A video exploring the potential of using the very slight vibration of objects to create a *visual* record of sound, recordable on commercial cameras and interpreted via software. The results aren’t spectacular, but they are interesting. It should be noted that intelligence services have been assumed to have used something like this for decades to record sounds at a distance: bounce a laser beam off of a window and into a finely tuned photoreceptor. Voices within a room will cause the window to vibrate slightly; the reflected laser beam will jitter and that can be used to record the sounds. The system in the video below uses ambient light rather than laser beams, and cameras rather than photoreceptors, to approximate the same thing.
Advance the technology few hundred years down the line, and the USS Whateverprise could sidle up to a wrecked ship and *listen* to it. Obviously it could do so by bouncing lasers off of it, but also just by using reflected starlight. Even with the most advanced processors, though, a fully functional operating ship would seem to be entirely too noisy for an eavesdropper to pick up individual conversations. But… maybe. Interesting to consider the outside possibility of a sufficiently advanced science vessel being able to evade a Klingon attack because they can “hear” the enemy commander screaming orders at the bridge crew.