Acoustic cameras can SEE sound

One of the cameras even seems to have a Fibonacci spiral of mics! Or maybe I'm just seeing the golden ratio when it isn't there (I wouldn't be the first). The sponsor is Incogni: The first 100 people to use code SCIENCE at the this link will get 60% off: incogni.com/science

As an engineer for an industrial machine corporation I have worked with these and they're brilliant. It really helps to isolate a malfunction or know what needs to be re-designed.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the video cameras that "amplified motion" to stare at industrial equipment vibrating.

The last bit with the echo is amazing.

There are so many things you could do with this technology, but as someone who dabbles in music, the first thought I had was recording a band playing in a room, and replaying it through vr like a virtual concert, but you can walk up to each person and hear their instruments get louder and quieter as you move towards and away from them

They're using color as a heatmap to indicate intensity but they could use color to map the frequencies and use saturation to indicate volume, that would look more like a camera and could capture many frequencies at the same time, avoiding the "focus" issue shown with the ukelele.

I work in a chemical plant and we've actually used these to detect small gas leaks because they make a noise that we normally can't detect. It's super loud in the plant yet this device can differentiate between all those sounds and actually shows you a hotspot from were the leaking noise is coming from. It has saved it so much time looking for leaks with gas detectors :D

Banger video, great job Mr. Mould! I recently took an acoustic signal processing course (I'm not an audio engineer though), and I believe the functional principle here is called "beamforming". It's a conceptually straightforward principle, and most phones and computers today have multiple microphones to make use of it. That's how some laptops know to wake up when you sit in front of them, but stay sleeping when random noises are made in the same room.

2:16 Ok, this is legitimately amazing, how come I've never known about this? an acoustic camera? that's just plain cool, and I'm kind of impressed that its possible at all.

I made an acoustic camera as a dissertation project 2 years ago, really interesting to see you do a video in it!

I remember hearing years ago that a research group designed a way to put hundreds of microphones around the perimeter of a sports arena and then fed all those signals into a computer. This allowed them to select a single person out of a stadium full of people talking and eavesdrop in on their conversation with perfect clarity even if they were talking quietly. Amazing to think what they can do now with so much faster tech.

You, The Action Lab and Veritasium are my favorite science channels

I always love stuff involving audio and sound, resonant frequencies, and the fact that we can "extract" frequencies / filter specific frequencies out and stuff is wild. I feel like audio based electronic sensors and such have such a massive future. being able to map / pinpoint the location off sound and how that could progress to audio in 3D space is wild.

Regarding audio triangulation & noise filtering, I noticed that after losing completely my hearing in my right ear I lost not only the ability to determine the direction of a sound (my hyperbolae of confusion, became a sphere of confusion :) ). But I also lost the ability to selectively concentrate on specific sounds (and filter/ignore others). I didn't realise I was doing it normally (before losing hearing in one ear) as it happens unconsciously. But apparently the ability to at least roughly determine the direction of a sound allows the brain to differentiate between them easier and thus to focus more on one sound while (partially) ignoring the rest. Now that all sounds come together in a single ear, I can't do either, which in a noisy place can be a problem. Many people probably know (though not so many have realised) that concentrating on specific sound (like simply looking at whomever is speaking to you) in a noisy environment allows you to pick details (like articulation) in that sound better (and of course we apparently can "read lips" unconsciously to a tiny degree, though that's really tiny factor. Just enough sometimes to the brain to pick a sound among several similar, because of the shape of the mouth of the speaker).

As a side note: This is why your phone needs to be able to see at least 4 GPS satellites to get an accurate positional reading.

I appreciate the fact you were able to explain this in such an easy way to understand.

Imagine using this camera in a music setting and being able to balance every part of the ensemble. Awesome!

A classmate and I built a very basic acoustic camera back in 1972 as a final year project in Physics at Aberdeen University. We took still images in a darkened room of a single red LED changing brightness as it moved through a sound field. Not bad given that red LEDs were the only colour available at the time and had only reached the market in 1968

You should've mentioned that a 2-mic or 3-mic version of this is how noise cancelling microphones work (like on your phone during a call). You use the delay between the mics to localize the direction every sound is coming from. Increase the gain from sounds coming from one direction (where the person's mouth should be if they're holding the phone against their face), decrease the gain from sounds coming from all other directions.

I'm researching into echolocation and I feel like this video's gonna be really helpful for it