LinuxMusicians

"Using high speed cameras, it’s possible to record the vibrations of everyday objects caused by nearby sounds and reverse engineer the sounds…essentially turning anything that vibrates into a speaker."

I've wondered about this ever since I was a kid (everything vibrates, right?) but had no idea just how possible it was to retrieve sound from nearby objects.

Amazing, super creepy or both.

"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it... I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen... Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move." - HAL 9000

Michael Willis wrote:"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it... I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen... Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move." - HAL 9000

It's only a matter of time before Alexa/HAL gets a high-speed camera. Things are not going to end well.

Reverse engineering vibrations to the point that "everything is a speaker" should be a very difficult, very slow and neverending task. Each material will have its own vibration patterns, also subject to temperature, perhaps air pressure and who knows what else. Every single situation would have to be covered, which is probably impossible.

Laser microphones already do some of that, but the result is bad. You can barely understand what someone is saying behind a glass pane.

Bats do better than that: they "see" with their echolocation, which gives them the advantage of seeing around obstacles. Some scientists believe they might even be able to "feel" texture from a distance by judging the waves that bounce off the surfaces.

Luc wrote:Reverse engineering vibrations to the point that "everything is a speaker" should be a very difficult, very slow and neverending task. Each material will have its own vibration patterns, also subject to temperature, perhaps air pressure and who knows what else. Every single situation would have to be covered, which is probably impossible.

Perhaps you don't need to model everything to such a deep degree to have a reasonable approximation of the primary sound field. Techniques like this are pretty common in optics, although they are made much more complex to adapt to acoustics for many physical reasons.