MIT develops a speaker thinner than sheet music

If you are into cars, you may have heard of vinyl wrapping, which can change the appearance of a car. Engineers from MIT have created a thin film that can turn any surface into a speaker. It can create high-quality audio with minimal power consumption according to its inventors.

The researchers created a fabrication technique. They claim that it can be scaled up to produce large, thin, soundproof speakers that can be used to wallpaper a room or cover an automobile. The audio nerd in me is feeling a hard-on. It's a joke, but if your fuzzies stiffen you'd be blind, so it makes absolutely no sense. The lengths I'm willing to go to for a joke are legendary.

Combining the speaker tech with electronics and microphones could cancel out sound. The inventors envision low-energy use cases such as smart devices.

This loudspeaker uses less energy than a traditional loudspeaker and produces sound with minimal distortion. The team demonstrated a loudspeaker that is about the size of a dime and can produce high-quality sound no matter what surface the film is on.

It feels amazing to take a sheet of paper and attach two clips to it, plug it into a computer and start hearing sounds from it. It can be used anywhere. One needs a small amount of electrical power to run it, according to the leader of the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory.

The paper was written by the lead author Jinchi Han, a ONE Lab postdoc, and co-senior author Jeffrey Lang. The research is published in a journal.

The film of the loudspeaker must bend freely to produce sound. The ability to generate sound would be hampered if these were mounted on a surface. The MIT team rethought the design of the loudspeaker to overcome the problem. Their design relies on tiny domes on a thin layer of piezoelectric material that vibrate individually, rather than having the entire material vibrate. The domes are surrounded by layers of film that protect them from the mounting surface and allow them to vibrate freely. The domes are protected from impact and abrasion with the same layers.

We have the ability to precisely generate mechanical motion of air with the help of a physical surface. The options of how to use this technology are endless.

I'd wallpaper my living room in speakers in a heartbeat if the tech came to market in consumer or commercial applications.