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Voices in Your Head
ceejayoz writes "MSNBC/Newsweek is running a story about a 'Hypersonic Sound System' that can 'can take an audio signal from virtually any source and convert it to an ultrasonic frequency that can be directed like a beam of light toward a target up to 100 yards away.' Sounds like something that advertisers will love - Minority Report just got a little closer." These guys (and the Audio Spotlight guys) have been hyping this technology for years with nothing much to show from it. But now, Newsweek promises, it's going to change the world as we hear it.
My only concern here is what happens when someone cranks up the amp on this and points it at someone's head at close range? Does it become a sonic bullet, destroying hearing (or worse), or is it limited in it's power by default?
The technology creats a sound wave at the point where the two ultrasonics intersect. So, if the energy of the ultrasonics were high enough, or enough ultrasonic waves intersected close to each other, this could create a huge sonic force, enough to throw someone through the air, or knock down walls. Interesting weaponry applications, eh?
Hey baby, this is your appetite speaking
</Barry White>
This amazing device can be yours for a minimal price. Just sent me $2000 and I'll ship a couple of devices capable of producing hundreds of watts of sound. None of this crappy 1 person 100 yards away stuff.. Man, where do they get their ideas?
Yo didn't read the article, did you? This does not LISTEN to people, it does the reverse... it sends a directed 'beam' of sound, that cannot be heard anywhere except inside the beam itself. True, private sound that can be directed just like a beam of light. Read the article, then post.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Woody Norris wants to tell you something--and he can put the words inside your head from 100 yards away.
Woody Norris thinks he is most clever scientist of the 21st century...but did Woody notice the yellow eyed green creature parked in a silver disk on the limbs the green tree 100 yards outside his office...
Now I can have information about increasing my penis 3 to 6 inches beamed directly into my head as I walk down the street. The very idea of pedestrian spam, spamming houses, cars, offices... give the advertisers military grade psychological warfare equipment and this will make email spam seem like well... something pretty damn trivial (drew a complete analogy blank there).
The day I get blasted with an add for Coke beamed directly into my head while walking down the street is the day I quit my job and start organizing consumer boycotts full time.
The real winner will be the engineer that develops a practical system to counter-act such a device. A small device such as a watch that can detect the signal and then send a destructive wave to cancel the signal would be good.
A previous article (months or years ago) said that it worked by setting up interference patterns in the ultrasonic beam. Just like interference patterns in normal sound can let you make subsonic noises, interference patterns in the ultrasonic beam can create audible sound.
Exactly how they do it? I dunno. I'm not even sure they have released their method to the public yet.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
For some reason I feel this is a double post, but no-one here seems to have noticed, so I must be nuts.
Here's how it works in laymans terms. I am no science wizard, but this sounds good to me..
There are things called beat frequencies that occur when you have two frequencies present. For example, if you play 20Hz into one ear, and 25Hz into the other, your brain can be 'tricked' into thinking it is hearing 5Hz (the difference between the two frequencies).
This is all well and good, but 20Hz soundwaves don't travel too good. Ultrasonic frequencies do though. Remember those TV remote controls in the 70s and 80s that used ultrasonics? You could control your neighbor's TV. (See the start of Poltergeist 1 if you forget)
But how does sending 50Khz sound waves through the air help you hear anything? Ay, well there's the rub. The concept of beat frequencies is used once again.
If you send a 50Khz sound wave from one source and pinpoint it at a certain spot, and then send a 51Khz sound wave from another source to the same spot, anyone at the place where those two beams join up will hear a 1Khz sound, thanks to beat frequencies.
That's how you can pinpoint sounds to a single place. It just took a genius to get the connection between beat frequencies and ultrasonics to work this one out. I think it's cool.
mogorific carpentry experiments
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/video_index/vide o_index.html
seems like there are a mixture of applications.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Now i guess they just need to push the arguments towards, "No, I don't want to buy a fucking Coke" and no-one will suspect a thing...
