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

The human stereo

[Adam Jenkins]

Now if they can just wire the Discman inside your skull someplace too..

Re:The human stereo

[Nucleon500]

This is clearly the best technology ever developed, because it can close the analog hole. We can implant two speakers, one for each ear, just inside the skull. Each speaker will have a DAC and a decryptor chip, and a secure digital pathway leading out the ear canal. The pathway will block the ear canal to restrict unauthorized listening. The speakers will connect to a wearable Microsoft Music Center device, which will manage the user's listening rights. Later versions might include a microphone, so that the user can listen to sounds in the environment, after a short delay to ensure they aren't watermarked.

Although some cyber-terrorists may consider this a drastic method, it's the only way to protect the content industries, which are vital to America's economy, from rampant piracy and theft. Therefore, I'm proposing legislation requiring these devices to be implanted in each child before they turn two. Please join my crusade of consumer protection and write your congressman today!

Re:The human stereo

[genecystal]

This is not funny. This is terrifyingly prophetic

Been done before?

[MImeKillEr]

SoundBug.

Ok, so you can't turn your head into a speaker, but you can with practically any smooth surface.

And for a lot less than $1500.

Re:Been done before?

[PaintyThePirate]

Acually, the SoundBug uses Terfenol.

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.

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.

Re:Been done before?

[blincoln]

I think there is a huge market for the ability to turn various items into a quality audio transmitter.

The problem is mostly with the concept of using things like walls and desks as speakers. The material they're made out of just isn't designed for it, and if you're like most people and have pictures hung on your walls and office supplies in your desk drawers or whatnot it's going to add even more distortion.

It sounds like a better use for this metal would be making really high-quality speaker cones and "headphones" that sit on your skull instead of your ears, like they do to the article's author.

Re:Been done before?

[jellomizer]

Because of the poorer sound quality, teenage boys seem to like it.

If you haven't listens to todays music. Low quality speakers only help make it better.

This explains alot...

[Anonymous Coward]

...no wonder the voices in my head sound like the Rolling Stones.

Now if they would only quit playing "Sympathy for the Devil".

-mark

Re:thinkgeek?

[Aneurysm]

It says in the article, that the Soundbug is the "toy version" of the product. Cheap, but not great sound quality.

My head already got a speaker!

[DaneelGiskard]

I wonder...will god nullify their patent because of prior art? ;-)

This sounds like Soundbug

[G4from128k]

This product was already out in a device called SoundBug. back in 2002.

I seem to recall that SoundBug had poor sound quality because most surfaces and structures have strange acoustic response patterns. But I'm sure that with a bit of clever processing (a microphone and a bit of FFT magic), one could estimate the transfer function of the speaker surface, create a inverse filter that corrects for its properties, and then apply the filter to the any sound for better output.

Matrix...

[DaneelGiskard]

If Mr. Anderson would have had that in Matrix, he could have really pissed of that agent in that questioning scene...

Agent: "What good is a phone call...if you're unable to speak!"

Neo turns on his head speakers

Neo: "Wadda say?" ;-)

Re:The human stereo - Monty Python

[Anonymous Coward]

And now for something completely different... a man with a tape recorder up his nose...

Re:ThinkGeek

[dirkdidit]

Take it from somebody who shelled out the $30 for one of those things, they suck. Not just a little bit, but a lot. The thing rarely worked on the surfaces I'd put it on and on the surfaces it did work on, it still sounded like a dying cat. Not to mention that it is about the flimsiest thing I've ever used. It broke after only 2 weeks, though I can honestly say I wasn't heart broken.

Sure the SoundBug is a cool gadget but I strongly doubt it's even close to the product quality of the $300 this company is selling.

who cares about this new fangled music technology.

[Anonymous Coward]

when you can listen to music that's in your mind here

now all we need is RIAA serving discovery documents for pieces of your brain....

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.

Re:Sound Cancel?

[Anonymous Coward]

they probably tightened a few screws then charged mrStupid 1.5mill

anti-sound

[cyber_rigger]

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

I tried it with some tape, my mpio, and those..

[cspring007]

inflatable speakers they have in sharper image. Bought them, blew them up, and made what can be described as headphones. The sound was insane, as were the looks on people's faces who saw me that day in the mall.

Been done before...

[ThogScully]

I don't know what particular metals are used in Bass Shakers, but I don't really care. They aren't Sound Bugs like everyone else has posted a link to and they work exceptionally well to create a speaker out of whatever you screw them into: car chassis, couch, wall, whatever.

Specifically, they are intended for bass reproduction, but that's the only frequency domain where the material of the cone isn't having a dramatic effect on the sound quality, so I wouldn't necessarily want full range production from whatever random materials I can find.
-N

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?

