Sound

With the SoundCam Go acoustic camera, you can be that person in your neigborhood social media group who can answer those “Where's that noise coming from?” questions whenever an unexplained sound is reported. And the device connects to your phone.

If you live in a noisy urban area, you're gonna love the sound of this. Researchers in Switzerland have developed a material that can dampen street noise while being four times thinner than similar-performing absorbers used in construction.

While headphones do provide an immersive listening experience, music is made to be heard through a good set of speakers in a room. Movengine's AirCore OWH headphones are made to simulate that experience, and I recently got to give the things a try.

Imagine being able to listen to music or other audio that no one else can hear, without having to wear headphones. Doing so is now possible via so-called "audible enclaves," which already exist in functional prototype form.

While there are already AI systems that generate sound effects to match silent images of city streets, an experimental new technology does just the opposite. It generates images that match audio recordings of streets, with uncanny accuracy.

In a crowd, background noise can make it hard to hear people talking. But soon we could be wearing headphones that use AI to filter out noise that’s more than a few feet away, creating a “sound bubble” that lets you focus on your own conversation.

Generative AI systems need to be fed huge amounts of often copyrighted data. Musicians could soon fight back with HarmonyCloak, a system that embeds data into songs that can’t be picked up by human ears but will scramble AI trying to reproduce it.

Vibration-absorbing, sound-damping materials such as sheets of rubber and expanded foam tend to be thick, bulky and soft. A new material is a big exception to that tendency, however, as it absorbs vibrations while staying stiff and thin.

Leaf-blowers are the bane of suburban Sunday mornings. Now a team of engineering students at Johns Hopkins University has invented a kind of silencer attachment to radically reduce noise, which could be on shelves in a few years from Black & Decker.

There may be new hope for people with noisy neighbors. Scientists at MIT have developed a method of using thin sheets of fabric to either cancel or block sound – in the latter case, the racket even gets reflected back to its maker.

Two new technologies allow a single pair of glasses to track eye movements and read the wearer's facial expressions, respectively. The systems use sonar instead of cameras, for better battery life and increased user privacy.

Researchers developed a battery-less sensor that reacts to particular sounds, like spoken words, producing vibrational energy to power an electronic device. It could power medical devices like cochlear implants or monitor buildings for faults.