Last week the conference Forum Acusticum 2014 took place in the city of Krakow, Poland. From Monday till Friday there were presentations as well as meetings of technical committees. The presentations covered a wide range of topics like structural acoustics, human response and auralisation.
A special session was organised on Urban Sound Planning as well, in which many of my project members presented their current work. I'm glad a lot of people attended the session.
I gave a presentation with the title Modelling sound propagation in the presence of turbulence for the auralisation of aircraft noise in a session on Environmental Acoustics. This session was Friday morning early, which was a bit unfortunate, considering there was a nice party with the Young Acousticians Network the evening before. I was surprised there were still so many people that morning!
On Thursday I joined a discussion on benchmarking for computational acoustics. When implementing a model you would like to be able to validate this. This can sometimes be difficult due to lack of available information or benchmarks. Therefore, the idea is now to put online some kind of repository where people can put their benchmarks. Considering this is a topic of interest in other fields of science I am really curious how they deal with this.
The city of Krakow surprised me a lot. It's quite a green city and there seems to be a good and relaxed mood. There's plenty of pubs and restaurants, especially around the main square which is huge.
Anyway, that's my summary on FA2014!