Thoughts on Noise Control Engineering Graduate Students' Plans of Study

Designing a graduate curriculum in noise control is challenging because noise control is multidimensional and multidisciplinary in nature. It encompasses modeling of how sound is generated and passes through materials and systems, whose performance is often controlled by the material microstructure and system connections, through to modeling of how sound is perceived and evaluated by people, as well as use of these models in machinery noise optimization. Reproduction of sounds fields in simulated realistic environments and decomposition of measured sound fields into spatially distributed source contributions are both areas that require a strong measurements, instrumentation and mathematical basis. Successful simulations and reduced order source model selection must be coupled to an understanding of people's perception of simulated versus actual sound fields to understand sensitivity to artifacts in the simulated sounds. So even with this very brief description of aspects of noise control, we have touched upon many, but certainly not all, aspects of what we might want to cover in an ideal noise control graduate curriculum. The challenges, including time to graduation, of designing a curriculum that equips students with a fundamental understanding of acoustical phenomena so that they can address new noise control problems are discussed.