Jared Ficklin: New ways to see music (with color! and fire!)

41,694 views ・ 2012-07-13

TED


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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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My passions
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are music, technology and making things.
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And it's the combination of these things
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that has led me to the hobby of sound visualization,
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and, on occasion, has led me to play with fire.
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This is a Rubens' tube. It's one of many I've made over the years,
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and I have one here tonight.
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It's about an 8-foot-long tube of metal,
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it's got a hundred or so holes on top,
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on that side is the speaker, and here
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is some lab tubing, and it's connected to this tank
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of propane.
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So, let's fire it up and see what it does.
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So let's play a 550-herz frequency
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and watch what happens.
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(Frequency)
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Thank you. (Applause)
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It's okay to applaud the laws of physics,
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but essentially what's happening here
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-- (Laughter) --
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is the energy from the sound via the air and gas molecules
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is influencing the combustion properties of propane,
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creating a visible waveform,
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and we can see the alternating regions of compression
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and rarefaction that we call frequency,
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and the height is showing us amplitude.
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So let's change the frequency of the sound,
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and watch what happens to the fire.
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(Higher frequency)
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So every time we hit a resonant frequency we get a standing wave
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and that emergent sine curve of fire.
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So let's turn that off. We're indoors.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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I also have with me a flame table.
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It's very similar to a Rubens' tube, and it's also used
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for visualizing the physical properties of sound,
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such as eigenmodes, so let's fire it up
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and see what it does.
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Ooh. (Laughter)
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Okay. Now, while the table comes up to pressure,
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let me note here that the sound is not traveling
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in perfect lines. It's actually traveling in all directions,
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and the Rubens' tube's a little like bisecting those waves
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with a line, and the flame table's a little like
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bisecting those waves with a plane,
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and it can show a little more subtle complexity, which is why
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I like to use it to watch Geoff Farina play guitar.
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(Music)
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All right, so it's a delicate dance.
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If you watch closely — (Applause)
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If you watch closely, you may have seen
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some of the eigenmodes, but also you may have seen
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that jazz music is better with fire.
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Actually, a lot of things are better with fire in my world,
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but the fire's just a foundation.
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It shows very well that eyes can hear,
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and this is interesting to me because
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technology allows us to present sound to the eyes
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in ways that accentuate the strength of the eyes
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for seeing sound, such as the removal of time.
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So here, I'm using a rendering algorithm to paint
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the frequencies of the song "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
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in a way that the eyes can take them in
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as a single visual impression, and the technique
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will also show the strengths of the visual cortex
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for pattern recognition.
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So if I show you another song off this album,
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and another, your eyes will easily pick out
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the use of repetition by the band Nirvana,
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and in the frequency distribution, the colors,
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you can see the clean-dirty-clean sound
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that they are famous for,
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and here is the entire album as a single visual impression,
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and I think this impression is pretty powerful.
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At least, it's powerful enough that
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if I show you these four songs,
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and I remind you that this is "Smells Like Teen Spirit,"
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you can probably correctly guess, without listening
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to any music at all, that the song
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a die hard Nirvana fan would enjoy is this song,
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"I'll Stick Around" by the Foo Fighters,
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whose lead singer is Dave Grohl,
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who was the drummer in Nirvana.
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The songs are a little similar, but mostly
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I'm just interested in the idea that someday maybe
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we'll buy a song because we like the way it looks.
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All right, now for some more sound data.
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This is data from a skate park,
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and this is Mabel Davis skate park
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in Austin, Texas. (Skateboard sounds)
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And the sounds you're hearing came from eight
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microphones attached to obstacles around the park,
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and it sounds like chaos, but actually
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all the tricks start with a very distinct slap,
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but successful tricks end with a pop,
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whereas unsuccessful tricks
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more of a scratch and a tumble,
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and tricks on the rail will ring out like a gong, and
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voices occupy very unique frequencies in the skate park.
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So if we were to render these sounds visually,
