Nearly four centuries ago Isaac Newton demonstrated that a glass prism could separate white light into all the colors of a rainbow. Now a Switzerland-based team of electrical engineers has built a device that can do something similar for sound—splitting noise into its constituent frequencies by physical means only.
The so-called acoustic prism comprises a 40-centimeter-long hollow aluminum case with a series of 10 holes on its side. Within, flexible polymer membranes divide the case into chambers. These barriers vibrate and transmit sound to neighboring cavities with a delay that depends on a sound wave's frequency. When the delayed waves escape from the holes, they are refracted in different directions so that waves with the lowest frequencies (comparable to red light) can be heard at the end nearest to the source, whereas higher frequencies (comparable to blue light) are refracted farther down the device. "This mimics how a water droplet or glass prism refracts each color of light at different angles," says Hussein Esfahlani, who studies signal processing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The device's design was recently published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Wednesday November 09 2016, @11:23AM
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/08/12/0133202 [soylentnews.org]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @04:57PM
Yup, duplicate. I remember making the last comment there.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @11:25AM
> Nearly four centuries ago Isaac Newton demonstrated that a glass prism could separate white light into all the colors of a rainbow.
NO! This was well known in Newton's time.
Newton demonstrated that the colors from a prism follow straight lines. Descartes had proposed that light colour was generated by spinning balls, which would follow a curved trajectory. Newton followed the idea that light colour was generated by wave frequency, and waves follow a straight trajectory. So Newton was able to reject Descartes's hypothesis.
The important point is that Newton used an experiment to reject a hypothesis proposed by a philosopher. It is one of the very early examples of such empirical reasoning. Newton's study also led to his invention of the reflecting telescope.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @11:46AM
FOOL! We don't need empirical reasoning! This is Trumpland!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @12:20PM
No, he didn't. He had a corpuscular theory of light. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @04:56PM
> No, he didn't. He had a corpuscular theory of light.
My mistake. Note that he did propose a sort of weird wave-particle duality in later editions of Opticks. Probably why I got confused. The point though is that they are not spinning balls and light travels in straight lines.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @11:29AM
https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/ [reddit.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 09 2016, @02:32PM
Tell that to Arizona.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @03:24PM
ain't shit compared to the now legal rec. states, i'm sure they'll try again though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @12:14PM
Such a device already exists. It is known as ear. The frequency splitting is purely physical, only afterwards it gets converted to nerve pulses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @12:25PM
What they describe sounds like you're blowing in the back end of a flute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @03:57PM
Gross.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @08:27PM
The ear doesn't split soundwaves up. It has hairs that are tuned to be responsive to different frequencies, an ear won't take a single sound source and send it in different directions based on the component frequencies. In other words, an ear is nothing like this device.