Re:Similar to hippy technology

[wjsteele]

Wow! I forgot about that thing. I had one. It was called the Bone Phone. It was a soft cloth covered device, about 18" long, 3" wide and 1" thick. You simply layed it around the back of your neck, with the two ends over your collar bones. The controls were at one end and batteries at the other. It did have speakers, but it didn't vibrate your collar bones... the speakers were positioned above the unit, right under your ears so you could hear it even with the volumn turned down low. This made it hard for others to hear.

It was a cool radio, but the walkman idea was better, because you couldn't jog with the Bone Phone on, it would too easily fall off.

Ah... thanks for the memories.

Bill

Walls as speakers in the military

[MemoryAid]

The military has transducers used on walls to prevent people from listening in on classified conversations. I've seen them installed in aircraft carrier ready rooms, where flight briefs take place. One can put an ear to the outside of the wall to try to listen, but can only hear the (usually lame) music in the wall.

This system is not designed as a speaker, per se, but it is audible from near the wall. I have no idea what flavor of unobtanium is used for these, but I suspect they probably cost at least $1500, based on the military's track record.

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:Old news

[steelframe]

Absolutely! The first I read of this was in the '60s (Popular Science/Mechanics?). I wanted one to attach to the floor for earth shaking bass, but it seems that low end is the weak point in most of these iterations. I couldn't conceive at the time that all I would have to do was park my car in the living room.

china

[Potor]

But if scientists from China discover how to manufacture Terfenol -- Etrema's Snodgrass says that three Chinese companies have already started making pirated versions -- the metal's still-fragile reputation could be harmed by the cheaper, imported version.

if china has the metals and the formula, why would their 'pirate' version be inferior to the american version, beyond its not being american? wouldn't market demand dictate the quality of the chinese ternenol? and surely pirated is the wrong word here. they are not bootlegging consumer goods, but manufacturing a material. unless, that is, they use it to make mickey mouse dolls and rolex watches.

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:Hearing for the deaf?

[cfradenburg]

It depends on how deaf they are. It's the same thing with a cochlear implant. If the hairs in the inner ear that sense the vibrations are too damaged it wouldn't work. However, if they can still function but not to well then something like that would be able to help. What I am interested in is how this technology differs from what is currently used in cochlear implants. Would it work better?

Re:Hearing for the deaf?

[alhawkins]

Depends on the reason they are deaf. There are two kinds of hearing loss, conductive and sensory/neural. Conductive hearing loss is caused by destruction/loss of function of the mechanical portion of the ear - the ear drum (tympanic membrane) and the hearing 'bones' (stapes, incus, malleus). Sensory/neural hearing loss comes from the destruction of the nerve receptors in the cochlea or the auditory nerve itself. This system would help someone hear if they had conductive hearing loss, because it would bypass the middle ear sound conduction system and directly stimulate the sensory hearing receptors in the cochlea by bone conduction. It would be far less useful to people with sensory/neural hearing loss.

I don't understand ?

[TenPin22]

Theres no such thing as pirating in China.

Bone-Fone

[kantai]

Some information about the bone-fone and a picture can be found here: http://pocketcalculatorshow.com/magicalgadget/inde x3.html

Rare Earth Elements

[Detritus]

The Industrial Physicist has an interesting article (PDF file) on rare earth elements that mentions terbium and dysprosium. According to the article, 3.6 kg of dysprosium will set you back about $50,000 US.

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.

nice

[sewagemaster]

oh great, so now even the unknown old fat ugly lady on the other side of the phonesex line that sounds like a horse can sound like the unknown old fat ugly lady on the other side of the phonesex line that sounds like a hot pr0nstar!

Naval Ordinance Lab

[gessel]

The ~NOLs are inventions of the Naval Ordinance Lab, curiously located out there in the corn fields; famously NiTiNOL and TerFeNOL, not exactly the the most overwhelmingly original names, they do sound techy.

The "latest" material, terfenol, exploits the giant magnetostrictive effect, which sounds even more brand new, but it isn't, having been discovered in the 1840s.

The high strain versions of this (and the thermally actuated "shape memory alloys") were developed in the 1940s for use in high powered sonar. They are generally used as replacements for voice coils and for the same reason. If you want to actuate your domestic structure, you can use a big one and keep it cool with LN2.

These materials are far too old to be covered by existing patents, so they're fabricated all over the world. Indeed, chinese manufacturers are in production.

Perfect example of why patents aren't all good

[anagama]

• " But that's not the biggest problem. For while Etrema currently holds a monopoly on the world's smartest metal, its executives predict that within about seven years competitors will have figured out a way to make Terfenol more cheaply--or worse, to manufacture an even smarter metal. (Etrema's scientists are already hard at work developing Terfenol's successor.)"

Without any fear of competitors, the rate of research would slow down. But because there are wolves at the door, the company will be more productive and innovative. And while it might not be this company that ultimately scores the money jackpot, humans in general will likely be better off through the enhanced development speed (speakers aren't the only application - it appears to have important ones as well).