Why study Acoustics?

Acoustics is a very niche area of physics that only two universities teach in the UK. Whenever I tell someone I study acoustics they assume I do a music based course, the common response being ‘is that like music????’. Let me clear this up right now. No. It is not like music. My course consists of maths, electronics, maths, programming, maths, signal processing, and maths.  Now that I have made it sound appealing I’ll talk a little bit about why it is in fact a very good area of physics to specialise in.

Jobs, lots of jobs.

As I mentioned, acoustics is a very niche area of physics but it is actually used in all forms of applications. A large area is dealing with environmental noise which is what a lot of acoustic consultancies specialise in. There is a huge demand for acousticians and there just aren’t enough being produced to satisfy the demand at the moment.

A more vast topic than you’d first think

Before I started studying acoustics I truly didn’t expect there to be such varied opportunities I could go into with an acoustics degree. The standing wave experiment we all had to do in GCSE and A Level physics doesn’t really represent acoustics to its full extent, and with the physics curriculum needing to cover so many topics already, it is hard to truly be inspired and look to acoustics. Some areas you can go into are as follows: Environmental Noise, Architectural Acoustics, Digital Signal Processing, Microphone and Loudspeaker design, Electroacoustics, Psychoacoustics, Musical Acoustics, Speech, Vibration and Dynamics, Material Design, Research. I could list more.

Acoustics is a young field of Physics

Acoustics has only recently been getting the recognition is deserves over the past couple hundred years and a lot of the foundations of acoustics have only been discovered in the past 100-150 years. For example Wallace Clement Sabine came up with an equation that moulded our understanding of architectural acoustics in 1895. In physics terms this isn’t old at all. There is still so much we don’t understand and so much room for improvement with our current methods for manipulating acoustics. Some consider acoustics almost a dark art of physics due to the quality of sound also being subjective.

In conclusion acoustics is a tough but rewarding subject and it is a great time to get involved with it. I would personally recommend (slightly biased) for the reasons I have listed above. And in this economy who doesn’t like the sound of lots of jobs?