I wouldn't say acoustics is dead at MIT. I participated in some very interesting ocean acoustics research in the last few years which has been published in Science a couple of times.

For anyone interested in reading about underwater ocean acoustics:

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5922/1734.full?ijkey=t...

[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5761/660.full?ijkey=bc...