SEEING SOUND: Researchers recovered human speech by analyzing high-speed video recordings of a bag of chips vibrating in response to speech from a cell phone in the same room.ABE DAVIS
Watch what you say. Nearly everything around you—from potted plants to a bag of chips—is catching your vibes. Sound waves pinging off the surfaces of these objects cause tiny vibrations invisible to the naked eye. But a group of MIT researchers led by William Freeman has devised a way to spot these movements on a high-speed video recording and use them to reconstruct the sound that triggered them. Their technique, presented at a meeting in August, effectively turns a variety of everyday objects into visual microphones.
Retrieving speech or song from footage of a shiny piece of foil may seem like the stuff of spy movies, but by magnifying minuscule movements, researchers could do some surprising, far-fetched things. “Our labs have been doing this work ...
