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"Your bag of potato chips can hear what you're saying. Now, researchers from MIT are trying to figure out a way to make that bag of chips tell them everything that you said - and apparently they have a method that works. By pointing a video camera at the bag while audio is playing or someone is speaking, researchers can detect tiny vibrations in it that are caused by the sound. When later playing back that recording, MIT says that it has figured out a way to read those vibrations and translate them back into music, speech, or seemingly any other sound."

"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."

"This class examines the ways humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. In addition to learning about how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally, students learn about the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, and sound recording, as well as about the globalized travel of these technologies. Questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing are also addressed. A major concern will be with how the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples - sound art, environmental recordings, music - will be provided and invited throughout the term."

"If soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause's theories are true, then animal song is part of a far more complex and all-encompassing sound world."

In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists' acoustemology-that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their "sonic way of knowing and being." Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a "vocabulary," a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms-Einstein's equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files-operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations-amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors-become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

"Despondent folk music has been written about the sound of silence, but the sound of spiders turns out to be much, much heavier. Scientists at MIT have collaborated with Berlin-based sound artist Tomás Saraceno to create a virtual experience that literally instrumentalizes spider webs. This project aligns with more than two decades on the artist's part to deepen our understanding of environmental justice and interspecies cohabitation. Saraceno, Roland Muehlethaler, and Ally Bisshop at Studio Saraceno all participate in the research and development carried out through projects, including "Arachnophilia." "

"Fermentophone is a multi-sensory installation in which an algorithmically generated musical composition is performed by living cultures of bacteria and yeast. The installation comprises a series of different vessels containing actively fermenting foodstuffs and beverages, which are wired with electronic sensors. Each colorful, odorous, and edible ferment has its own musical vocabulary which is expressed according to microbial activity.( The installation was presented at the Hacking Arts festival at the MIT Media Lab."

MIT researchers have built a battery-free pinpointing system dubbed Underwater Backscatter Localization (UBL).

"Andante" was created by MIT's Tangible Media Group as a way to promote an understanding of the way that music is rooted in the body, an experience that transcends more than just the ears. The group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, gives physical form to abstract digital information, providing delightful visuals to more complicated processes."

"Recording of sound is an old dream of man. Scientists began to declare the physical basics of sound in the early Middle Ages already. Bonetius, roman philosopher described the relation between fastness of vibration and the pitch of the sound at the end of the 5th century [1]. In the Middle Ages, many researchers tried to record sounds but they were not too successful, due to the insufficient knowledge. Giovanni Battista della Porta, a great natural scientist, who lived in the 16th century, wanted to "trap" the sound with metal tubes. He thought, if he speaks into the tube and covers that very fast, then the sound will be caught and he can listen that later. He was very enthusiastic, but he could not reach any result"