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we might end up with something like this.
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This is all 40 minutes of the recording,
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and right away the algorithm tells us
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a lot more tricks are missed than are made,
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and also a trick on the rails is a lot more likely
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to produce a cheer, and if you look really closely,
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we can tease out traffic patterns.
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You see the skaters often trick in this direction. The obstacles are easier.
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And in the middle of the recording, the mics pick this up,
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but later in the recording, this kid shows up,
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and he starts using a line at the top of the park
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to do some very advanced tricks on something
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called the tall rail.
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And it's fascinating. At this moment in time,
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all the rest of the skaters turn their lines 90 degrees
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to stay out of his way.
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You see, there's a subtle etiquette in the skate park,
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and it's led by key influencers,
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and they tend to be the kids who can do the best tricks,
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or wear red pants, and on this day the mics picked that up.
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All right, from skate physics to theoretical physics.
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I'm a big fan of Stephen Hawking,
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and I wanted to use all eight hours
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of his Cambridge lecture series to create an homage.
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Now, in this series he's speaking with the aid of a computer,
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which actually makes identifying the ends of sentences
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fairly easy. So I wrote a steering algorithm.
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It listens to the lecture, and then it uses
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the amplitude of each word to move a point on the x-axis,
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and it uses the inflection of sentences
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to move a same point up and down on the y-axis.
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And these trend lines, you can see, there's more questions
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than answers in the laws of physics,
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and when we reach the end of a sentence,
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we place a star at that location.
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So there's a lot of sentences, so a lot of stars,
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and after rendering all of the audio, this is what we get.
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This is Stephen Hawking's universe.
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(Applause)
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It's all eight hours of the Cambridge lecture series
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taken in as a single visual impression,
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and I really like this image,
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but a lot of people think it's fake.
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So I made a more interactive version,
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and the way I did that is I used their position in time
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in the lecture to place these stars into 3D space,
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and with some custom software and a Kinect,
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I can walk right into the lecture.
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I'm going to wave through the Kinect here
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and take control, and now I'm going to reach out
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and I'm going to touch a star, and when I do,
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it will play the sentence
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that generated that star.
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Stephen Hawking: There is one, and only one, arrangement
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in which the pieces make a complete picture.
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Jared Ficklin: Thank you. (Applause)
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There are 1,400 stars.
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It's a really fun way to explore the lecture,
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and, I hope, a fitting homage.
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All right. Let me close with a work in progress.
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I think, after 30 years, the opportunity exists
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to create an enhanced version of closed captioning.
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Now, we've all seen a lot of TEDTalks online,
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so let's watch one now with the sound turned off
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and the closed captioning turned on.
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There's no closed captioning for the TED theme song,
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and we're missing it, but if you've watched enough of these,
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you hear it in your mind's ear,
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and then applause starts.
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It usually begins here, and it grows and then it falls.
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Sometimes you get a little star applause,
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and then I think even Bill Gates takes a nervous breath,
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and the talk begins.
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All right, so let's watch this clip again.
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This time, I'm not going to talk at all.
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There's still going to be no audio,
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but what I am going to do is I'm going to render the sound
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visually in real time at the bottom of the screen.
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So watch closely and see what your eyes can hear.
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This is fairly amazing to me.
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Even on the first view, your eyes will successfully
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pick out patterns, but on repeated views,
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your brain actually gets better
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at turning these patterns into information.
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You can get the tone and the timbre
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and the pace of the speech,
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things that you can't get out of closed captioning.
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That famous scene in horror movies
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where someone is walking up from behind
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is something you can see,
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and I believe this information would be something
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that is useful at times when the audio is turned off
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or not heard at all, and I speculate that deaf audiences
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might actually even be better
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at seeing sound than hearing audiences.
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I don't know. It's a theory right now.
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Actually, it's all just an idea.
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And let me end by saying that sound moves in all directions,
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and so do ideas.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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