I’m really interested in the phoneme around us that we can’t perceive as humans. I was thinking a lot about how sound can create light, but the reverse isn’t possible. Ultrasonic frequencies are the bands of frequency that are beyond human hearing usually above 20-22khz. The frequencies captured in this project go between 0-196khz. I recorded various kinds of lightbulbs in many different places, with the ultrasonic microphone. Initially, I wanted to create a system that can capture and process the sounds of the lightbulb live, but due to technical limitations, I had to scale back the idea. I had to process each sample by hand; and focused instead on the automation of cataloguing the sounds using ffmpeg to create the spectrograms and final video of the images. If I had time, I would combine this with the audio samples to give a better display of the data, but it was too difficult as this was my first time working in bash.
Processing of audio – Filtering out audio beyond 20khz with a highpass filter and tuning down the audio by four octaves.
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