Pinpointing Location of Videos from Background Airplane Sounds

SSchneier on Security · 2 hours ago

This is fascinating: The video describes a technique that can reveal where an otherwise unidentifiable recording was made by analyzing its audio for the faint sounds of passing aircraft. The technique is both fascinating and frightening. It works by looking at Doppler curves, which plot the way a plane’s sound changes as it passes overhead because of the Doppler effect. This is the same familiar Doppler effect that causes the frequency of a siren to rise as it approaches and then fall as it passes by and moves away. More generally, it’s the phenomenon whereby the frequency of a wave perceived by an observer changes when the observer and the source of the wave are moving in relation to one another...