CETA Grads Win Acoustics Award

Two recent graduates of CETA, Jonathan Silver and Robert Tanen, won the Best Student Paper Award competition held at the 156th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), recently held in Miami, Florida. This is the second year in a row that CETA students have won this award; last year Samantha “Sammi” Rawlings, ’07, and Joshua Magee, ’07, took first prize. Both years, the work our undergraduates reported on beat the work of graduate students from other schools in the competition. During the conference, a subcommittee of ASA judges anonymously attended the sessions at which presentations were made and scored the participants on the content of the papers and the quality of the presentations.

Robert Tanen and Jonathan Silver

Silver and Tannen did work building on that done by Rawlings and Magee, who studied the acoustic signatures of footfall noise. This year’s winners created additional floor profiles and correlated the results of human walkers to the sounds produced by a standard tapping machine, then compared the footfalls’ airborne noise to the amount of vibration produced in the floor beneath each test subject. The studies were run in the Reverberation Room in CETA’s Acoustics Engineering Laboratory as part of a second research grant from the Paul S. Veneklasen Research Foundation. The grant was obtained by the students’ advisor and program director of the Acoustical Engineering and Music Program in CETA, Dr. Robert Celmer, professor of mechanical engineering.

Silver, who graduated summa cum laude in May 2008 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with an acoustics concentration, is now attending graduate school at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Tanen graduated magna cum laude in May 2008 with a Bacnelor of Science in Engineering majoring in acoustical engineering and music. He works as an acoustical engineering with Shen, Milsom & Wilke Consultants, Inc., in New York City.