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Projecting Sound 'Inside Your Head'
Gregus writes "Projecting 'hypersonic sound' has appeared here before, but NY Times Magazine (FRRYYY) has an in-depth article with its lauded inventor and its applications. John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now." Plus this story includes screwing with Mall Walkers!
It's good to know that I'm not crazy and someone has been telling me to start those fires...
It seems like many people in the industry thought this guy was a crack-pot, and didn't believe some of his theories. However, he seems to have been able to prove himself and turn many skeptics into believers. This really does have some neat, and disturbing applications.
Yea, great, mucic for the voices i my head to sing along with. Quite badly I might add.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
its not a dupe, its an echo ;)
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
Ok this is a new low for the NY Times, using pr0n to attract readers. I mean, how horny do you think we are?
With this technology, they can directly beam marketing into your head, and it's not like you can ignore it like you can print/t.v/radio ad's by switching the channels, or averting your eyes. Now they have the ability to force you to listen to it, whether you want to or not.
While research has proven that subliminal messages are, from a marketing standpoint, mostly ineffective, one has to wonder about the advertising possibilities of this type of technology.
Sure, there are the obvious "private advertising" applications mentioned in the article, but this kind of thing can be very interesting - and very frightening.
Picture - you're driving along a road during rush hour. Suddenly, your skull registers the squeal of tires and a massive crash. Or, walking down a sidewalk, a quiet voice inside your head whispers that you're all going to die.
Like any new technology, this one sounds fun, but is going to require some degree of regulations and control to avoid abuse.
This has the potential to be the worst invention ever. How would you feel about being forced to listen to advertisements while riding the subway? You can't turn it off. 20 minutes of commercials, or event (shudder) popular music.
I'm sib888, and I approved this comment.
"transmitting" sound to other people? Sounds like a copyright circumvention device to me.
Till some artist thinks its funny and puts a recording of fingernails on a chalkboard on their CD... and projects that sound inside your head.
will it make floor-shaking bass sounds when I listen to music in my head too?
For those that looked at me funny while I was wearing my tin foil hats: Apolgies will be accepted in verbal and written form from 6AM to 11:30PM.
Your apologies will be accompanied the cursory "I told you so"
~Z
March 23, 2003
The Sound of Things to Come
By MARSHALL SELLA
No one ever notices what's going on at a Radio Shack. Outside a lonely branch of the electronics store, on a government-issue San Diego day in a strip mall where no one is noticing much of anything, a bluff man with thinning, ginger hair and preternaturally white teeth is standing on the pavement, slowly waving a square metal plate toward people strolling in the distance. ''Watch that lady over there,'' he says, unable to conceal his boyish pride for the gadget in his giant hand. ''This is really cool.''
Woody Norris aims the silvery plate at his quarry. A burly brunette 200 feet away stops dead in her tracks and peers around, befuddled. She has walked straight into the noise of a Brazilian rain forest -- then out again. Even in her shopping reverie, here among the haircutters and storefront tax-preparers and dubious Middle Eastern bistros, her senses inform her that she has just stepped through a discrete column of sound, a sharply demarcated beam of unexpected sound. ''Look at that,'' Norris mutters, chuckling as the lady turns around. ''She doesn't know what hit her.''
Norris is demonstrating something called HyperSonic Sound (HSS). The aluminum plate is connected to a CD player and an odd amplifier -- actually, a very odd and very new amplifier -- that directs sound much as a laser beam directs light. Over the past few years, mainly in secret, he has shown the device to more than 300 major companies, and it has slackened a lot of jaws. In December, the editors of Popular Science magazine bestowed upon HSS its grand prize for new inventions of 2002, choosing it over the ferociously hyped Segway scooter. It is no exaggeration to say that HSS represents the first revolution in acoustics since the loudspeaker was invented 78 years ago -- and perhaps only the second since pilgrims used ''whispering tubes'' to convey their dour messages.
As Norris continues to baffle shoppers by sniping at them with the noises he has on this CD (ice cubes clanking into a glass, a Handel concerto, the plash of a waterfall), some are spooked, and some are drawn in. Two teenage girls drift over from 100 feet away and ask, in bizarre Diane Arbus-type unison, ''What is that?''
