Question: What have you done so far with sound that has benefitted people/the environment?

Rachel Edwards answered on 30 Jun 2025:

Hi! Thanks for the lovely question 🙂
I work at a university, so I do science research. We work with sound waves (ultrasound – very high frequency) and study how the sound travels through different structures. If you have something like a railway track, the metal can get stressed, and can start to break – and people need to know if there is cracking and how bad of a problem it is, as then they can work out when to replace the rail to keep people safe. We look at lots of similar metal structures, and use sound to listen to echoes from cracks, or to see how the way sound travels changes if there’s a patch of corrosion.
Mostly we are working on early stage ideas. Some things work really well, and then we pass them on to a company to make a product, and sometimes they don’t go so well – and then we learn from it.