American Scientist

When a full orchestra starts playing while you are sitting in a large concert hall, the music can feel like it’s physically surrounding you. The sound waves are bouncing around the room, creating reflections that hit you from all sides with varying intensity. For decades, acousticians have attempted to re-create the same complex experience with recordings and stereo technology, so that listeners can get that feeling of being enveloped with music at home as often as they’d like. Multiple speaker setups can create some of the illusion, especially when replaying speech, but a virtual concert hall impression remains elusive. Part of the problem is that judgments of sound quality are subjective and difficult to quantify. But in “The Science of Hi-Fi Audio," John G. Beerends and Richard van Everdingen describe new research with directed speakers (as shown below) that take advantage of the acoustics of reflected sound, to produce a more realistic listening experience.

Music may be a matter of personal preference, but in science, the standards by which we judge new research findings are meant to be consistent and unbiased. That goal is part of the reason for the development of the peer-review system in research. But as Robert Pennock describes in “After Peer Review” (Science and Engineering Values), the process of peer review has evolved over time, and the ways in which scientific research is deemed to be valid and distributed publicly are also expanding. Peer review is a useful tool, says Pennock, but referees should clearly understand what it can and cannot do.

A better grasp of the process of doing science is the objective of a new column that is being launched in this issue, called Scientific Method. In future installments of this column, authors will explore themes across research and delve into ongoing challenges and outstanding debates, everything from experimental setup and data gathering, to questions about how to interpret results, to philosophical discussions about the purpose of research itself. In “Finding the Rules that Work,” Richard Fiene takes on the topic of regulatory science, discussing which rules actually improve quality. Do you have a suggestion for a topic we should cover in this new column? Write to us through our website to let us know.