Nantes welcomed the conference participants with rain which has stayed all week so being inside all day is not too painful!

With over 1000 participants from all fields of acoustics the conference is a melting pot of ideas for the applications of acoustics from bioacoustics to biomedical studies and optimisation of musical instruments and room acoustics.

Monday kicked off with some music from the university band and the plenary lectures. One very interesting talk presenting the research of Bradford University about discovering faults in pipelines using sound waves rather than the classic CCTV methods. 

Tuesday was all about noise, how to map it in the terrestrial environment and included details about why wind turbine noise is so annoying to humans.

Bioacoustics was Wednesday's focus with talks about a variety of species from crickets to crocodiles and whales. Indeed the use of acoustics to study animals is expanding exponentially! I presented my work on the classification of humpback whale songs which was the subject of my phd thesis.

A very interesting talk was given by G. Dutilleux highlighting the importance of collating information regarding environmental conditions and bioacoustics when assessing the impact of noise in the terrestrial environment. This concept was then reiterated in the marine environment during T. Folegot's talk in the underwater acoustics session. Sound propagation is so closely linked to environmental conditions that these two elements need to be integrated to obtain a realistic picture of the impact of noise.

Many of the talks presented studies on soundscape creation which seemed to be the common denominator across the different branches of acoustics. Soundscapes based on long term data analysis will create a more detailed picture of the noise distribution through space and time.

Here's a link to the IOA web site where the conference papers should soon be available to download. http://www.acoustics2012-nantes.org/