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Much of the sound of your own voice while speaking is not sound waves traveling back in through your ears -- they are the result of vibrations of your skull from speaking.
This will probably operate on the same principle -- a 51HZ beam at one waveform and a 50Hz at an opposite will partially cancel, and you get a 1Hz resonance inside your skull, which you hear much as you would your own voice while speaking.
Now wait a minute! I thought ultrasound caused small fusion reactions to occur when sonic cavities collapsed! Rather than projecting a sound, isn't this thing going to cause people's heads to explode in a fusion reaction???
That wasn't a coincidence. Speilberg had a large number of people interested in future technological developments come up with rational extropolations of current research. The MIT project, for instance, to produce just this effect.
So, just about everything you saw in Minority Report, tech-wise, is under consideration somewhere.
I, however, am sadly certain that this will be used as a weapon. Blow a person's eardrums out with that thing, or even worse. How much sonic energy does it take to make your head blow up like an overheated pumpkin?
Is there a defence that can be devised? 180-out-of-phase speakers? What?
Physics majors, any answers?
OK, Newsweek has now slipped into the same category as the TV channels that show infomercials 20 hours a day. A couple of weeks ago Newsweek touted Microsoft Palladium as the revolutionary future, now they're saying this sound wave thing will be. How much would it cost me to have Newsweek run a long article about my futuristic world-changing vaporware product that happens to be 8 to 15 years away from actual production? It's worse than biased media, it's buy-your-own-news.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
Consider a car with active sound dampening. no road noise. No passing car noise. However, active sound dampening could be used intelligently, to allow you to clearly hear sirens, horns, etc.
Of course, with the sound beams and active noise cancelling, the driver could (theoretically, with enough sensors & speakers) hold a hands-free cellphone conversation without the passengers being able to hear.
Frightening.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
just as two frequencies of light make a different pattern when they interfere, the ultrasound makes different frequencies (sound) when they interfere.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
You got a few things right, but a few things wrong.
First, beat frequencies are quite real - there is no "tricking" your brain into hearing something that isn't there - the signal is there.
Specifically, whenever you feed 2 signals f1 and f2 into a system with any non-linearities, you will get four frequencies out - the original f1 and f2, and two new frequencies (f2-f1) and (f1+f2). So, if I feed 51kHz and 50 kHz into a system, you will get 1 kHz, 50 kHz, 51 kHz, and 101 kHz. This is the same principle that all modern radio receivers work on - it is called heterodyning, and a modern radio is a superheterodyne receiver.
Now, in terms of propagation, low frequency sound does better than high frequencies - hence why thunder goes "CRACK" when it is close and "rummmblee" when it is far away - all the high frequencies have been attenuated by the air. Also, this is one of the reasons why all you hear of the assholes with the ThunderThump 3000 car stereos is the low frequencies - what little high frequencies they produce are attenuated by the car's body and the distance.
However, to get any directionality from a sound transducer, it must be large with respect to the sound frequency. The problem is that the bulk of the frequencies humans hear have very long wavelengths - it is possible to make a directional beam of 20 Hz sound, but you would need a speaker system the size of a football field. Somewhat impractical if you want them all over the place, pumping out your "BUY ME NOW" message.
However, by translating the frequencies up to 50 kHz, you reduce the wavelengths down to the point where the speaker needn't be much larger than a paperback to get the directional gain you want. So, you upconvert the signals to ultrasonic frequencies, and you use the fact that just hitting a surface acts as a nonlinear mixing element.
However, I have always wondered how much of the signal is going into the (f2-f1) component, and how much of the power is in the other three frequencies you cannot hear? What kind of damage will this energy do over the long run?
Not to mention that, with the steady erosion of the respect of the right of people to be left alone, how will this be abused? Will we see "reality TV" shows freaking people out? (say, by beaming "LOOK OUT! HE'S GOT A GUN" to one person in a crowd). Let alone the targeted advertisments ("Hey lard butt! Yeah, YOU. Get your fat ass into Fred's Gym, across the street. NOW!")
