Sound and Human

The Opportunity

Sound is a huge business that almost no student studies as a scientist. Recorded music alone brings in more than $30 billion a year (IFPI). Around it sits everything that makes and shapes sound: a multi-billion-dollar market for instruments, amplifiers, microphones, and hi-fi gear (Steinway and Yamaha pianos; Gibson, Fender, and Taylor guitars; Eastman and Stentor strings; Pearl drums and Zildjian cymbals; Shure mics; Sonos, KEF, and Bose speakers), and roughly $16 billion a year in acoustic treatment and soundproofing for rooms, studios, and buildings.

All of that runs on people who understand sound as a system: instrument and audio-gear design, studio and live engineering, acoustic consulting, noise control, and psychoacoustics work at audio companies like Sony, Dolby, and Sennheiser. Almost no one reaches those fields having done real acoustics research as a teenager.

And the open questions are everywhere within reach. The forward physics is settled: how a guitar body couples to the air inside it, how a drumhead's modes are set by tension, how a room's dimensions fix its resonances. What is not settled is the harder half: predicting a finished instrument's tone from its design, and what a listener can actually tell apart. That research splits two ways, mechanism and perception, and this lab works on both.

You are well placed for it, on both sides. You can produce the exact sound on demand, the same note or stroke or phrase, which makes you both the experimenter and the source, exactly what a real acoustic experiment needs. And a trained ear hears differences most listeners miss, so you can run the listening tests the perception side depends on and judge what is actually audible.

What You Get

Standing on real science. You ground your own question in published work and push it one honest step further. Research advances not by inventing from nothing, but by building on what is known.

A scientist's question, not a shopper's. “Which microphone is best” has a one-off answer. “Which features of a voice carry its identity, and which does a microphone alter” is science: it generalizes, it has a mechanism, it can be wrong.

Doable without a dedicated lab. A USB measurement microphone, free software (Audacity, Room EQ Wizard, Python), headphones, and instruments you already own, plus cheap builds like a cigar-box guitar. Acoustics is hands-on experimental science you can do properly this way.

A real publication and presentation pathway. A genuine result is something you can submit to the SoTS journal, present at the conference, and talk about honestly in a college application.

What Students Do

The question is yours, and finding it is most of the work. It starts from your own ear and curiosity: something your playing made you wonder about, or just a pull toward how sound works. These questions don't have answer keys. The mentor helps you sharpen a question you care about and connect it to what is known. From there the work is hands-on and yours: you measure, model, build, and run listening tests, then choose your methods, analyze, write it up, and aim to publish.

Some Examples of Studies in This Area

The settled physics is not the research, and “which product is better” is not science. The studies below are examples, not assignments, grouped by how instruments and rooms work, how sound is heard, and the claims worth testing, each sized to what an advanced high schooler can do with simple gear. Your own question will be narrower, and it will be yours.

Mechanism: how instruments and rooms work

• The body as coupled oscillators. An acoustic guitar's low notes come from the top plate and the cavity air resonating together, a coupled system. The open question behind all lutherie: why does a finished instrument still resist prediction from its separate parts?
• Soundhole geometry. A 2015 study (Nia and colleagues, Proc. R. Soc. A) found a violin's air resonance tracks the sound hole's perimeter, not its area. Does that hold for shapes no one has measured?
• A drummer's stroke. A membrane's modes are set by its tension and selected by where it is struck (Rossing), and drummers shape a stroke's sound in systematic, individual ways (Danielsen, 2015). How does your own playing map onto the physics?
• Printed instruments. How 3D-print infill, orientation, and material change a body's resonances is barely in the literature, so a careful study here is close to genuinely novel.
• The room as an instrument. A church, a hall, even a stairwell colors sound through its reverberation and resonances. Measure the acoustics of a space near you, then test how it reshapes a note played inside it.

Perception: how sound is heard

• Identity in a single note. Players are physically individual, with an “acoustical signature” a listener can hear even on isolated notes (Chadefaux and Le Carrou on harpists, 2012; Woodhouse on plucking, 2004). Which measured features of the sound carry that identity, and what is the limit of what a listener can hear? For drummers it is nearly untouched.
• When two sounds become one. Spectral-centroid similarity and onset synchrony predict whether instruments fuse into one voice (McAdams and the ACTOR project). How does detuning push a section from one perceived source to many?
• What the ear can resolve. In double-blind tests, expert soloists could not reliably tell six Old Italian violins (five by Stradivari) from six new ones, and the most-preferred was new (Fritz and colleagues, 2014). What physically differs between instruments when you measure them, and how much of that can a listener actually hear?
• Why the same level annoys differently. Dose-response curves link sound level to annoyance and sleep disruption (WHO, 2018; Basner and McGuire, 2018), yet the same level disturbs differently depending on the source. The real science under “soundproofing.”

Claims worth testing: gear, treatments, and the words people use

• A marketed tone treatment. Yamaha's Acoustic Resonance Enhancement (A.R.E.) uses heat, humidity, and pressure to make new wood behave like decades-old wood, and other makers sell their own heat-treated (“torrefied”) tops. Does any of it measurably change an instrument's resonances, and can anyone hear the difference?
• Gear, measured not marketed. A volunteer community at Audio Science Review measures headphones, microphones, and speakers in the open to check makers' claims, a science-type effort run outside any lab. Take a piece of gear you use: measure its response yourself, then test how well those numbers predict what you and others actually prefer.
• Monitors versus the living room. Studio monitors aim for a flat, accurate response in a treated room; home speakers are voiced to sound pleasant in an ordinary, reflective one. How much of what you hear is the speaker and how much is the room, and what should “accurate” even mean?
• The words for sound. Players and listeners call sounds warm, bright, harsh, or clinical, but do those words map onto measurable features, and do two people mean the same thing by them? Brightness tracks the spectral centroid; most such words are barely pinned down.

Mentor

Dr. Sergey Samsonau

• Trained 100+ students in research methodology at NYU
• Built and directed research labs program at PRISMS (top USA high school)
• Led AI projects at financial, medical, and educational institutions
• Conceptualized and organized AI Meets Science NYC-metro area conference
• Developer of original research education methodologies
• Trained vocalist

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With input from Olga Vine, a trained musician on the SoTS team.

Prerequisites

• You play or sing seriously: youth orchestra, band, jazz, choir, drumline, a group with friends, or recording at home all count
• Curious about why and how your sound is what it is, not just how to make it
• Willing to read into a real literature and design your own study, not follow pre-made assignments
• Commitment to weekly meetings and work between sessions

No prior research experience required. No physics background required. You pick up the measurement, modeling, and analysis your project needs as you go.

General Details on SoTS Research Labs

• About
• 10 Reasons
• Research & College
• How It Works
• Certificate
• Expectations
• Refund Policy

Enrollment and Cost

Available in In-person and Hybrid formats, in Fall, Spring, and Summer semesters. See Princeton Labs enrollment for full details and the schedule call.

You already make the sound. Now ask the question no one has answered yet.

Outside the Princeton, NJ area? Hybrid lets students anywhere participate in authentic weekly research: Zoom sessions plus a few half-day in-person visits per semester. See Princeton Labs enrollment for details.