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High-Tech Microphone Picks Voices From a Crowd
JerryQ writes with news of an impressive audio detection system from a company called Squarehead that was demonstrated during a professional basketball game. According to Wired, "325 microphones sit in a carbon-fiber disk above the stadium, and a wide-angle camera looks down on the scene from the center of this disk. All the operator has to do is pinpoint a spot on the court or field using the screen, and the Audioscope works out how far that spot is from each of the mics, corrects for delay and then synchronizes the audio from all 315 of them. The result is a microphone that can pick out the pop of a bubblegum bubble in the middle of a basketball game..."
How come you get terrified by an array of microphones with an impressive spatial detection capability? The thing is technically impressive, whether or not it "terrifies" a certain person is about perspective, and that person's tendency towards becoming terrified by mundane objects.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
"The thing is technically impressive, whether or not it "terrifies" a certain person is about perspective, and that person's tendency towards becoming terrified by mundane objects."
It is not the object that is terrifying, but rather what the existence of the object, plus the current trends in behavior by our Fearless(fearful) Leaders, plus a modicum of ability to put 2 and 2 together, yielding these devices being everywhere, able to monitor all conversations in the world.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... so now we have three numbers: 325, 315, 300. ...
Of course we can assume he rounded there for ease of explaining.
If I were designing a "phased array radar" style microphone, in the front end I'd probably toss the mics that are the furthest away, and of the remaining mics, I'd toss the ones closest to clipping or otherwise distorting. There are also certain combinations of unfavorable geometry both inherently due to mic placement and also the acoustic design.
So its entirely possible they wired up 325 but before they do all the phased array calculations they toss out the 25 worst signals or something like that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
... to a political rally near you. You probably don't need particularly accurate microphone placement and, in fact, if you had precise position and velocity coordinates of each of the mikes at any given time, they could even be moving.
That is all.
Just in case anybody is confused, that is cool as shit. That's all.