Thermoacoustics and Carbon Nanotubes

Nanotechnologists are exploring new fields of sound design AKA Building a sound speaker has never been so easy and... hot?

Just yesterday, with my own eyes, I saw one of those - a sound speaker that doesn't have a vibrating membrane or any moving parts, is not bulky and complicated, and is so simple in design it would make you spasm with joy. Super thin Carbon Nanotubes, when stretched as a sheet, will emit sound while electric current is applied to them. Its thermoacoustics y'all! In layman's terms here's what happens: when you send electricity through these super tiny threads of carbon they release little bursts of heat into the air, agitating the air molecules and changing the air pressure around them - make acoustic vibrations that we discern with our ears. This has been long known in the world of physics and just recently a team of Chinese scientists published an article in Science that shows CNT (carbon nanotubes) sheets as ideal for this purpose.

So anyway, yes, this is super wild and amazing, and has been shown to me and I even have a video clip of it. Why am I so excited about this? Because when I first saw it I was truly amazed! I was looking at a clear plastic box with some ultra thin threads of wire stretched from one end to the other and that, connected to a radio through an amp, was playing a song by Outkast! The wire never vibrated or moved, but produced heat that i perceived as sound. Well, and I could also feel the heat on my hands when I moved them right over. It wasn't perfect sound reproduction, in fact it was far from perfect with more treble and not enough base, but still, that shit was FREAKY COOL. I'm sure with enough tweaking it will sound good. You can have sound come out of your t-shirt or your name card, better yet, your poster of Bob Marley! That's some mad gritty nano steez :)