Vibrations as sound
Vibrations as sound
Treehopper vibrations and beyond
Hello Everyone - Welcome to Ignore the Confusion.
During the past several years, I’ve been thinking about vibrations and the potential to “feel” sounds.
Recently, I spoke to Ethan Castro and Valtteri Salomaki from Edge Sound Research - their start-up has developed an interesting solution that combines audible, tactile, and haptic audio which can be used in a variety of environments to enhance how people interact with sound.
Several months prior, I learned from a friend about Ed Yong’s book discussed recent Book “An Immense World” (Highly recommended). And then last week, just before I spoke to Ethan and Val, week, I heard Ed Yong interviewed on Fresh Air on NPR.
During the show, Ed mentioned recordings of Treehoppers mating calls. Apparently these insects use vibrations which “course through plants” to communicate with other Treehoppers. The vibrations are inaudible, however using special microphones people have transformed the vibrations into audible sounds that we can hear.
I was fascinated by this idea so I stumbled across (searched and found) a Treehopper sound database assembled by The Cocroft lab at University of Missouri.
This is likely the most comprehensive recording collection of tree hopper vibrations (sounds) compiled by Dr. Reginald Cocroft:
“The treehopper signals provided here originate not as audible airborne "sounds," but as substrate vibrations that treehoppers use to communicate through the physical structures of plants. Researchers record and amplify the signals by various means, including phonograph needles or accelerometers attached to the plant, and laser vibrometers that can measure vibrations based on reflected light. Once recorded, signals can be played back as airborne sounds with no changes in pitch or structure. Studies reveal that treehoppers use vibrations to attract mates, to announce the discovery of a good feeding site, or to alert a defending mother to the approach of a predator.”
Check out the sounds of courtship, discovery and defense:
Here are a few of my favorites:
While you’re there - have a look at these amazing photos of Treehoppers by Gernot Kunz and Piotr Naskrecki
I sent the tree-hopper vibration sounds on to Ethan from Edge Sound Research and he sent me an article from 2014. The article describes how “researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.”