Your eardrum converts the motion of the air into something you can hear, but what if everything around you could work the same way? In a recent TED Talk, MIT researcher Abe Davis demonstrates cutting edge research into extracting audio from silent video of everyday objects exposed to sound. Using high-speed video equipment and even a consumer-level camera, he extracts intelligible music and speech just by watching a nearby houseplant or a snack bag—the proverbial “fly on the wall”. Acknowledging the surveillance possibilities (which were already feasible using lasers), the research pushes beyond audio to expose the natural modal movement of an object by simply ensonifying it and recording what happens, allowing one to push, pull, and shake something virtually without ever touching it.

Tags: audio, demonstrations, education, hearing, modes, vibration