MickLinux's Journal: Public Domain -- distributed music recording and reconstruct

Okay, here's my next public domain idea: Essentially, a speaker/microphone/microprocessor/RAM/USB or microphone/microprocessor/RAM/radio-com based sound pickup device for recording concerts.

You synchronize several of them, and place them around the concert hall, and then each in turn emits a beep. The others record the beep, and record the timing. In so doing, they record the relative position of each. Then, at a preprogrammed time, they come online, and record until either they run out of memory, or until they are turned off.

At that point, you have a reconstructable image of the concert. You load it into the computer, and the computer maps everything out backwards in time, to generate music sources at their origin in the computer. As a result, you can then use that map to digitally amplify or silence the sources. Finally, using 3-D graphical techniques, you "program" the virtual speaker location, to produce the concert in a controlled fashion.

This should use technologies including the fourier transform (to eliminate frequencies that are artifcacts of the digital process), 3-D radiosity as applied to sound, and other 3-D graphical, stereo, and surround-sound techniques that are currently in use.

Note, also, that all sound levels in the wav file can be, but need not be, automatically time-stamped. That is, you technically only need to time stamp the original, if your recording device has a stable enough frequency. But it could be better to time stamp things, concievably, especially for the part next to be mentioned.

There is another option for this, for live production, in which a concert hall has its own sources. In this case, there is radio and/or USB communication back to a live computer, which takes the sound, uses the different sources to determine the origin, and it digitally amplifies or silences the source, for both recording purposes, and playback on the speakers. As a result of this, you may be able to completely eliminate feedback problems, and could possibly not need to have microphones on stage.