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Hi all, first time here and I've come with a bit of a puzzler for you:

Imagine:
You're in an MRI scanner. These consist of a massive electromagnet that can lift fully laden hospital trolleys off the floor and suck em in to the ring. Therefore you can't have anything metal on you or (generally) in you or even in the room since even a tiny bit of metal basically becomes a bullet flying toward the bore of the magnet.

OK, scene set. Now, the MRI machine generates a massive magnetic field and to do so it creates a major amount of noise, sometimes even such that ear protection is needed. So there you are minding your own business, going about your day laying in an MRI scanner and you want to record your voice. Strange but true.

Any ideas as to how I can do this reasonably? Money is not a problem.

Major issues:
- Noise generated by the machine (unknown, but possibly a constant hum or periodic pulse). Maybe this could be filtered out later with appropriate software?
- No metal allowed in the room. Possible to have something fixed I guess, but it'd need to be unaffected by the magentic field. This makes normal mics unusable.

I have heard about laser mics. Anybody know if these might be suitable?

Any help greatly appreciated (this is for a job application)!

Lag

Comments

anonymous Sat, 07/09/2005 - 09:17

My best answer would be to turn the machine off, lay in it with a mic and record my vox. After that, you could overdub the machine, tracked with a shotgun mic from outside the room. Or, why not mic up a chlothes dryer? It would have pretty much the same sound and would save your client some $. Let me know if I got the job... :wink:

anonymous Sun, 07/10/2005 - 06:22

freaky wrote: I just remembered, MRI machines already have a talkback system in them. Just find a way to patch into the technician's desk...

Interesting..... Although I guess the quality would be a bit poor. Worth investigating though. Thanks for that!

Re: turning the machine off and over-dubbing. Not possible. The idea is that we are recording sentences a person is speaking whilst scanning there lower vocal tract to see how the pronounciation of different sounds is affected by movements in the lower pharynx. Subtle differences in the way a person speaks the same sentence means that we cant simply record them saying the sentence later either. The scan and recording have to be simultaneous.

moonbaby Mon, 07/11/2005 - 07:29

Laguardo: I work in the medical imaging business.
You might contact a company in Cali-land called Resonance Technology @ 818-882-1997. They manufacture communications
systems for MRI applications. Ask for the "tech support" dept. Good thing that "money is not a problem", because their stuff is not cheap. Good luck!

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