This open access book highlights the negative and positive health effects of chronic exposure to environmental sound. It describes the state of the art in the field from a public health point of view and puts it in a broad societal perspective looking at sound from physical, social, psychological, economic and governance angles. Rather than a mere collection of papers around the theme as usually provided in special issues, this book offers a comprehensive look at the meaning of sound in society and its impacts and provides directions to further advance the field. 

The book presents theoretical and experimental studies to establish the relationship between volume jumps of the 90° domain wall in a ferromagnetic material and the magnitude of the half-space surface displacement caused by it. A method of evaluating the influence of the external magnetic field on the stress intensity factor at the tip of the crack-like defects in ferromagnets is discussed. The influence of hydrogen on the generation of magneto-elastic acoustic emission signals of ferromagnets is described. The features of magneto-elastic acoustic emission due to the presence of plastic...