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 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.