics.

”I have done lithography for 30 years, and although we’ve had this machine for a while, it still feels like science fiction. We’ve done many experiments, like making a copy of the Mona Lisa in a 12 by 16-micrometre area with a pixel size of ten nanometers. We’ve also printed an image of DTU’s founder – Hans Christian Ørsted – in an 8 by 12-micrometre size with a pixel size of 2.540.000 DPI. To get an idea of the scale we are working at, we could write our signatures on a red blood cell with this thing,” says Professor Peter Bøggild from DTU Physics.

“The most radical thing is that we can create free-form 3D landscapes at that crazy resolution – this grey-scale nanolithography is a true game-changer for our research”.

…

The scientists show how they inscribed the song onto the world’s smallest record (Note 1: You will not hear the song. Note 2: i don’t know how many times I’ve seen news releases about audio files (a recorded song, fish singing, etc.) that are not included … sigh),

A December 22, 2022 Technical University of Denmark press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides detail about the work,

Nanoscale Christmas record – in stereo
The Nanofrazor is not like a printer adding material to a medium; instead, it works like a CNC (computer numerical controle) machine removing material at precise locations, leaving the desired shape behind. In the case of the miniature pictures of Mona Lisa and H.C. Ørsted, the final image is defined by the line-by-line removal of polymer until a perfect grey-scale image emerges. To Peter Bøggild, an amateur musician and vinyl record enthusiast, the idea of cutting a nanoscale record was obvious.

“We decided that we might as well try and print a record. We’ve taken a snippet of Rocking Around The Christmas Tree and have cut it just like you would cut a normal record—although, since we’re working on the nanoscale, this one isn’t playable on your average turntable. The Nanofrazor was put to work as a record-cutting lathe – converting an audio signal into a spiralled groove on the surface of the medium. In this case, the medium is a different polymer than vinyl. We even encoded the music in stereo – the lateral wriggles is the left channel, whereas the depth modulation contains the right channel. It may be too impractical and expensive to become a hit record. To read the groove, you need a rather costly atomic force microscope or the Nanofrazor, but it is definitely doable.”

High-speed, low-cost nanostructures

The NOVO Foundation grant BIOMAG, which made the Nanofrazor dream possible, is not about cutting Christmas records or printing images of famous people. Peter Bøggild and his colleagues, Tim Booth and Nolan Lassaline, have other plans. They expect that the Nanofrazor will allow them to sculpt 3D nanostructures in extremely precise detail and do so at high speed and low cost – something that is impossible with existing tools.

“We work with 2D materials, and when these ultrathin materials are carefully laid down on the 3D landscapes, they follow the contours of the surface. In short, they curve, and that is a powerful and entirely new way of “programming” materials to do things that no one would believe were possible just fifteen years ago. For instance, when curved in just the right way, graphene behaves as if there is a giant magnetic field when there is, in fact, none. And we can curve it just the right way with the Nanofrazor,” says Peter Bøggild.

Associate professor Tim Booth adds:

“The fact that we can now accurately shape the surfaces with nanoscale precision at pretty much the speed of imagination is a game changer for us. We have many ideas for what to do next and believe that this machine will significantly speed up the prototyping of new structures. Our main goal is to develop novel magnetic sensors for detecting currents in the living brain within the BIOMAG project. Still, we also look forward to creating precisely sculpted potential landscapes with which we can better control electron waves. There is much work to do.”

Postdoc Nolan Lassaline (who cut the Christmas record), was recently awarded a DKK 2 Mio. VILLUM EXPERIMENT grant to create “quantum soap bubbles” in graphene. He will use the grant – and the Nanofrazor – to explore new ways of structuring nanomaterials and develop novel ways of manipulating electrons in atomically thin materials.

“Quantum soap bubbles are smooth electronic potentials where we add artificially tailored disorders. By doing so, we can manipulate how electrons flow in graphene. We hope to understand how electrons move in engineered disordered potentials and explore if this could become a new platform for advanced neural networks and quantum information processing.”

The Nanofrazor system is now part of the DTU Physics NANOMADE’s unique fabrication facility for air-sensitive 2D materials and devices and part of E-MAT, a greater ecosystem for air-sensitive nanomaterials processing and fabrication led by Prof. Nini Pryds, DTU Energy.

