Amazing Technology: Optical Microphone records the instruments separately
Researchers develop an optical microphone that uses cameras to record the vibrations of objects. This system makes it possible to isolate the sound of a single instrument in an orchestra, eliminating any effect of the venue’s acoustics – an extremely complicated task, even with the best microphones.
To solve this problem, researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University in the United States have developed an optical microphone capable of seeing an object’s vibrations and thus only picking up the sound produced by a single instrument. Such a camera-only system would have to zoom in on an object to pick up minute vibrations caused by noise, and would have to be very fast to detect the frequency of those movements. However it would be extremely costly and won’t be easy to set up.
The optical microphone relies on a laser that is aimed at a surface such as an instrument. When the laser is reflected, the vibrations of the object create speckles or speckles, i.e. a pattern that can be recorded by cameras. Your system then uses two cameras that record at only 60 frames per second. This may seem insufficient for tones with a frequency of up to 20,000 hertz.
Two cameras to record at 63 kHz
The first camera has a global shutter that captures the scene in a single take. The second uses a rolling shutter, which records the image line by line with very little delay on the sensor. This delay, which can distort the photo of a moving object, is used here to obtain information about high-frequency vibrations. The lines are recorded with a frequency of 63,000 Hertz after which the system use an algorithm to put the two images together and recreate the sound. Their system works directly on the instrument, like a guitar or violin, and even on other objects that vibrate through resonance, like a packet of chips placed in front of a speaker. It is even able to compensate for the musician’s movements.
With this system, sound engineers could track each instrument in a band or orchestra individually without the intervention of others. It completely removes the impact of the acoustics from the recording room, effectively eliminating any echo. The system could even be used to monitor each machine in a noisy factory to determine when maintenance is required.
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