This book presents the established fundamentals in the area of active sound and vibration control (ASVC) as well as exploring the new and emerging technologies and techniques. There has been a considerable amount of effort devoted to the development and realisation of methodologies for the control of sound and vibration, and this book covers the latest theoretical, algorithmic and practical applications including: noise control in 3D propagation, adaptive algorithms, prediction, processing and tuning, neuro-active control, control of microvibrations, and noise reduction in locomotives and vehicles. Topics discussed include multichannel active noise control, adaptive harmonic control, model-free iterative tuning, model-based control design for active vibration control (AVC), ASVC using neural networks, genetic algorithms for ASVC systems, and active noise control (ANC) around the human head. The authors also discuss active control of microvibrations, vibration control of manipulators, and techniques of real-time processing. This book will be essential reading for electrical, mechanical and control engineers, designers and researchers, interested in noise and vibration control.

In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians—Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw—Boon outlines how music constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation. Contributing to a new interdisciplinary field of vibration studies, he understands vibration as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological determinant of subjectivity. Boon contends that music, as a shaping of vibration, needs to be recognized as a cosmopolitical practice—in the sense introduced by Isabelle Stengers—in which what music is within a society depends on what kinds of access to vibration are permitted, and to whom. This politics of vibration constitutes the hidden ontology of contemporary music because the organization of vibration shapes individual music scenes as well as the ethical choices that participants in these scenes make about how they want to live in the world.

In creatures as different as crickets and scorpions, mole rats and elephants, there exists an overlooked channel of communication: signals transmitted as vibrations through a solid substrate. Peggy Hill summarizes a generation of groundbreaking work by scientists around the world on this long understudied form of animal communication.

Beginning in the 1970s, Hill explains, powerful computers and listening devices allowed scientists to record and interpret vibrational signals. Whether the medium is the sunbaked savannah or the stem of a plant, vibrations can be passed along from an animal to a potential mate, or intercepted by a predator on the prowl. Vibration appears to be an ancient means of communication, widespread in both invertebrate and vertebrate taxa. Hill synthesizes in this book a flowering of research, field studies documenting vibrational signals in the wild, and the laboratory experiments that answered such questions as what adaptations allowed animals to send and receive signals, how they use signals in different contexts, and how vibration as a channel might have evolved.

Vibrational Communication in Animals promises to become a foundational text for the next generation of researchers putting an ear to the ground.