While it’s not an audio file from the smallest record, this features Brenda Lee (who first recorded the song in 1958) in a ‘singalong’ version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,”

Bøggild was last featured here in a December 24, 2021 posting “Season’s Greetings with the world’s thinnest Christmas tree.”

Have a lovely Christmas/Winter Solstice/Kwanzaa/Hannukah/Saturnalia/??? celebration!

Physics of a singing saw could lead to applications in sensing, nanoelectronics, photonics, etc.

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I’d forgotten how haunting a musical saw can sound,

An April 22, 2022 news item on Nanowerk announces research into the possibilities of a singing saw,

The eerie, ethereal sound of the singing saw has been a part of folk music traditions around the globe, from China to Appalachia, since the proliferation of cheap, flexible steel in the early 19th century. Made from bending a metal hand saw and bowing it like a cello, the instrument reached its heyday on the vaudeville stages of the early 20th century and has seen a resurgence thanks, in part, to social media.

As it turns out, the unique mathematical physics of the singing saw may hold the key to designing high quality resonators for a range of applications.

In a new paper, a team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Physics used the singing saw to demonstrate how the geometry of a curved sheet, like curved metal, could be tuned to create high-quality, long-lasting oscillations for applications in sensing, nanoelectronics, photonics and more.

An April 21, 2022 Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) news release by Leah Burrows (also on EurekAlert but published on April 22, 2022) delves further into physics of singing saws,

“Our research offers a robust principle to design high-quality resonators independent of scale and material, from macroscopic musical instruments to nanoscale devices, simply through a combination of geometry and topology,” said L Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics and senior author of the study.

…

While all musical instruments are acoustic resonators of a kind, none work quite like the singing saw.

“How the singing saw sings is based on a surprising effect,” said Petur Bryde, a graduate student at SEAS and co-first author of the paper. “When you strike a flat elastic sheet, such as a sheet of metal, the entire structure vibrates. The energy is quickly lost through the boundary where it is held, resulting in a dull sound that dissipates quickly. The same result is observed if you curve it into a J-shape. But, if you bend the sheet into an S-shape, you can make it vibrate in a very small area, which produces a clear, long-lasting tone.”

The geometry of the curved saw creates what musicians call the sweet spot and what physicists call localized vibrational modes — a confined area on the sheet which resonates without losing energy at the edges.

Importantly, the specific geometry of the S-curve doesn’t matter. It could be an S with a big curve at the top and a small curve at the bottom or visa versa. 

“Musicians and researchers have known about this robust effect of geometry for some time, but the underlying mechanisms have remained a mystery,” said Suraj Shankar, a Harvard Junior Fellow in Physics and SEAS and co-first author of the study.  “We found a mathematical argument that explains how and why this robust effect exists with any shape within this class, so that the details of the shape are unimportant, and the only fact that matters is that there is a reversal of curvature along the saw.”

Shankar, Bryde and Mahadevan found that explanation via an analogy to very different class of physical systems — topological insulators. Most often associated with quantum physics, topological insulators are materials that conduct electricity in their surface or edge but not in the middle and no matter how you cut these materials, they will always conduct on their edges.

“In this work, we drew a mathematical analogy between the acoustics of bent sheets and these quantum and electronic systems,” said Shankar.

By using the mathematics of topological systems, the researchers found that the localized vibrational modes in the sweet spot of singing saw were governed by a topological parameter that can be computed and which relies on nothing more than the existence of two opposite curves in the material. The sweet spot then behaves like an internal “edge” in the saw.

“By using experiments, theoretical and numerical analysis, we showed that the S-curvature in a thin shell can localize topologically-protected modes at the ‘sweet spot’ or inflection line, similar to exotic edge states in topological insulators,” said Bryde. “This phenomenon is material independent, meaning it will appear in steel, glass or even graphene.”

The researchers also found that they could tune the localization of the mode by changing the shape of the S-curve, which is important in applications such as sensing, where you need a resonator that is tuned to very specific frequencies.

Next, the researchers aim to explore localized modes in doubly curved structures, such as bells and other shapes.

…

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Geometric control of topological dynamics in a singing saw by Suraj Shankar, Petur Bryde, and L. Mahadevan. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) April 21, 2022 | 119 (17) e2117241119 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117241119

This paper is open (free) access.