Projecting Sound 'Inside Your Head' 296
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!
Article (Score:5, Informative)
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'
Re:Grado SR 80 (Score:1, Informative)
Try some real headphones, like Sennheiser or Staxx.
Grado, I mean please. The Bang and Olufsen of headphones...
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
This is some scary stuff. I can't begin to imagine how horrible this could make life.
Re:This will likely become... (Score:4, Informative)
For the moment, though, HSS is unfinished business. As night must follow day, there are Defense Department applications. Norris and A.T.C. have been busy honing something called High Intensity Directed Acoustics (HIDA, in house jargon). It is directional sound -- an offshoot of HSS -- but one that never, ever transmits Handel or waterfall sounds. Although the technology thus far has been routinely referred to as a ''nonlethal weapon,'' the Pentagon now prefers to stress the friendlier-sounding ''hailing intruders'' function.
In reality, HIDA is both warning and weapon. If used from a battleship, it can ward off stray crafts at 500 yards with a pinpointed verbal warning. Should the offending vessel continue to within 200 yards, the stern warnings are replaced by 120-decibel sounds that are as physically disabling as shrapnel. Certain noises, projected at the right pitch, can incapacitate even a stone-deaf terrorist; the bones in your head are brutalized by a tone's full effect whether you're clutching the sides of your skull in agony or not.
And then later, he asks to have a demo...
Norris prods his assistant to locate the baby noise on a laptop, then aims the device at me. At first, the noise is dreadful -- just primally wrong -- but not unbearable. I repeatedly tell Norris to crank it up (trying to approximate battle-strength volume, without the nausea), until the noise isn't so much a noise as an assault on my nervous system. I nearly fall down and, for some reason, my eyes hurt. When I bravely ask how high they'd turned the dial, Norris laughs uproariously. ''That was nothing!'' he bellows. ''That was about 1 percent of what an enemy would get. One percent!'' Two hours later, I can still feel the ache in the back of my head.
Re:This is scary.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Grado SR 80 (Score:4, Informative)
Nevermind, I found one. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
I've heard this system in person (Score:2, Informative)
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.