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posted by takyon on Friday August 12 2016, @02:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the I've-heard-it-all dept.

EPFL scientists have invented a new type of "acoustic prism" that can split a sound into its constituent frequencies. Their acoustic prism has applications in sound detection. [...] Hervé Lissek and his team at EPFL have invented an "acoustic prism" that splits sound into its constituent frequencies using physical properties alone. Its applications in sound detection are published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America .

The acoustic prism is entirely man-made, unlike optial[sic] prisms, which occur naturally in the form of water droplets. Decomposing sound into its constituent frequencies relies on the physical interaction between a sound wave and the structure of the prism. The acoustic prism modifies the propagation of each individual frequency of the sound wave, without any need of computations or electronic components.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by AudioGuy on Friday August 12 2016, @04:12PM

    by AudioGuy (24) on Friday August 12 2016, @04:12PM (#387068) Journal

    Acoustic prism would not have been my choice as a descriptive term for this.

    Ordinary directional microphones exibit a falloff of high frequencies as you go off axis. What this does is greatly exaggerate that effect using an acoustic tramsmission line with resonant chambers and membranes. Enough that it is useful as a direction finder. If you feed it 600-1400 Hz you can get a nice plot of direction vs freq.

    I'd simply call it a new technique for audio direction finding, which is commonly done with multiple microphones. This works with one.

    It doesn't seem to work at all like a prism to me.

    It does seem like it might have applications in sonar, and in providing a good income to the company that makes this rather complex microphone. :-)

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