Comment by dshankar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dshankar | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious, let's assume this technology is created. What would audio signals would you even record?

Most drones are far from any subject (sound-producing or not). What are use cases where the drone is close to a sound source?

This got me thinking of a few examples:

  - drones could get closer to waterfalls or volcanoes than any sound engineer with a boom could
  - a drone could be used for video interviews, automatically panning between the interviewer & the interviewee, recording both video and pristine audio, streaming via a cellular data link back to the studio

Action sports are probably the big one. Filming things like MBX or snow sports can be greatly improved by including natural ambient sounds. Tricky to do with a quadcopter.

Search and rescue missions? People could tell the drone operator how to help.

Not to mention tell the operator if they are alive at all. It may not be obvious if you see from a few meters away someone who is mostly immobilized by a fallen whatever. For this sort of application, a microphone on a winched cable might be useful (n.b.: make a feature to jettison the cable if it gets stuck!).

Yes, strap a megaphone on here and now you've got a flying telephone for search & rescue as well as a chance for an aerial director to talk with folks in the ground without the need to set up a second comms channel (e.g. RF radios).

I think just subtracting out the rotors would be nice...

Right, but my point is that if a drone is flying over an area like the Golden Gate Bridge, you're really not going to pick up any audio aside from wind noise. You'd have to be in close proximity to some sound producing subject.

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