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The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how a stochastic disruptive event can dramatically alter community soundscapes. Whilst religious bells have symbolism in many worldwide faiths, the sound emanating from church bells can be considered public domain and therefore, is not exclusive to the church. Pandemic-related interruption of these sounds impacts not only the church involved, but both the surrounding soundscape and any members of the community who ascribe value to these sounds. This paper examines the soundscape of Christian churches in the states of New South Wales and Victoria, to give an Australian perspective one year after the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. It provides an update of the situation in Australia, building on our previous work from August of that year. In doing so, it explores the activity of church tower bell ringing, and how this "non-essential" activity has been affected, both during and subsequent to the heavy community restrictions applied in Australia. The paper also explores what lengths bellringers have undertaken to be permitted to conduct such activities, such as the use of adaptive measures due to "social distancing", and considers what implications this enforced silence has in similar soundscapes elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a 2AFC identification task experiment to test listener perception of voiceless fricative-stop contrasts with minimal pairs modified along a 10-step continuum. Here, the authors focus on the uniqueness and near-uniformity of the phonological systems found in Australia. The languages involved in this study include Roper Kriol (an English-lexifier creole language), Gurindji Kriol (a mixed language derived from Gurindji and Kriol), with Standard Australian English (Indo-European) used as a baseline. Results reveal that just over 50% of the Roper Kriol and Gurindji Kriol listeners identified differences in the stop-fricative pairs with a high degree of consistency while nearly a quarter consistently identified the fricative-like stimuli as such, but showed random responses to the stop-like stimuli. The remaining participants showed a preference toward the fricatives across the entire continuum. The authors conclude that the fricative-stop contrast is not critical to the functionality of the phonologies in Roper Kriol or Gurindji Kriol, which could explain the high degree of variability. In addition, there is some evidence that the degree of exposure to English may have an effect on the degree of contrastability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia is a four year degree program. In their fourth and final year, students can choose from a range of technical elective courses, one of those being in acoustics. The acoustics course entitled 'Fundamentals of Noise' can also be taken as a postgraduate coursework subject as part of a Masters by Coursework degree. The course covers fundamental topics in acoustics, noise, noise measurement, and noise control. This paper outlines the topics covered in the course, the range of assessment activities conducted by the students, and the use of invited industry guest speakers, all of which aim to maximize student knowledge, interest, and performance in the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]