  We start by a review of the chronology of mathematical results on the
Dirichlet-to-Neumann map which paved the way towards the physics of
transformational acoustics. We then rederive the expression for the
(anisotropic) density and bulk modulus appearing in the pressure wave equation
written in the transformed coordinates. A spherical acoustic cloak consisting
of an alternation of homogeneous isotropic concentric layers is further
proposed based on the effective medium theory. This cloak is characterised by a
low reflection and good efficiency over a large bandwidth for both near and far
fields, which approximates the ideal cloak with a inhomogeneous and anisotropic
distribution of material parameters. The latter suffers from singular material
parameters on its inner surface. This singularity depends upon the sharpness of
corners, if the cloak has an irregular boundary, e.g. a polyhedron cloak
becomes more and more singular when the number of vertices increases if it is
star shaped. We thus analyse the acoustic response of a non-singular spherical
cloak designed by blowing up a small ball instead of a point, as proposed in
[Kohn, Shen, Vogelius, Weinstein, Inverse Problems 24, 015016, 2008]. The
multilayered approximation of this cloak requires less extreme densities
(especially for the lowest bound). Finally, we investigate another type of
non-singular cloaks, known as invisibility carpets [Li and Pendry, Phys. Rev.
Lett. 101, 203901, 2008], which mimic the reflection by a flat ground.
