In the lecture on Friday, October 25th, the magic of sound was unveiled by Jeff Oishi, a research scientist in AMNH, who vividly showed that sound waves could be decomposed into simple sinusoidal plane waves. With the help of specific frequency-analyzing software, the differences among various types of sounds, such as whistles, noises, singing were visualized based on their amplitudes and frequencies (pitch). Jeff also introduced an application of sound waves in asteroseismology, by which means the internal structures of stars wound be known since sound waves wound present different oscillation modes when propagating through different depths.
After the lecture, discussions on topics such as interpretations of sound waves’ propagation and the earth tides took place between the speaker and the audience. In addition, the weather was so amazingly good that a lot of visitors went up to the roof to enjoy the observations of Altair, Albireo, Vega, and the Owl Cluster.
Volunteers on Friday night included graduate students Jingjing Chen in the lecture hall and Susan Clark, Steph Douglas, Ron Tso, Tze Gho and David Jaimes on the roof.
— Yong Zheng (graduate student)
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