Acoustic metamaterial science is an emerging field at the frontier of modern acoustics. It provides a prominent platform for acoustic wave control in subwavelength-sized metadevices or metasystems. However, most of the metamaterials can only work in a narrow frequency band once fabricated, which limits the practical application of acoustic metamaterials. This paper highlights some recent progress in tunable acoustic metamaterials based on various modulation techniques. Acoustic metamaterials have been designed to control the attenuation of acoustic waves, invisibility cloaking, and acoustic wavefront engineering, such as focusing via manipulating the acoustic impedance of metamaterials. The reviewed techniques are promising in extending the novel acoustics response into wider frequency bands, in that tunable acoustic metamaterials may be exploited for unusual applications compared to conventional acoustic devices.

In this work we theoretically study the interface acoustic states of resonators on a thin plate with topologically protected and conventional designs. Topologically protected interface state is first analyzed by employing the conception of breaking inversion symmetry within the unit cell of a honeycomb lattice for cylindrical and spherical resonators; we further demonstrate the robustness of the wave propagation along a zig-zag path containing sharp corners, defect and disorder. The wave propagation ceases to be preserved if we increase the degree of disorder along the zig-zag path. In parallel, the conventional interface state is also designed and compared to the same situations. We found that the conventional interface state suffers back scattering in the zig-zag path while it can show a more confined wave transport in some cases. The presence of a defect along the propagation path scatters the conventional interface wave and in particular can prohibit a full propagation in presence of a localized state at the defect. If the zig-zag path is made disordered, the propagation of the conventional interface mode can be conserved at given frequencies for a low random degree and disappears for higher random degree as the interface bands become flat in dispersion and turn to localized states. Finally, we show that the immunity of the topologically protected design needs the interface to be surrounded by at least two hexagons of the phononic crystals on both sides, especially at the sharp corners in the zig-zag path, while the conventional design only needs one hexagon bulk media with the advantage of compact wave transport. This work puts a step forward for the interface states in micro-/nano-scale characterization and figures out the behaviors for both topologically protected and conventional interface states.