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Speech-Jamming Gun Silences From 30 Meters
MrSeb writes "Japanese researchers have created a hand-held gun that can jam the words of speakers who are more than 30 meters (100ft) away. The gun has two purposes, according to the researchers: At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking — but its second application is a lot more chilling. The researchers were looking for a way to stop 'louder, stronger' voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: 'We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.' In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce 'proper' conversations."
Silence, peon. Your must wait your turn. And not yell. If you speak out of turn or too loudly, you will be muted.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
"This is totally ....."
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Conventional firearms have been effective at silencing speakers for centuries. Do we really need this?
If conversation fails, people escalate to violence.
If bigbro wields this against the masses, a riot's going to erupt. Might as well go straight for the teargas and flashbangs.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
According TFA all the "jammer" does is play back a copy of your speech delayed by 0.2 seconds, akin to being annoyed by loud echo on a VoIP phone or Skype conversation. While echo can sometimes be annoying when it interrupts yourself, it is fairly easy to adjust if you've done it before and talk over yourself. Because the gun features both a directional microphone and directional speaker, if you can comfortably talk over yourself everyone else will hear you just fine, sans echo.
Hip! hip! H....
I was disappointed to see that it doesn't create some kind of actual interference, but rather just gives them a local echo of themselves and creates a psychological effect. This can easily be overcome with practice. If you've ever announced in a gym or a stadium, you get the same effect and get used to it quickly.
There's a Nobel prize waiting for the person who invents a way to use this over the Internet. Possibly the Nobel Peace Prize itself.
http://xkcd.com/368/
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Having worked with different types of audio equipment my entire life I can assure you that this effect is real.
However, depending on the delay it might not "shut you up" completely. It can make you slur or not be able to form words. You can get stuck on a single syllable because your brain says you haven't finished it.
So, no, it doesn't sound just like simple feedback or echo.
Interesting. I worked phone support for a company, and their systems would occasionally do this. The delay was anywhere from a fraction of a second to a couple seconds, randomly for each call it happened to. It is really, really annoying, but I always assumed it made me stop talking because I was trying to be polite to the customer and when I hear a voice from their end, I'd stop and listen.
It took me about a week to learn to just keep talking when I heard my own voice, and not someone else's.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
They like to hear themselves talk too much.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I used to do this to co-workers at the music store I worked at many, many years ago. Make a bet that they can't say the alphabet, put a set of headphones on them, run it through a digital delay set to 150 ms or so, then sit back and listen to them sound like a speech-impaired two-year-old. :-)
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Same phenomenon :
- for people used to do VoIP over shitty connection with a correspondant lacking echo cancellation (where you get a smiliar delayed echo). The first few days, you might be distrubed by the delayed echo. Afterward you just start ignoring it.
- for people who've learned not to rely on auditory feedback when speaking (like simultaneous speech translators: they use sound blocking earphones to hear to source material, and speak the translation into a sound-proof recording mask, to avoid creating noise interference to other translator in neighbooring booths. Thus they are used to speak without any auditory feedback).
- for deaf or hard-hearing persons who've lost the auditory feedback since long time ago.
They too will be unaffected by this device, just like you probably aren't due to your training with shitty phone links.
The only way to effectively silence a conversation would be using destructive interferrences (playing the conversation back in-sync but with opposite phase, to cancel out the noise).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I remember reading an article a few years ago called "Conversational Ballgames" by an english-speaking woman who became fluent in Japanese while in residence there. She describes her difficulty fitting in to conversation patterns even after she was "fluent" until she learned that social expectations of the conversation differed across cultures. She compares western-style conversation to volleyball or tennis, a match where you bat back and forth the same ball with a partner -- whereas Japanese conversation reflects more a game of bowling. She explains the game:
"A Japanese-style conversation, however, is not at all like tennis or volleyball, it’s like bowling. You wait for your turn, and you always know your place in line. It depends on such things as whether you are older or younger, a close friend or a relative stranger to the previous speaker, in a senior or junior position, and so on.
The first thing is to wait for your turn, patiently and politely. When your moment comes, you step up to the starting line with your bowling ball, and carefully bowl it. Everyone else stands back, making sounds of polite encouragement. Everyone waits until your ball has reached the end of the lane, and watches to see if it knocks down all the pins, or only some of them, or none of them. Then there is a pause, while everyone registers your score.
Then, after everyone is sure that you are done, the next person in line steps up to the same startling line, with a different ball. He doesn’t return your ball. There is no back and forth at all. And there is always a suitable pause between turns. There is no rush, no impatience."
Here's a link to the essay: http://books.google.com/books?id=EhAYIyaeuz8C&pg=PA454&lpg=PA454#v=onepage&q&f=false
The reasoning given by the researchers for the need to silence someone (while still chilling) comes into context for me when I think of them trying to harmonize a game of bowling. I can see them pointing their silence gun at rowdy american-like bowlers butting into the lane when it isn't their turn, distracting the bowler on deck, and scooping the ball off the lane before it reaches the pins!
I read TFA and there seems to be a really easy workaround, and politicians making speeches can easily utilize it.
The speaker can simply block their ears. The gun works by sending the speaker's audio back to them with a delay.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.