If you’ve ever considered your conversations in your own home or office to be private, get ready to feel completely vulnerable. A research team at MIT developed a way to listen in on your conversations using nothing more than high-speed video – even if the video is shot from a distance and through glass.

Sound waves cause minute vibrations in objects near the sound source. The waves are so tiny that we can’t detect them, but high-speed cameras can, as the MIT experiment showed. The researchers pointed a camera at a potato chip bag and played a recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb in the same room. When they played back the video and ran it through a computer program, the program was able to analyze those tiny vibrations and translate them into sound.

The results were eerie. The played-back sound was completely recognizable as the song that had been played in the room. The same result was achieved with spoken words and with music played through a pair of earbuds. The recreated music was even clear enough to be recognized by a song recognition app. The implications of this type of technology are both thrilling and terrifying; it could be easily used for nefarious purposes, but we’re staying optimistic and choosing to believe that it will only be used to catch bad guys and recover lost puppies.

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This modern art sculpture would look at home on any mantle, side table, or desk…but as beautiful as it is, it also has a very important job to do. The two glass bowls and the wooden base are actually speakers, not just home decorations. Designer Casey Lin designed the Timbre Speakers after choosing materials for their acoustic properties.

The wooden base hides all of the electronic bits while looking simple and lovely. The only clue to the assembly’s true nature is the small plastic power/volume knob.

Inside the wooden box are surface transducers which cause the box’s surface to vibrate like a set of speakers when playing music. As the sound travels up to the glass bowls, it is amplified by the bowls’ concave shape.

Since the bowls have uneven tops, they can be turned into different positions to change the treble and bass levels. Even when they are completely silent, these speakers are undoubtedly the kind you would want to display rather than hide.

The post Sculptural Sound: Decorative Wood and Glass Speakers first appeared on Gajitz.

As our world gains more advanced technology, just think about what we are losing. We lose the history of the gadgets we grew up with, along with the way it felt to live in that comparatively low-tech world. The delightfully eccentric Brendan Chilcutt is attempting to preserve at least a part of our tech history by creating the amazing Museum of Endangered Sounds. In his virtual museum, Chilcutt preserves the noises that used to accompany our gadgets: the rattling zip of a dot matrix printer, the subtle but clanky whoosh of a VCR sucking up a VHS tape, and more that anyone over the age of 25 will probably remember fondly.

The sounds in the museum made us unexpectedly nostalgic. The jarring sounds of a dial-up modem were particularly emotional. You can choose to play the sounds in the museum one at a time or create a kind of mega-mashup by activating all of the buttons at once and listening to a deafening auditory pile of history. According to Brendan, the world is a poorer place for having lost these vintage sounds and will be poorer still when all of our technology is entirely silent other than the sounds we choose to hear. Chilcutt’s plan is to continue collecting endangered sounds through 2015, then spend several years refining the sounds.

The post Preserving the Sounds of Yesterday’s Household Gadgets first appeared on Gajitz.

When we talk about art cars, most people think of the sculptural, conceptual, highly unusual art cars that drive around in parades and at Burning Man. But musician and freelance director Julian Smith made a whole new kind of art car: one that’s all about the sounds, not the looks. With a crew of friends, some microphones and a soundboard, the Techno Jeep was born.

Two weeks of rehearsals and seven hours of filming resulted in this well-orchestrated and awesomely entertaining video. All of the sounds come directly from the Jeep, and everyone in the video has a specific sound to make. The result is a wicked techno sound that takes the idea of the “art car” to a whole new level.

The post Auto Sounds: Techno Jeep Blows Away Other Art Cars first appeared on Gajitz.