Norris responds with his affable mantra -- ''In'nat cool?'' -- before going into a bit of simplified detail: how the sound waves are actually made audible not at the surface of the metal plate but at the listener's ears. He doesn't bother to torment the girls with the scientific gymnastics of how data are being converted to ultrasound then back again to human-accessible frequencies along a confined column of air. ''See, the way your brain perceives it, the sound is being created right here,'' Norris explains to the Arbus girls, lifting a palm to the side of his head. ''That's why it's so clear. Feels like it's inside your skull, doesn't it?''
In the years Norris has demonstrated HSS, he says, that's been the universal reaction: the sound is inside my head. So that's the way he has started to describe it.
Just to check the distances, I pace out a hundred yards and see if the thing is really working. (I've tried this other times -- in a posh hotel in Manhattan, in another parking lot in San Diego -- but HSS is so often suspected of being a parlor trick that it always seems to bear checking.) Norris pelts me with the Handel and, to illustrate the directionality of the beam, subtly turns the plate side to side. And the sound is inside my head, roving between my ears in accord with each of Norris's turns.
The applications of directional sound go quite a bit beyond messing with people at strip malls, important as this work may be. Norris is enthusiastic about all of the possibilities he can propose and the ones he can't. Imagine, he says, walking by a soda machine (say, one of the five million in Japan that will soon employ HSS), triggering a proximity detector, then hearing what you alone hear -- the plink of ice cubes and the invocation, ''Wouldn'
the most abused technology in history. I have visions of teenage drive-by "screamers" hitting pedestrians with targeted high-decibel music as a prank.
What about sonic weapons? Is there any reason why a rigged emitter couldn't be built that would emit a signal loud enough to rupture the eardrums of a specific target? Or at the very least, cause excruciating pain?
I think the inevitable barrage of targeted advertising will be the least of our worries with this new technology.
While the technology is cool and perhaps one day will be refined for home music consumption, its ability to be used as a non-lethal incapacitating weapon is scary. What could a corrupt government do with these devices. Would public protests against the government eliminated by these devices? (under the normal guise of controlling the crowd and responding to protesters crossing police barriers.)
The bit about different people in the car only hearing their own music is cool. The annoying pop machines and, even worse, PRODUCE ISLES, are just awful. I mean, I can look away from an obnoxious billboard etc, but there is no way to stop this! Not even plugging your ears, since it is IN your head!
Also, using it for emergency sirens? One of the biggest problems with CURRENT emergency sirens is that it is VERY difficult for the human ear to tell which direction it is coming from, because of the specific frequencies used. If it projects the sound INTO your head, there will be no way in HELL to know where it is coming from.
Another problem with using it for sirens is that it is important to hear the siren well before the emergency vehicle reaches you. This system appears to be LOS, so how well will that work? It would only work if the ultrasonic sounds can penetrate through surrounding houses and so on, which would be FAR worse than current sirens, as the walls of your house wouldn't dampen it! And if it CAN'T penetrate through your walls, then I don't see how CARS wouldn't block it, too; It is VERY important that people inside of cars be able to hear the siren!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Fry: So you're telling me they broadcast commercials into people's dreams?
Leela: Of course.
Fry: But, how is that possible?
Farnsworth: It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg. [He holds up an egg and injects it with liquid. The egg explodes.] Although in reality it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.
Fry: That's awful. It's like brainwashing.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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.
or whatever that game was where you shot at the people using calls such as 'im naked, and i have a pizza..' imagine the hunters expressions after 6 hours in a tent.. :-)
At least the war on the environment is going well
I think there are certainly some uses for this technology. One of the best examples was a museum. When you stand in front of a painting, you and you alone hear a description of it. For others, I'm sceptical. For example, most of the soda machines I see are tucked away. Generally, if I'm close enough to see the machine, its because I want to buy a soda. It seems a little senseless to advertise to someone who is in the process of buying it. Other examples he mentions, such as kids in the back seat of a car are easily handled with current technology -- headphones. I don't see any added benefit.
