Capturing Sound From The Zapruder Film

I found this article interesting in that it suggests that sound can detected on film.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/05/boffins_turn_passive_objects_into_visual_microphones/

The faster the film the better the results but they were able to discern signals as low as 60fps.
Basically it works like this:


“When sound hits an object, it causes the object to vibrate,” says Abe Davis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the new paper. “The motion of this vibration creates a very subtle visual signal that’s usually invisible to the naked eye. People didn’t realize that this information was there.”



This video gives examples.



More can be read here:

Extracting audio from visual information.

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804

It got me thinking that one day (hopefully not too far away)the Zapruder film might yet reveal the shots through information we cannot yet see.

Most interesting, Paul. Who knows what future breakthroughs in technology might uncover?

ROFLMAO!

Yeah, it might work on plants... (although probably not the trees in Dealey Plaza).

Noise pollution would definitely be a problem in any such effort. (Not to mention the vibrations from a dozen armor plated limousines or whatever.... yuk).

But the Zapruder film is tainted to begin with, it's unreliable as evidence. (At least the version "we" have).

Again, most interesting Paul. Problems that seem insurmountable today sometimes can be solved in the future by ways and means we can't imagine. Everything starts with an idea. Who knows where it can lead?

nonsqtr wrote:ROFLMAO!

Yeah, it might work on plants... (although probably not the trees in Dealey Plaza).

Noise pollution would definitely be a problem in any such effort. (Not to mention the vibrations from a dozen armor plated limousines or whatever.... yuk).

But the Zapruder film is tainted to begin with, it's unreliable as evidence. (At least the version "we" have).

It won't work on the Zapruder because its 18fps.Someone under the comments section of the article already suggested it and its limitations were quickly pointed out to them.

I find this technology fascinating. Like Stan pointed out, who knows what the future holds. We may develop new and better methods of looking and assessing existing information.

Stan Dane wrote:Again, most interesting Paul. Problems that seem insurmountable today sometimes can be solved in the future by ways and means we can't imagine. Everything starts with an idea. Who knows where it can lead?

20 years ago Stan, if someone had told to me one day I'd be able to store all the information contained at my local library in something the size of my toenail, I would have had them committed.

Yeah well, when the man behind the curtain does his thing you won't find me reveling in awe.

I'll be the one with the meter in hand and the reporter in tow, screaming to high heaven that the emperor has no clothes, and offering free proof to anyone who's willing to look.

Fifty damn years the "experts" have been working on this case - FIFTY. That is almost as long as we've been able to eavesdrop on a phone call from outside a skyscraper using a laser beam.

And FIFTY years later there's not a simple publicly available set of cross references for the fundamental body of evidence in this case.

Do you remember the Wizard of Oz? He turned out to be a doddering old fool, didn't he? And all that hifalutin "power and influence" was nothing more than couple of rusty old levers.

And the kids in Iraq, they're bringing down multi-million dollar drones with slightly modified cell phones.

Hm. You're familiar with the Casimir Effect? That's exciting. Extracting signals... not so much. A while back I designed a "near-perfect" microphone preamp, its noise level was just about 1 bit relative to a 32-bit signal. And, it turns out, the devices themselves (the transistors and chips and such) have intrinsically higher noise levels, so you have to work a little electronic magic to get the macroscopic result. So someone asked me, "how do you measure it?" If you can't find a device that's good enough to achieve the precision you're trying to measure, then how are you going to tell whether your next incremental circuit improvement worked or not? The answer is, the Casimir effect. And that very same answer is also why we now have jfk-timeline.org.

It's not a riddle, it's a very simple concept. It might seem like a riddle at first, but that's only 'cause you're in awe of the technology.

I wouldn't go as far as assuming I am in awe of technology, Brian. I came across this article via reading another about film restoration.
I can't remember reveling in it but I recall being impressed with the possibilities.
As you said, 50 years is a long time so you can hardly blame me if I got a little excited about the future. I am a n00b when it comes to technology.

Are you guys familiar with a fellow named Norbert Wiener?