Personally, if this sort of thing gets deployed in public places, I want to start carrying one of the boxes you used to downmix bat echolocation down to audible, locate the speakers, and use my Leatherman on them... Or my Browning...
www.eFax.com are spammers
Isn't there a risk that your head might explode if someone play's Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
It turns out that "Field of Dreams" was military testing of this sound system and holographic projection systems.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Here is an rare drawing of the initial design...
Good.. Can you hear me now?..Good..
I recall that this technology has also been explored by the military. Last I heard, it was to be used to confuse troops on the other side -- "what's that noise", "where's that coming from?" , and so on.
Drug dealing - forget selling cheap/fake drugs, consider the drug seller options.
You could stand in an alleyway and talk only to the people you want, without worrying about being seen/heard by police.
Think about informants and other covert situations. Your informant sits on a park bench and you, 100 yards away in a car, ask him questions to which he responds with motioning.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
But to make the complex sound for each person, you must have an ultrasonic system for each person, as well as a sensor system that can track each person and the local obstacles to sound.
Then you would need emitters all around the room to improve the the ability to target people in a varied environment. Each emitter would have to be on a pivot to work best, and you would need some great software to dynamically track people's movements to prevent "falling out" of the sound accidentally.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I can see it now... kill yourself...kill yourself...turn the wheel of youre car hard right...NOW!
That scene in Real Genius...You know... ... ...
Mitch: And from now on, stop playing with yourself!
Kent: It is God!
Physics majors, any answers?
A simple metal helmet should protect you. In fact, tinfoil might be sufficient.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Our local Ralphs supermarket recently installed flat-panel LCD screens on every register to show advertising to the people waiting in line to check out. Video I can tune out, you simply look away, but they added audio. You can't not pay attention to audio, which is why I am now boycotting Ralphs. I still think consumer boycots are the best way to go. Here's my boycot list:
Shell - Bastards wouldn't let me use their bathroom because they close them at 10pm.
Arco - Deceptive pricing, $0.35 if you use an ATM card, noted in very small print on the pump.
TNN - Put a black bar that blocks content without adding anything extra.
Movies on TV - "Edited for Time", removing content to put in commercials or fit a schedule.
What else do people boycot?
Travis
"Warning: through sound and motion you might accidently paralyse nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs."
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
It won't feel like it's comming from inside your head anymore than anysound wave does.
Quoth the article: "What the person across the room hears is, well, unbelievable: all of a sudden, the sound of a waterfall has materialized in his head."
I'm not sure how the technology works (they don't give much actual detail about it) but it may be vibrating the skull, which would make it sound like it's coming from inside your head. (I have a Thinkgeek "Soundbug" and if you push it against your forehead, you hear it from between your ears - very weird!)
Oldest story where they used the same mechanism (modulating an audio signal onto an ultrasonic frequency and sending it to people) is a story by L. Spague de Camp, _The Exalted_, first published in 1940. (Fun story, by the way; my copy is from _The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology_, edited by John Campbell, Simon And Schuster. Publication date is roughly 1952.)
"There's the soft-speaker, for instance-"
"What's that?"
"It's like a loud-speaker, only it doesn't speak loudly. It throws a super-sonic beam, modulated by the human voice to give the effect of audible sound-frequencies when it hits the human ear. Since you can throw a supersonic beam almost as accurately as you can throw a light beam, you can turn a soft-speaker on a person, who will then hear a still small voice in his ear apparently coming from nowhere..."
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
I think this would be really handy for home theater setups. Most of the places I've lived just aren't set up right to have proper surround sound. The rear speakers just don't really have any place to go, and even if they did, the wires would be really obnoxious. Often times the front left and right speakers can't be pushed out far enough to really give the proper seperation, either.
But, by using this technology, all you'd have to do is point these high-freq speakers at the spots from which you want the sound to come and *poof* you've got a virtual-speaker there.
