Turn Your Head Into Speakers

Roland Piquepaille writes "A small company based in Iowa has developed products made with a "smart" metal that can turn your walls or your head into speakers. "Last August, Etrema -- an innovative technology firm nestled in the cornfields of Ames, Iowa -- started selling those chrome discs for $1,500 a pair. Called Whispering Windows, they can turn any wall, window, or drab conference table into a speaker." The author tried the technology, and even if she needed a full bottle of Tylenol after usage, said "it's not every day that your head serves as a piece of stereo equipment." This overview tells you more about this "magic" metal, the Terfenol, which is a combination of terbium and dysprosium. The article also says that we can soon expect pirated versions of Terfenol coming from China."

Comments

Re:Been done before?

[area-k]

From the Article: "Etrema is now trying to secure a major retailer to sell a $300 portable version called the Presenter, aimed at business travelers, that can plug into laptops and give any room a top-quality sound system for presentations. A toy version, the Soundbug, is available for $20 from Amazon and OfficeDepot.com. Despite the poorer sound quality, teenage boys seem to like it" Have you ever heard the SoundBug? It sounds like the cheap plastic it is. I think there is a huge market for the ability to turn various items into a quality audio transmitter.

Sound Cancel?

[Davak]

One wealthy businessman handed Etrema $1.5 million to stop the slight vibrations on his yacht when he hit top speeds. Terfenol did the trick, allowing him to dine at sea without having his meal shimmy off the plate. [And] a local church hired the firm to build a special pew so that a deaf person could hear the service.

This interests me more than the original article. How does a speaker-like material stop vibrations? Sure sound is a vibration... but to cancel out another sound/vibration it would have play the inverse sound at exactly the same time to cancel it out.

I'm assume the pew above just converted the sounds to either physical vibrations which the person could feel... or just adjusted the frequency to something that could be better heard/perceived.

anti-sound

[cyber_rigger]

Wire this up to create a "noise canceling" device and you might have something.

Similar to hippy technology

[back_pages]

I was told by my highschool orchestra conductor that he once had a device that looked similar to a small lead apron worn during X-Rays at the dentist's office. It contained oscillators that used your collar bones as the speaker, and though it produced no audible sound, you could "hear" it through the vibrations it introduced to your skeletal system.

It wasn't that popular. I think he said it was called something like a "Bonophone" or some combination of "bone" and "phone", but Googling for it this morning just comes up with a lot of links to naughty sites. Does anybody know if this really existed and what it was called?

Hearing for the deaf?

[timefactor]

a local church hired the firm to build a special pew so that a deaf person could hear the service

This is the most intriguing thing about this. Would a deaf person be able to "hear" using the "head-as-speaker" technique?

Re:Walls as speakers in the military

[surprise_audit]

Many years ago I got a bunch of piezo-electric transducers for around 15 cents each. Just a brass disk with a slice of crystal on one side. The open face of the crystal is silver-plated. You carefully solder a fine wire to the centre of the silver and to the edge of the brass. It functions pretty well as a pickup, and moderately well as a speaker.

To make a speaker out of one (or more), just fix them securely to any flat surface. The bigger and flatter the surface, the better, and better yet would be to have some kind of sounding box behind it.

The pickup function works incredibly well - with one plugged into a normal guitar amp, you can shout at it as loud as you like and it barely registers, but hold it against your throat and speak normally and you get really good quality with absolutely no background noise... Excellent for phones, microphones, etc.

Re:Dickhead

[Nucleon500]

The process to make this material is patented, right? If so, wouldn't hacking a network to steal the manufacturing details be superfluous? Couldn't they just look at the patent? The whole point of patents is that you get a temporary monopoly in return for not keeping secrets.

Granted, making this material would be a violation of US patent law (and Chinese patent law, to the extent it exists), but you're making it sound like the patent has been obfuscated, which shouldn't be.

Re:my bullshit meter is going of the scale

[Jonathan Platt]

Playing off a table I would agree with you. But this technology could be improved and used with different surface materials to one day provide sound better than conventional speakers. I used to be a sound engineer, and there are some major problems with creating really large speakers. Which is why most companies now use line array systems instead, but even these have phase cancellation, and don't represent low frequencies accuratly. This could allow a new way of creating speakers, and I'm sure could be perfected. Also EAW and Turbo Sund specialise in concert speakers, not quite speakers an audiophile would use. Tannoy, Meyer, now they make speakers.