Engineers at MIT have developed an ultra-thin speaker that could be used to make entire surfaces produce sound. The unique design should be energy efficient and easy to produce at scale, the team says.
In a basic sense, speakers work by vibrating a membrane, which manipulates the air above it to produce sound waves. In speakers commonly found in audio systems or headphones, that’s done using electrical currents and magnetic fields.
But in recent years scientists have developed ways to achieve similar results in much slimmer devices. Thin film speakers work using piezoelectric materials, which vibrate in response to the application of a voltage. These have been used in phones and TVs, and even experimentally to create speakers out of things as unusual as flags.
Comments are closed.