Re: [microsound] HSS: The Sound of Things to Come

["aemx" <aemx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

apparently, USATODAY have an article about this too

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2003-05-19-hss_x.htm

very interesting reading, indeed.

// george

----- Original Message -----
From: "p. hendricks" <ph@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "microsound" <microsound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 4:20 AM
Subject: [microsound] HSS: The Sound of Things to Come

>
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.''
> Advertisement
>
>
> 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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