Technology: Super-Microphone Picks Out Single Voice in a Crowded Stadium

You're filming a sports game. An argument breaks out between players, and you zoom in to get a closeup of the action. The crowd goes wild, shouting and booing. Now, you zoom the audio in to hear what the players are saying to each other, despite the din. Impossible? Not with Squarehead's Audioscope.

Squarehead's new system is like bullet-time for sound. 325 microphones sit in a carbon-fiber disk above the stadium, and a wide-angle camera looks down on the scene from the center of this disk. All the operator has to do is pinpoint a spot on the court or field using the screen, and the Audioscope works out how far that spot is from each of the mics, corrects for delay and then synchronizes the audio from all 315 of them. The result is a microphone that can pick out the pop of a bubblegum bubble in the middle of a basketball game, as you can see in this video.

For more including a demo, see Super-Microphone Picks Out Single Voice in a Crowded Stadium by Charlie Sorrel, October 6, 2010 at Wired.com.