Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of my coauthors, I'd like to inform the publication of our latest paper "Kurtosis analysis of sounds from down-the-hole pile installation and the implications for marine mammal auditory impairment," published in the JASA Express Letters, 2, 071201. doi:10.1121/10.0012348. The paper is open access: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/10.0012348.

Abstract:

Sounds from down-the-hole pile installation contain both impulsive and non-impulsive components. Kurtosis values (β) were determined for two datasets to investigate the impulsiveness of piling sounds. When the hammer struck the pile(s), β was 21–30 at 10 m and approximately 10 at 200 m. When the hammer was used for drilling without contacting the pile, β was 4–6 at all distances. These findings suggest that a simple dichotomy of classifying sounds as impulsive or non-impulsive may be overly simplistic for assessing marine mammal auditory impacts and studies investigating the impacts from complex sound fields are needed.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Shane