WFNK.COM

decades of fun

Getting Audio From Video Where There Was None


Yes that’s right. Researchers have used some cool computer programming and video chip tricks to do what was previously impossible – to use video to record vibrations made by sound and then recreate the sound.

No sound recorded, just video of something like a paper bag or a pair of headphones.

The camera chip manages to see tiny variations in the image which are calculated out as vibrations caused by a sound source. The computer can actually process the video frames in such a way as to reconstruct the original audio that caused the vibration!

Wow! That’s a whole new world right there.



It goes to show that sound is a physical vibration that affects all physical items in an intimate way.

There are some things stopping this from being totally magical at this early stage of research — the computer program takes hours to process the video, the video needs to be recorded at a high frame rate and the recreated sound is not nearly as high definition as the original.

But it is sufficiently recognizable, enough so that they were able to Shazam the recreated audio with a match!

Just thinking of the good and bad uses for this and my mind boggles. Video investigations, surveillance, items that react to sound…