An idea close to the noise-sensitive table we have at the lab, this project has the same idea: creating social visualizations of aural group conversation. It's describe in the following paper: Visualizing Audio in Group Table Conversation by Karrie Karahalios and Tony Bergstrom:

These visualizations are tailored to a table setting. Examples of such settings are a family sitting about a table eating dinner or colleagues sitting about a table in a meeting. The form of the visualization is highly coupled to its function. People sit about the table structure and see their conversation visualized on the table surface as they speak. Using this physical structure, we present two graphical table interfaces. The first interface [Conversation Clock] depicts the rhythm and conversational patterns in table top interaction; the second visualization [Conversation Votes] extends this theme by incorporating a voting mechanism to highlight agreement and disagreement in spoken interaction. The visualizations evolve over time to create an evocative, graphical, interactive snapshot of the entire conversation within that table space.

The figure below depicts the two kinds of visualizations:

Why do I blog this? this is an interesting project, at the lab we're interested in this kind of visualizations as a way to give some feedback to groups about their own behavior (since it might be useful to improve collaborative processes like group regulation). The authors' goal is a bit different: they propose to use it to meet a certain need: "we find that participants frequently request graphical renderings of meaningful conversations as evocative souvenirs".