A Sound Approach

Article by William Tadje | Photo Courtesy Ben White

Imagine standing in the center of a room, singing a middle C. The pitch leaves your mouth exactly as you rehearsed. The walls bounce the traveling sound waves, which, to the untrained ear, seem to ring one homogeneous tune.

But not all ears — nor minds — are untrained to the micro-discrepancies that interfere with how sound waves are propagated. Ben White, an Honors student currently in the Master's of Accountancy program, has one such mind, and has been conducting research on conductivity for the last two years BYU's acoustics lab. His work with the Underwater Acoustics Research Group began back in 2021.

His Honors thesis, "Developing a Protocol to Obtain Source Directivity of Hydroacoustic Transducers in a Water Tank," begins with the same scene you just imagined: a sound that seems to fill a room evenly but is actually altered subtly by its physical environment. As you sing that middle C, the walls seem to bend it, your mouth projects it more forcefully in some directions than others, and anything standing between you and your listener — a couch, a rug, another person — discreetly steals part of it before it arrives.

In an underwater tank, sound follows the same pattern, with one crucial difference: walls sit close, and echoes come fast. By the time a sound is perceived underwater, it's already tangled with its own echo, which trails a fraction of a second behind.

Ben focused his research on capturing sound in its purest form — he wanted to race the echo. He enlisted an underwater audio transmitter, two robot arms to aim a receiver at the omitted sound, calculated when each signal should arrive, and carefully trimmed the time-domain signal by the requisite amount, leaving only the sound the transmitter actually made. After several layers of analysis, he calculated the Directivity Index — one number showing exactly how loud a transmitter is in every direction. The method has already traveled farther than the tank: Ben has presented it at Acoustical Society of American conferences in Ottowa and New Orleans, and his finished thesis will soon be published on BYU Scholars Archive.

This week, I picked Ben's brain while we walked laps around south campus near the Maeser Building. On the heels of describing his research to me — a conversation full of acoustic theory and real-life applications that had my frontal lobe running at 8,000 RPM to keep up — I expected to hear he would be off to a STEM-adjacent field. To my surprise, I learned he is off to endeavors of different (yet equally impressive) stature, and that physics is not even his major but a secondary field of interest. He instead majored in accounting and will graduate from BYU’s integrated BS/MAcc program this December, before heading to law school.

But Ben doesn't consider his dual STEM-business proficiencies mutually exclusive. He believes acoustics research has helped him learn accounting theory and that his business coursework has sharpened his research skills. The technical concepts hardly overlap (I would be surprised to learn my accountant understands Welch narrowband spectra), but that's not where Ben sees the connection. To him, the overlap isn't in the material — it's in the muscle. Wrestling with one hard subject, he's found, makes the next one easier. He calls it an "intellectual potluck" — not two fields bridged, but ideas from one brought over to season the other.

Still, Ben sees threads tying his interests together. At one point he quipped, "Well, accounting is the thermodynamics of money." He declared it with conviction, as if the comparison were obvious. For Ben, several years into a BYU Honors Program built around finding unexpected connections, it is obvious. With an Honors education, the overlap hides in plain sight.

If you ever meet Ben, ask him about other amusing similarities between his accounting coursework, acoustics research, mediation work with the BYU Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution, and his love of musical instruments, including the cavaquinho (that is, after a moment's pause to wonder what a cavaquinho is). With an enthusiasm that outpaced our laps around the Maeser Building, he'll explain that he isn't chasing four different things — he's just building the same muscle four different ways.