It's possible to eavesdrop on a conversation hundreds of feet away — as long as there's a lightbulb in the room

Scientists have discovered a low-budget way to listen in on conversations you can see but not hear.

By measuring the vibrations that sounds make on a glass lightbulb, researchers at Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science were able to reconstruct songs and voices making noise through windows and more than 80 feet away. It took just a telescope, a $400-electro-optical sensor, and a clear view for their technique to recreate words and songs that even Shazam could recognize, Wired reports.

For their experiments, researchers put telescopes about 80 feet outside an office with a hanging lightbulb inside. They pointed one end of the telescope at the window, put the eyepiece to the electro-optical sensor, and played music and voices. They then converted the analog signals the sensor produced to digital information, ran it through software that filtered out excess noise, and produced recordings with "remarkable fidelity," Wired writes. Google's Cloud Speech API could transcribe a speech from President Trump played in the room, and Shazam was able to decipher The Beatles' Let it Be.

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The "lamphone," as the researchers call their technique, does have room for improvement. The hanging bulb they used to measure vibrations wasn't as secure as one in a fixture, and the speakers had to be turned all the way up to track enough vibrations. But if you want to lift the playlist from a neighbor's rowdy party in an unfinished basement, it just might work. Read more at Wired.