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: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.