They're saying that there are issues with reproducing bass signals, but that's where your subwoofer comes in. Now, that is often the uglies part of the system.. big and bulky, but if you could find somewhere for that to go, then that should make up for the lack of bass from the high-freq speakers. Sort of like those Bose systems with the little satelite speakers and the sub. Together, the system sounds really good.. but unplug the sub? It's not a pretty sound..
But you're stealing from the advertisers if you do that. It's theft. Your contract with the store when you walk in is that you're going to listen to the ads. Otherwise they couldn't sell as many things. Any time you don't listen to one of our advertisements you're actually tresspassing in the store.
(If that sounds familiar, you might be thinking of this article)
That's the quickest way to get these dick-heads to leave you hanging on the phone. Just tell 'em you're broke.
You don't even get a chance to start a sob story about it either. They figure they'rte going to give you the same warm welcome they've been getting all day and they slam the phone in your ear.
Its great. Word gets around and they don't call anmore.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Ok...I'm inclined to think you were born yesterday.
Ever been to even the most basic children's museum? Then you've seen the two parabolic reflectors that transmit a whisper clearly across a crowded, noisy room.
Ever cupped your hands around your mouth to shout to someone far away? You must have looked pretty stupid, if, as everyone knows, you can't focus sound.
Ever seen an amphitheatre? They're designed specifically to focus sound to the listening audience.
Those great big flaps of flesh that stick out of your head, that just happen to be rougly cone-shaped and connected to your auditory canal? What do you think those are there for? For that matter, ever seen a horse, dog, or cat when it's listening to something?
Sound is a wave, and can be focused. Everything exhibits both wave and particle properties, light can be focused because of its wave properties, not its particle properties.
You obviously skipped 1st grade physics.
...
Sorry, but if you actually TRY the noise-cancelling headphones you'll quickly discover that they don't work so well on high-frequency content. They're mainly intended to help damp out the rumbling of jet engines inside an airplane cabin. You can still clearly hear human speech.
The problem is that to accurately cancel a sound, you have to EXACTLY invert its phase - match it and you double the volume instead. Bass is a lower frequency with a longer wavelength and is easier to accurately match and thus cancel. You can measure the sound with a microphone a small distance from the ear canal, without causing much problem. But the high frequency sound is more directional, and you'd have to mount the microphone which measures the sound to be canceled almost directly in the ear canal to get a real measurement of what you need to be canceling. Not exactly comfortable to wear, or convenient.
As electronics get smaller, I wouldn't be surprised to see active cancellation hearing-aid-style inserts. This method would probably work perfectly. As a matter of fact, the only real high-end noise cancelling system used something like that setup, with a remote electronics pack.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
QSound was supposed to do this, cause vibrations in the auditory system to make the sound seem like it was coming from inside you and around you. I don't know how well it worked because the only time I saw anything with the QSound label it was in an arcade and everything just ran together in one huge cacophony.
This will no doubt comprise the superliminal branch of their three-pronged attack.
"Score:4 Informative"
The mind boggles...
I said it before and I'll say it again. We need to use the [HUMOUR] tags.
I am a Karma Library.
qsound is mostly just varying amounts of inversion on one side of a stereo channel. If you happen to be in the sweet spot it sounds kinda like its coming from inside your head. There were some qsound demos that came with the SB AWE32 years ago. The kind of stuff you play with for a minute or two and think 'I can't believe they are trying to sell this crap.'
There are some riot control devices that look like a cannon. They essentially consist of a massive multi-kilowatt power amplifier that is used to fire 10hz tones (lower limit of human hearing is around 20hz) at the crowds. "Loud" enough sound at 10 hz is enough to knock people over and make them lose control of their bowels.
I imagine this could easily be used to 'beam' a low tone like this at someone specific (a hostage taker, etc) and make them incapacitated without any harm to others in the area.
I've got something that has your invention beat by a mile...It's called a radio, see, and. . .
