Acoustic metamaterials have been widely investigated over the past few decades and have realized acoustic parameters that are not achievable using conventional materials. After demonstrating that locally resonant acoustic metamaterials are capable of acting as subwavelength unit cells, researchers have evaluated the possibility of breaking the classical limitations of the material mass density and bulk modulus. Combined with theoretical analysis, additive manufacturing and engineering applications, acoustic metamaterials have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities, including negative refraction, cloaking, beam formation and super-resolution imaging. Owing to the complexity of impedance boundaries and mode transitions, there are still challenges in freely manipulating acoustic propagation in an underwater environment. This review summarizes the developments in underwater acoustic metamaterials over the past 20 years, which include underwater acoustic invisibility cloaking, underwater beam formation, underwater metasurfaces and phase engineering, underwater topological acoustics and underwater acoustic metamaterial absorbers. With the evolution of underwater metamaterials and the timeline of scientific advances, underwater acoustic metamaterials have demonstrated exciting applications in underwater resource development, target recognition, imaging, noise reduction, navigation and communication.

The addition of a fourth type of voice to Titze’s voice classification scheme is proposed. This fourth voice type is characterized by primarily stochastic noise behavior and is therefore unsuitable for both perturbation and correlation dimension analysis. Forty voice samples were classified into the proposed four types using narrowband spectrograms. Acoustic, perceptual, and correlation dimension analyses were completed for all voice samples. Perturbation measures tended to increase with voice type. Based on reliability cutoffs, the type 1 and type 2 voices were considered suitable for perturbation analysis. Measures of unreliability were higher for type 3 and 4 voices. Correlation dimension analyses increased significantly with signal type as indicated by a one-way analysis of variance. Notably, correlation dimension analysis could not quantify the type 4 voices. The proposed fourth voice type represents a subset of voices dominated by noise behavior. Current measures capable of evaluating type 4 voices provide only qualitative data (spectrograms, perceptual analysis, and an infinite correlation dimension). Type 4 voices are highly complex and the development of objective measures capable of analyzing these voices remains a topic of future investigation.

A bioinspired metagel achieves broadband tunable acoustic impedance matching.

In this work, a convolutional neural network based method is proposed to automatically detect odontocetes echolocation clicks by analyzing acoustic data recordings from a passive acoustic monitoring system. The neural network was trained to distinguish between click and non-click clips and was subsequently converted to a full-convolutional network. The performance of the proposed network was evaluated using synthetic data and real audio recordings. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method works stably with echolocation clicks of different species.

Asymmetric transmission devices that allow acoustic waves to propagate only along one direction receive significant attention because of the rich physics and many potential applications. However, most proposed designs, such as acoustic superlattices and nonlinear acoustic diodes, are much larger than the wavelength, which are impractical for aqueous applications that require unidirectionality at low frequencies. In this work, subwavelength asymmetric acoustic transmission (SAAT) is realized based on low-frequency forbidden transmission of solid-fluid acoustic superlattices. Our design is comprised of a 1D superlattice serving as a low-frequency forbidden transmitter and a periodic rectangular grating serving as the wave-front converter. The SAAT structure and superlattice constant are only $0.6\lambda$ and $0.128\lambda$, respectively, where $\lambda$ is the wavelength, while a very high rectifying efficiency of over ${10}^8$ is achieved. This SAAT design breaks the size-wavelength limitation to allow unidirectional low-frequency acoustic wave transmissions, which is desirable for the miniaturization of integrated acoustic devices in unidirectional signal-transmission applications.

Harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) use narrow band echolocation signals for detecting and locating prey and for spatial orientation. In this study, acoustic impedance values of tissues in the porpoise's head were calculated from computer tomography (CT) scan and the corresponding Hounsfield Units. A two-dimensional finite element model of the acoustic impedance was constructed based on CT scan data to simulate the acoustic propagation through the animal's head. The far field transmission beam pattern in the vertical plane and the waveforms of the receiving points around the forehead were compared with prior measurement results, the simulation results were qualitatively consistent with the measurement results. The role of the main structures in the head such as the air sacs, melon and skull in the acoustic propagation was investigated. The results showed that air sacs and skull are the major components to form the vertical beam. Additionally, both beam patterns and sound pressure of the sound waves through four positions deep inside the melon were demonstrated to show the role of the melon in the biosonar sound propagation processes in the vertical plane.