Professor Ville Pulkki awarded for amusing and imaginative research

The Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum in China annually awards the Pineapple Science Award for research considered entertaining, amusing or imaginative. The purpose of the awards is to inspire young people to engage in scientific inquiry.

In the award ceremony on Saturday, 11th November, Professor Ville Pulkki was honoured in the physics category. Pulkki works at the Department of Information and Communications Technology in the School of Electrical Engineering at Aalto University. His research group explores communication acoustics, including the capturing, transmission, reproduction, synthesis, and perception of sound.

In the awarded research by Pulkki and his fellow researchers, they explored why shouting into the wind feels challenging for people, even though sound actually carries better within the first 100 metres upwind. The surprising but straightforward result of the research was that it isn’t harder to shout into the wind; it’s just harder to hear yourself. When someone shouts upwind, their ears are situated downwind from their mouth, which means that their ears receive less sound – it’s harder from them to hear their shout than when there’s no wind.