And you're building them without speakers?
to beam "helpful suggestions" to drivers in front of me that are driving like idiots...
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Is there a defence that can be devised? 180-out-of-phase speakers? What?
Physics majors, any answers?
Duck and cover.
Seriously, ultrasonic frequencies do a poor job of going through any barrier. It would make a lousy weapon compared with, say, a sniper rifle.
As soon as someone shoots one of these things at you, just pull out yours and fire it right back at him only reamplified =)
I'm pretty sure it was meant to be a "subliminal message" given the nature of this article. So you weren't supposed to notice it enough to respond directly to it.
Just go buy some shares of lnux, and you'll be fine.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
As the headline of the story says, check out Audio Spotlight from MIT. I was lucky enough to see Joseph Pompei (the inventor of Audio Spotlight) give a demonstration and it was amazing. The technology works as promised: it produces a directed beam of sound which can make noises come from anywhere in the room you want. Furthermore, Mr. Pompei struck me as an exceptionally competent researcher. He had looked at a lot of issues like what kind of frequency response you can get (bass is harder to get than treble), whether the ultrasound causes long term damage (not according to a Harvard study), and how to manufacture (short answer: lots of DSP chips).
I don't new about the guy Newsweek talks about, but the technology is real and I'm looking forward to hearing it.
beaming ultrasonic waves at a toddler or infant for extended periods of time cannot possibly be healthy for them. I'm dubious of even having done to myself until there's been research done that shows this has no long term effects on brain or hearing function.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
People hearing voices in their head? Wow talk about old news, they used to burn people for that kind of thing..... Though I have to admit, making a product you can sell based on this is pretty slick (well aside from whoever makes boatloads of money from things like Thorazine).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
If you want to humiliate someone or win a great battle against indiscriminate or aggressive advertizing, try addressing yourself to the book company. The $8-an-hour clerk isn't responsible. Neither are the poor high school dropouts trying to sell you long distance service. Ask for a manager, and then explain to the manager that "suggestive selling" the membership was intrusive.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Wow, devices that beam sound directly at me used for advertising... in the past vandalism on billboards were pretty amusing, if not unsightly. If people start to vadalize these devices, say by cracking them with bats so we dont have to hear any unwanted advertisements, Id say vandalism will have taken on a new role, going from destructive to useful.
For those who are interested in things such as white papers on the technology, go to American Technology Corp. website. I used to work there... the article does not do it justice.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
Yeah, I remember hearing stuff like that, which is why I left the door opened. It's unverified... but of COURSE it's unverified, as to be fair it is exactly the sort of thing the military would justifiably suppress. (That said, I doubt it's useful, but I don't really know.)
Regarding your last paragraph, check my last paragraph. Also, watch your dB, remember, they are exponential. A gun shot tops out at around 140... at 170, they may not have an eardrum left.
(You can get some fun results with that... a nuclear bomb is actually only in the low 200s, as I recall.)
The article mentioned that he was using a pair of ultrasonic beams, so it was my assumption that he was focusing the two beams on the person's head and that the person was hearing the "beat frequency" of the two beams.
(but not from Bill's humidor...)
Correct - what I was alluding to was being able to hear the original ultrasound before the mixing, so as to better locate the speakers.
And I'm not sure if the bat boxes do a single-sideband on the signal - I think they just do a straight mix of a bandwidth limited input - the mike responds to 20kHz->40 kHz, and then you mix with 20 kHz, yeilding 0->20 kHz and 40->60 kHz. Who cares about the high-side signals?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Google on "Voice to Skull" technology - and be afraid...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It's not the wavelength of the sound you're sending that matters. It sends a couple of ultrasonic waves that interfere with each other at the destination to produce the result. The ultrasonic waves are, of course, highly directional and controllable. The article did say that they had trouble producing the lower tones of music, however. I would imagine the 10Hz "brown note" isn't workable (yet).
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
For the differently clued (moderator, listen up):
1) Every sentence of my post was about the article.
2) I was making a point there.
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