This paper reviews the impact of digital computers on acoustics research since their introduction about a decade ago. The influential rôle that computers have attained in acoustics has resulted from their imaginative use as research tools for analysis, control of experiments, modeling, and simulation—rather than from straightforward calculating applications. Illustrative examples discussed in this paper include modeling of the human speech‐production process and the mechanical and neural aspects of hearing, speech analysis and synthesis, automatic speech and speaker recognition, generation of musical sounds and psychoacoustic test stimuli, study of the perceptual correlates of acoustic stimuli, multidimensional scaling, simulation of ray propagation in the deep ocean and in reverberant enclosures, acoustic measurements in concert halls, digital modeling of auditorium designs. Monte Carlo simulation of wave propagation in multimode transmission media, and acoustic image reconstruction of unknown objects by “inverse diffraction” on the computer.