artificialtelepathy

Woody Norris has reinvented acoustics. Big news for the world of music. Bigger news for advertising and crime-fighting and combat.

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 raid 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 this 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.

How HSS Works

At the source, in the circuitry of the emitter, audio frequencies are "stirred together," as Norris puts it, with ultrasonic frequencies and then sent out as a "composite frequency" that is inaudible to the human ear. The sound "hitches a ride on the ultrasonic frequency," Norris says, which travels in a laserlike beam in whatever direction it is pointed. "And here's the beauty part," he says. "The air molecules themselves convert this ultrasonic frequency back down to a frequency that can be heard." So unlike sound that travels on radio waves and has to be converted by your stereo's receiver, you simply need to be standing in the path of an HSS beam in order to hear the sound.

(http://www.woodynorris.com/Articles/NewYorkTimesMagazine.htm)

Woody Norris demonstrated his invention to the public for New York Times reporter Marshall Sella in San Diego and the article published in the March 23 Issue of 2003. he used prerecorded sounds such as waterfall and a snippet of Handel concerto for his live demonstration. but what's to stop a microphone being attached instead, allowing the live transission of voice that only the beamed recipient will hear in their heads? the hearing of a 'voice' directly within somebody's head. to the reciever this is artificial telepathy.

if the united states had their own version, i doubt they'd be calling up a press converence to announce it to the world. so the next obvious question is - "do they?" along with "since when?"