Speech jammers were a meme a little while back. By feeding back delayed voice audio to a person’s ears, it makes it near-impossible for most people to speak, as our speech system runs on a continual feedback loop. [Benn Jordan] decided to try reworking that concept by replacing headphones with a directed sound projector.
The key to the project is the use of hypersonic sound arrays. These essentially use high-frequency sound beyond the human range of hearing to carry a lower-frequency sound signal. By essentially modulating this higher-frequency carrier to create the perception of lower-frequency sound, it’s possible to create an audible signal that is highly directional. It’s like a “sound laser” that can be pointed directly at a person to allow them to hear it, which is then inaudible when pointed slightly away.
These allow the delayed voice signal to be fired at a person’s head with a relatively narrow spatial spread. When an individual speaks into a microphone hooked up to the device, delayed audio is sent through the hypersonic array back to the speaker’s ears, garbling their speech as their brain gets confused by the feedback.
[Benn] demonstrated the device in public by offering random individuals $100 to read a paragraph out of a book. The speech jammer worked a treat, and [Benn] was able to keep his money… until one amazingly immune individual breezed through the test. Check out our prior coverage of speech jamming technology. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Hyperific for the tip!]
Being deaf does have some perk. I can still speak decently with hearing aids turned off so I guess those speech jammer may not work on me.
I was born nearly profoundly deaf (hearing loss at 100dB at low frequency to 125dB at 3KHz, nothing above 3KHz) and with early education program and hearing aids I was able to learn to speak. The drawback of being deaf at my level is I can’t just listen to the sound and know what’s being spoken so radio, telephone, and other long distance conversation falls on my deaf ears (literal not proverbial). Because of this, sound jammer would seem to sound like gibberish to my ears and not interfere with my ability to read and speak.
You should go find this guy ;)
I have a slight hearing impairment too (nothing too bad) and when I tested this kind of speech jammers, it does annoy me, but I can plow through it without much hassle.
Hypersonic?
I think that was meant to be spelled “ultrasonic”. It still travels at the sound of speed, it just wiggles faster ;-)
While probably deadly effective, it’s definitely not advised to shoot the person at the podium with a rail gun.
To be fair, that would also be pretty effective at preventing speech. 😃
(Aside: isn’t the principle of this ultrasonic (not hypersonic) device similar to the method used by Lex Luthor in Superman 1 when he broadcast a message that only Superman could hear?)
I probably missed the cultural reference -if you’re making a joke-, but hypersonic is a field of engineering in which audible sound is generated using the interference of several supersonic waves.
That would be exclusively “American Technology Corporation HyperSonicTM Sound” because hypersonic refers to traveling more than 5 times the speed of sound.
I double check your tag for “speech jammer” the older article the tag was “speechjammer” no space so they don’t both show up on the tag pages for each other.
this would be useful for political debates. or riot control, shut down the rabble rousers. use for evil? yea probibly.
The best part is that for political debates, the speech is pregarbled.
This is like having to work with Motorola digital radios. The delay and sharp digital bandpass filter, I can “hear some words” and talking is difficult for many
I’ve seen some videos of people interacting with speech jammers, the ones with a lot of broadcast radio experience (people who routinely wear headphones and listen to themselves) are essentially immune to the jamming.
This is not new technology as “conspiracy theorists” will tell you. Think of Bose noise cancellation or the dual microphone setup you can see in The Grateful Dead Movie.
The jammer would have no effect on most politicians, they don’t appear to have any way to interrupt their own mouth.
For some politicians I think the main reason it does not work is, that the speech jammer is intended to confuse the brains.
Which some people seem to lack :-)
Since most politicians seem to be pregarbled, maybe the garble function would make what they say make sense.
That would definitely confuse them.
Often some not so good handsfree telephone systems have this effect on me, when the echo cancellation is working only half way. This really confuse wehn you try to speak.
Reminds me when analog FXO cards was a thing for VOIP. You either had your echo cancellation right or the phone system was borderline unusable.