HSS: The Sound of Things to Come

["p. hendricks" <ph@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23SOUND.html?ex=1049549223&ei=1&e
n=0d3c6cc627cd43bc

The Sound of Things to Come
By MARSHALL SELLA

o 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.''
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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't a Coke taste great right about now?'' Or riding in the family
car, as the kids blast Eminem in the back seat while you and the wife play
Tony Bennett up front. Or living in a city where ambulance sirens don't wake
the entire neighborhood at 4 a.m. Or hearing different and extremely
targeted messages in every single aisle of a grocery store -- for instance,
near the fresh produce, ''Hey, it's the heart of kiwi season!'' 

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