He's the greatest unsung hero of World War II. He's almost singlehandedly responsible for the Allies' enormous advantages in the areas of technology that were most important at the time. Specifically RADAR, is what he worked on. He came up with concepts like the "synthetic aperture radar", which is still in use to today on the AWACS recon planes and whatnot.

Wiener did something so clever, that most people today haven't even figured out what it means.

He came up with a form of "non-linear analysis" for statistical data sets, and he came up with a method of extracting essential information from them - called the "Wiener Kernels" in his honor. (There's also another Italian fellow named Volterra, that was thinking along the same lines although from a slightly different non-war perspective, and there's "Volterra kernels" named after him).

Now, this fella Wiener, he was interested in "seeing beyond the veil". In other words, physics gives us things like the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle" - which says that at a certain level of description, one can not "see beyond" the limit of precision, and the reason is mainly because any kind of tool we use to "look" ends up imparting energy into what we're looking at, which CHANGES it - so in other words, we end up with a situation that's so delicate that we can't even breathe on it - can't even LOOK at it - without changing it somehow.

So Wiener, he started thinking out of the box. He said, "well... this is very nebulous, this boundary of sorts, whatever it is - and why don't we try to characterize it, instead of just taking for granted that it's there" - so he started looking at "random fluctuations" in data sets, to see whether there was any additional information that could be extracted, relative to the math at the time and what they knew about physics at the time.

And that is, in fact, the answer to the riddle. Turns out, you can see beyond the veil, but you have to use some tricks, and employ some "inference" when you make your measurements. Fortunately, in our case (JFK research), we're not su much interested in the underlying background radiation, we are interested in whether specific events are random or not.

And THAT is a perfect data set for Norbert Wiener's analytical approach.

This Wiener is well worth checking into. The Wiki page doesn't "at all" do justice to hos brilliant this guy was. He got into cybernetics, hydraulics, all kinds of interesting stuff. It would take me an entirely lifetime to try to figure out what he apparently "intuitively understood".

nonsqtr wrote:Are you guys familiar with a fellow named Norbert Wiener?

He's the greatest unsung hero of World War II. He's almost singlehandedly responsible for the Allies' enormous advantages in the areas of technology that were most important at the time. Specifically RADAR, is what he worked on. He came up with concepts like the "synthetic aperture radar", which is still in use to today on the AWACS recon planes and whatnot.

Wiener did something so clever, that most people today haven't even figured out what it means.

He came up with a form of "non-linear analysis" for statistical data sets, and he came up with a method of extracting essential information from them - called the "Wiener Kernels" in his honor. (There's also another Italian fellow named Volterra, that was thinking along the same lines although from a slightly different non-war perspective, and there's "Volterra kernels" named after him).

Now, this fella Wiener, he was interested in "seeing beyond the veil". In other words, physics gives us things like the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle" - which says that at a certain level of description, one can not "see beyond" the limit of precision, and the reason is mainly because any kind of tool we use to "look" ends up imparting energy into what we're looking at, which CHANGES it - so in other words, we end up with a situation that's so delicate that we can't even breathe on it - can't even LOOK at it - without changing it somehow.

So Wiener, he started thinking out of the box. He said, "well... this is very nebulous, this boundary of sorts, whatever it is - and why don't we try to characterize it, instead of just taking for granted that it's there" - so he started looking at "random fluctuations" in data sets, to see whether there was any additional information that could be extracted, relative to the math at the time and what they knew about physics at the time.

And that is, in fact, the answer to the riddle. Turns out, you can see beyond the veil, but you have to use some tricks, and employ some "inference" when you make your measurements. Fortunately, in our case (JFK research), we're not su much interested in the underlying background radiation, we are interested in whether specific events are random or not.

And THAT is a perfect data set for Norbert Wiener's analytical approach.

This Wiener is well worth checking into. The Wiki page doesn't "at all" do justice to hos brilliant this guy was. He got into cybernetics, hydraulics, all kinds of interesting stuff. It would take me an entirely lifetime to try to figure out what he apparently "intuitively understood".

Thanks Brian. You're right. Interesting fella.