DIY: listening to electromagnetic fields
It’s amazing how many electromagnetic fields are all around us. The cool part about it is that it’s very easy to be able to hear the fields that are in the audible range. Here’s a quick and easy DIY project that will help you do just that.
All you need is the electronic guts of an old cassettte walkman. You can pick these up at thrift stores for next to nothing (hey, who uses tapes anymore?). Rip out everything except the circuit board, the tape head, power source and audio connector. It’s best to use the batteries if you can because power adapters have their own EM field.
That’s it.. you’re done. Just take your device, point it at anything that would have an EM field (try close to parts of your laptop – laptops have a huge amount of different EM fields coming from them), and plug the audio output into your computer or powered speakers. You can record the output with any old audio recording software (windows has a voice recorder built in.)
So go ahead and discover all the fluctuating electromagnetic fields that are all over the place!
Here’s a video of the boys at retrointerfacing using such a device to listen to their laptop.
Some of the EM fields I have found are really strange sounding. You can even find out if any given wire is ‘live’ with AC current using this method.
That’s creative!!
Very neat idea!!
I like this because it is akin to how Theremin first began working with magnetic fields. He was working on a radio and noticed that there were distortions in the sound, and began experimenting.
Is there a way that you would be able use this to pick up fields a distance away so that you could, for example, walk down the street and listen to neon lamps, and power lines while they are still maybe 30 feet away? I think that would be more interesting, as you would be able to get a sense of the electromagnetic world around you.