David Dunn: A Very Brief Summary
A music professor named David Dunn has received a patent on his procedures and technology for fighting bark beetles in the western United States. Dunn first became interested in the bark beetles and their ability to destroy drought weakened pine trees, when there was an influx of tree deaths in Northern New Mexico, where he was living at the time. Dunn began to wonder what that much biological activity sounded like, so he recorded the bark beetles using a listening device he built for ten dollars. After recording many different types of bark beetles that lived in trees at various stages in their life cycles, he created a sound composition that showed incredible diversity. Two Northern Arizona University forest scientists heard about Dunn’s work and offered to help push his research further.
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This partnership then lead to the patent on the device and the protocol.
From this patent, Dunn and his colleagues, Richard Hofstetter and Reagan McGuire, are looking to develop a range of products to combat the beetles. I wonder what products one could use to combat bark beetles through
sound? I also wonder how the process of combating the beetles would work? Would the sound waves kill the beetles or just force them to ‘evacuate’ the tree? My uncle works for the Nature Conservancy, and he was assigned work on combating the bark beetles using disruptive frequencies, like Dunn is doing. They want to use local FM broadcasting to broadcast the frequencies, but ultimately it will come down to how cheap they can make an effective system. I wonder how much money a ‘cheap’ and effective system actually costs to make? The main obstacles they will have to overcome are, shrinking the analog circuits and the sample playback, creating viable output transducers, the amplification of the sound, and solar power solutions, but they already have one of Dunn’s graduate students working on some solutions. Ultimately, Dunn and his colleagues work on combating bark beetles using sound waves in the Western United States is innovative and important work.
This partnership then lead to the patent on the device and the protocol.
From this patent, Dunn and his colleagues, Richard Hofstetter and Reagan McGuire, are looking to develop a range of products to combat the beetles. I wonder what products one could use to combat bark beetles through
sound? I also wonder how the process of combating the beetles would work? Would the sound waves kill the beetles or just force them to ‘evacuate’ the tree? My uncle works for the Nature Conservancy, and he was assigned work on combating the bark beetles using disruptive frequencies, like Dunn is doing. They want to use local FM broadcasting to broadcast the frequencies, but ultimately it will come down to how cheap they can make an effective system. I wonder how much money a ‘cheap’ and effective system actually costs to make? The main obstacles they will have to overcome are, shrinking the analog circuits and the sample playback, creating viable output transducers, the amplification of the sound, and solar power solutions, but they already have one of Dunn’s graduate students working on some solutions. Ultimately, Dunn and his colleagues work on combating bark beetles using sound waves in the Western United States is innovative and important work.