
Not even the click of a pen or the rustle of a shirt goes undetected by Signal Interface Group’s acoustic imager. But how about a person’s, um, rude noises?
“We don’t record those,” the company’s president, Neil Fenichel, says with a smile.
The gizmo that Fenichel demonstrated this week at Signal Interface Group’s office in Bellevue, Wash., is designed for higher purposes: to find out why an elevator is whining, where an air-conditioning system is leaking, which fluorescent light is buzzing, why a car’s engine is making a funny sound, or even how a hummingbird does its buzz.
The imaging system, developed in cooperation with Bellevue-based OptiNav, combines several tricks of the acoustic trade.