Some engineers built the acoustic equivalent
of LEGO blocks. You gotta hear this.
The engineers come from MIT, Columbia University
and Disney Research. They designed interconnecting,
3D-printed blocks that can dramatically change
sounds. The small cubes have connecters on
each of their six faces. Those connecters
can be open to other cubes or closed off,
depending upon what you want to do. You connect
a bunch of these blocks together and fit them
inside an arbitrarily shaped, 3D-printed “instrument.”
With a particular configuration of blocks,
you can dampen sounds you don’t like. Or
with a different combination, you can emphasize
sounds in a range of frequencies. Or you can
even build your own hippo bugle and play the
Imperial March from Star Wars on it. I know
because they did that thing and it was awesome.
In late July, the team will present their
findings at SIGGRAPH 2016, a conference for
digital graphics and interactive design. Their
paper has the zingy title of “Acoustic Voxels:
Computational Optimization of Modular Acoustic
Filters.” The boxes are the modular acoustic
filters, aka voxels. How does it work? Sound
is vibrations that move through matter. By
making changes to the medium through which
the sound travels, you can change the nature
of that sound. Take a guitar string. Pressing
down on a string between frets changes the
length of the string, which changes the string’s
number of vibrations per second, also known
as its frequency. We perceive sounds with
a higher frequency as having a higher pitch.
The interconnection of voxels changes sound
in a similar way as it passes through the
system. Some filters muffle certain frequencies
while some boost others. There are no moving
parts and no need for electricity. It’s
a purely physical phenomenon. With this technology,
you could also create a type of acoustic tagging
for products, kind of like a sound-based QR
code. The engineers demonstrated this with
3D-printed octopuses. Each
octopus had a slightly different configuration
of voxels inside it. An app on a smartphone
generated a specific noise. Holding the phone’s
speaker against one of the octopuses, the
noise traveled through the boxes inside and
came out with a different tone. The phone’s
mic picked up the new sound and the app identified
the octopus. The app could identify different
cephalopods by their unique sounds. Ultimately,
I think this simple technology’s most important
use will be to allow for an entire hippo orchestra
to play the music of John Williams. I dream
of that day. I dream of it a lot.
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