They explain the concept on how to disable the enemy with this technology. Take the reverse baby crying sound and crank up the output signal for the speaker. What's to stop someone from buying the speakers in the future and doing the exact same thing to civilians/police? I'd hate to see this type of technology in the hands of terrorists. Imagine sonic bombs taking out city blocks (given that the inventor says 1% output could nauseate the author for hours, what do you think 100% output would do)?
I'm deaf myself, and I wonder if this thing could work a lot better than ordinary hearing aids.. would be seriously cool, and be much cheaper.
I'm too sexy for you.
actually, a really old primitive set of monophonic headphones will make the sound appear to be in the exact center of your head
RTFA...The sound is meant to be used as a weapon, and the writer got to see how it worked. The writer was nauseated and in pain at one percent of what it would be on the battlefield.
This is some scary stuff. I can't begin to imagine how horrible this could make life.
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
"These are not the droids you were looking for."
This technology doesn't suddenly make it possible for them to force you to listen to things on a subway. They could do that already with loudspeakers. The fact that they don't, and that so many mass transit systems ban radio et al unless you use headphones, suggests that this invention won't change this.
I've read a couple of posts that suggest the reader would likely hunt out and smash the offending advertising emitter using this technology. I'd suggest that you'd even have the legal right to do so!
This technology creates the offending sound 'in your head'. Litteraly, the sound is created by the resonating waves heading your eardrum or bones in your ear. This is as close to abuse as you can get, imho. You can't turn away or tune it out.
It's one thing for an ad to sit there waiting to be looked at, or a background noise which are human brains are accustomed to tuning out. It's yet an entirely different thing to have sound resonating in your head which you cannot stop nor have really much sense of the emminating source.
Just think of the problems caused by billboards on the freeway... 'Um, excuse me, while your driving by at 60 mph, would you consider a nice refreshing
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
Back in high school I used to drive around with friends shining a 2 million candlepower spotlight into bedrooms of people we didn't like, or ringing the doorbell and waiting until they answered the door to blind them. I imagine that I wouldn't have been nearly as bored with a sound "spotlight" to bother people.
chillax137
The other direction, the steerable microphone with strong off-axis noise rejection, has been around for years. I have one, and it's not a big parabolic reflector; it's four small microphones and a DSP. Combine that with the ultrasonic speaker and you have a hands-free phone that's useful in office environments. You could probably mount the microphones on the speaker, because the outgoing signal is ultrasonic until the impedance of the air downconverts it. So the outgoing audio can be filtered out from the microphones.
Now the RIAA can restrict 'collaterial hearing' from your car stereo..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We have one of their units at work, and have been using it since the fall. It really does work - you're able to point sound at someone 20 feet away, yet the person standing next to them hears nothing. Also, any sound reflecting surface (concrete walls) that the beam is aimed at effectively becomes the sound surface itself. The only downsides to the unit is that bass is nonexistent - high frequencies only. Also, volume is fairly limited, but it works well enough. I believe we paid about $800 for the device, so it's not that terribly expensive.
It's really fun to aim it out the window of our building at passing people below. (God speaking to them, etc)
http://www.atcsd.com/tl_hss.html
(Includes data sheet, white paper, FAQ, etc...)
