Acoustic Prism Invented at EPFL

The actual paper is here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scitation.aip.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;asa&#x2F;journal&#x2F;jasa&#x2F;139&#x2F;6&#x2F;10.1121&#x2F;1.4949544" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scitation.aip.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;asa&#x2F;journal&#x2F;jasa&#x2F;139&#x2F;6&#x2F;10.1...</a><p>With pictures of the apparatus.

Isn’t this what the cochlea already does in a human ear?

I wonder how much of an improvement this will be over microphone arrays and determining direction in software.

YouTube link from the article : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6sSBPxAv2qk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6sSBPxAv2qk</a>

It&#x27;s not loading for me, so here&#x27;s a text-only version from Google. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?strip=1&amp;q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Factu.epfl.ch%2Fnews%2Facoustic-prism-invented-at-epfl%2F" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?strip=1&amp;q=cach...</a> Sounds like a cool idea, but being able to load the pictures would probably help.

I wonder whether this has any real-world applications, since the Fourier Transform is a well understood and easy to implement method for analyzing spectra digitally.