This semester the Professorship of Audio Information Processing organized a field trip to Hamburg to show students interested in the field of acoustics exemplary work environments and laboratories for university- and industry-based research. As Hamburg is the city of Airbus and aerospace research, much of the shown research topics were centered around airplanes, but a couple of students also got the chance to visit the Elbphilharmonie, the great new classical concert hall, as well as a short sightseeing trip to Hamburg’s harbor.

The two-day trip started on Thursday, June 13th at the early time of 7am at Munich Central Station, where everyone got on the train to Hamburg. After a six hour ride we arrived in Hamburg, and after a short lunch break we went on the way to the University of Applied Science (HAW), where Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Gleine and two of his PhD students welcomed us and showed us the newly build laboratory for technical acoustics. Prof. Gleine also gave us a brief overview of his past and present research topics and introduced us to the current projects he and his students are working on, for example new isolation materials for reducing flight noise in the airplane cabin. Afterwards the students did some further hands-on explanation of their projects and showed us the main attraction of the laboratory: an anechoic chamber connected to a reverberant room, which is in turn connected to three semi-anechoic rooms, used to measure different properties of the developed materials.

As we finished our visit to HAW, Prof. Gleine invited us to see his other laboratory at Hamburg’s Centre for Aviation Training (HCAT), where an experiment in the thermal chamber was just about to finish, so we could be able to observe his research live. After the reveal of the experiment’s result Prof Gleine was eager to show us more of the testing areas in HCAT, where some systems of a plane’s cabin were reconstructed, such as the ventilation and the toilet, for experimental design and testing. After some eager explanations and funny anecdotes about airplane design our time with Prof. Gleine came to an end and we got on the way to our hotel.

A short subway ride and a construction-conditioned foot walk later we arrived at the hotel, left our belongings behind and set foot for some sightseeing, walking through St. Pauli and along the harbor, followed by dinner.

The next day started early as well, as we left the hotel at 7:30 am and went to the docks. Half an hour of boating with some great sights later we arrived at Finkenwerder, where we visited the big centre for applied aerospace research (ZAL). After a meetup with our contact Dr. Christian Thomas we were presented the work of acousticians at ZAL by Dr. Jörg Biedermann of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and Dr. Christian Thomas of Airbus. Afterwards Dr. Thomas proudly showed us the Flight-LAB-Demonstrator, a part of an airplanes fuselage mounted in a big anechoic chamber (one of the biggest in Europe!), where a lot of Airbus’s research on cabin acoustics is performed. We left the premises impressed and set foot for another one of Hamburg’s major acoustic points of interest: the Elbphilharmonie.

Sadly, a high demand for tours lead to limited spots, so that only 14 students could attend a guided tour. The shrunken group joined up with other tourists and took a tour of the impressive building. After some interesting facts on the building, we ascended to the eighth story via escalator and arrived at the “Plaza”, where the entrance area for the concert halls and a round-walk around the building are located. Then we went further up to the 16th story and entered the big concert hall, arguably the most impressive room in the building with its beehive-like structure and the weird-looking gypsum-fibre paneling. Afterwards we were also granted permission to have a look at the small hall, a multi-purpose hall where smaller artists perform, but also dinners and meetings are held.

With that, our visit of the Elbphilharmonie ended, as well as our field trip itself. The whole group met again at Hamburg Central Station and entered the train home to arrive back at Munich at 10pm, where we thanked our organizers for the great trip and disbanded.

Overall, this trip gave us a good overview of the application of acoustics to the aerospace industry, from practical applications to innovative research.

This year the annual AIP excursion took us to Salzburg and Graz.

Eleven students from our courses and student projects visited Geislinger GmbH, close to Salzburg, on the first day. Geislinger is a manufacturer for vibration dampers and misalignment couplings for large engines, especially for ship and wind energy industry. We got an introduction in the development and testing of acoustically optimized couplers and got a tour through factory and the production line. As a highlight, we were allowed to visit the acoustic measurement laboratory of Geislinger GmbH. Here we got interesting demonstrations of the benefit of acoustically optimized couplers.

On the next day we visited the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustic (IEM) in Graz. There we visited the so-called “Cube”, a room with a loudspeaker array for artificial reverberation and sound-field synthesis. We were able to listen to different acoustical demonstrations in the “Cube”, which also showed us how they use spatial audio reproduction to create new musical pieces, specially composed for an icosahedral loudspeaker lab. After the demonstrations were allowed to visit their different acoustical laboratories and sound studios of the IEM.

This year the annual AIP excursion took us to Wien.

Twenty-one students from our courses and/or student projects visited the Austrian Academy of Science (ARI) on Thursday 9th of June and the headphone and microphone manufacturer AKG on Friday 10th of June.

At ARI, we were first introduced to the variety of research they do (in, e.g. psychophysics, noise reduction and neural prostheses), after which we got hands-on experience with virtual acoustics.

At AKG, we had the privilege to receive an introduction how a high-end product is iteratively designed and modified before reaching the consumer market. Moreover, we could see the development labs and production facilities where prototypes are built and tested.

Let’s see where the excursion leads us next time.