Sound

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.

You might not hear it, but rodents are known to speak to each other in voices so high-pitched that human ears can’t pick them up. Now scientists have found that these vocalizations might have a second purpose – they help them smell better.

It turns out that blasting people with shockwaves during open-heart surgery is a really good idea. That's what researchers found who used the technique to reactivate heart cells and improve the post-op lives of patients in a groundbreaking study.

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.

Scientists have discovered that audio recordings of healthy coral reefs may help attract free-swimming coral larvae to damaged ones. The finding could be a major step toward preserving the world's coral reefs.

If someone you know has gone through chemotherapy, you might be familiar with the side effect 'chemo brain.' Scientists have now demonstrated a simple way to protect brain cells from damage using flashing lights and sounds at a certain frequency.

A tiny, newly-discovered minnow has measured louder than gunshots, jet engines or most competition-grade car stereos on the decibel scale – which raises the question: how on Earth was it not discovered earlier? It hasn't exactly been discreet.