Take a video of a visual image and its reflection in the surface of a liquid, as a series of sounds are being played, so that the disturbance in the reflected image is measurable. Then play only the visual part of the video and infer backwards what the sound was. Then compare the inferred sound and the actual sound and do this a bunch of times changing the conditions incrementally and develop algorithms for inferring audio from visual data.
-- JesusHChrist, Jan 01 2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone [FlyingToaster, Jan 01 2013]

Baked, only a year later https://www.google....q=visual+microphone
[notexactly, Oct 01 2019]

umm... you do realize that video is at 60 samples per second, while CD audio is at over 44,000.
-- FlyingToaster, Jan 02 2013


This technology has already been conceived, developed, refined, and had all of the useless bits picked out and has yielded the laser microphone, which discerns sounds at long range, by measuring the vibration frequency of nearby objects, especially glass.
-- Alterother, Jan 02 2013


//all of the useless bits picked out// [marked-for-tagline]
-- pocmloc, Jan 02 2013


Yep, baked. I've seen a video of people recovering reasonable audio of a conversation from a video of a crisp-packet.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 01 2019



random, halfbakery