Headphones are like any speaker, they are designed for a different sound. The BEST home theater setup wont be the BEST for music, and vice versa. Sennheiser, while good, are only good for their kind of music. Music with delicate highs and a full frequency range. Mostly classical and the like. Awesome soundstage. Flat frequency response. However I wouldn't own a pair of Senns because I don't listen to that kind of music. Not only that, but they need a LOT of power. Normal headphone jack? no good. You need a dedicated $200+ headphone amp(the DSP Sennheiser sells is NOT an amp, btw) Grado cans on the other hand sound much faster and alive, great for rock, or any kind of faster music. They also have a better sounding bass. Listen to Rush with the Sennheiser HD-600(most expensive non-electrostatics they make) and then listen with the Grado SR-60(cheapest open-air Grado makes). TOTALLY different sound, and despite the lack of bass in the Grado low-end models, I bet a donut you'll like the SR-60 better. The SR-225 is probably the best value, and some say best sound of the SR line, but I went for the 325's. the RS line uses wood so a smoother sweeter sound, I can't wait to get some myself. Downfall to Grado: soundstage. Almost none. Its a very in-head sound. With Senns you'll sometimes wonder if you left some speakers on by accident. High-end Grados still sound perfect and smooth, but you know their headphones. Even so, Senns sound so dead on the wrong music, a pair of $50 sonys would be just as good. Do electrostatics like Stax sound better than normal dynamics? well, I've never tried any myself, but most people who spend like 10k on headphone setups still don't buy Stax. Best soundstage headphones going around right now? People say the AKG K1000, but they sorta cheat, the drivers are held away from your ear. Funny looking things. btw, did you know you can make your own electrostatic headphones at home? I believe you use clear plastic wrap to produce the sound.... 30 Helens agree, Grado is Great.
I found a baby crying WAV at http://ladywing.crosswinds.net/wavs.html.
Without editing it, you can play it backwards in the Quicktime Player by pressing ctrl-[left arrow], and ctrl-L will loop it.
Anyway, it actually sounds pretty much the same played both ways.
Bart: Rod! Todd! This is God!
Rod: How did you get in my head?
Bart: Whaddya mean, how did I get in your head? I created the universe! Stupid kid.
Todd: Forgive my brother. We believe you.
Bart: Talk is cheap. Perhaps I'll test a guy's faith. Walk through the wall! I will remove it for you.
Rod: [thud]
Bart: Ha ha ha.
Todd: What do you want from us?
Bart: I got a job for you. Bring forth all the cookies from your kitchen and leave them on the Simpsons' porch.
Rod: But those cookies belong to our parents.
Bart: Ugh! Look, do you want a happy God or a vengeful God?
Todd: Happy God.
Bart: Then quit flapping your lip and make with the cookies!
Todd+Rod: Yes, sir!
Unbelievable that "personal countermeasures" are going to be required just to walk down the street!
I had a similar idea a while back, just with a little more sinister application. It involved using two ultrasound sources with frequencies differering by something like 7Hz (cant remember exactly, but it was supposedly the resonant frequency of the gut), aim it at someone and make them feel distinctly queasy. Thankfully for all my classmates, I never actually got to try it out (I'm not sure if the guy in the article used the same method, and whether my idea would have worked), but if he were to transmit the sound at the natural frequencies of certain objects to that specific object, some pretty spooky effects could be generated, and nobody would hear.
(Time to go set up a haunted house I think.. smashing wine glasses, voices in peoples heads, strange feeling in the stomach - 'must be a ghost passing through me'). I'd make a fortune!
So I can send messages like:
- Hey dude, your tire's flat
- Go home, or learn where the accelerator pedal is
- You moron, speed up
- Do you know how I can get to Chestnut St. ?
- Yo mamma's fat
and direct it to a car.
The NYTimes article describes the protoype used as being very portable.
flash forward.
Can you imagine a protester using this to tell a politician what they think about the politician? or dozens of protesters.
Or aimed at Bill Gates at Comdex. or any other celebrity.
more subtly done, just a quiet voice wispering in the ear "you're evil" or something. Even with glass in between, the glass should resonate nicely.[?]
This will turn being a celeb into a living hell.
I can envision the havok teenage boys with these things could do.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There are many saying how it's an invasion of personal space, etc. Talking to the people who presented it they pointed out how a loudspeaker blares out over a large area. This system would be projected only in the area near a vending machine, store front window display, TV screen in a store, etc.
In a store with a lot of TV screens hawking different products each one would have it's "sound zone" which you could easily leave.
I'm sure that this 'sounds' like great tech to advertisers. It's too bad I will be forced to direct it at you at your home, work, and anywhere you go. I won't be gentle.
I have a right to silence in 'my head' and will defend that right like a crazy motherfucker hearing voices.
Got it, Madison Ave?
Time to bust out those tin foil hats boyz!!1