Play audio:
Imagine this scenario. You’re sitting in the living room watching TV. In a chair nearby, someone is listening to music, and in the hall, someone else is listening to the radio. Sound like a recipe for noise pollution? Maybe not.
The “Audio Spotlight” aims to beam sound in such a tightly focused way, that people nearby can’t hear it at all. There’s an example of the audio spotlight used with an advertising billboard in Manhattan right now.
Here’s the unedited interview I did with Joe Pompei, president and founder of the company behind the Audio Spotlight.
An edited version of the interview will appear on Episode 19 of Spark. Click above to listen to the full interview, or download the mp3.
The file seems to be truncated or broken. It certainly seems short for a “complete interview”, especially as Joe Pompei gets cut off in mid-word.
This appears to be true for both the inline player and the MP3 file download.
D’oh! Thanks for the heads up, Charles. We’ll fix it when we’re back in the office tomorrow. ny
David Harvey, the British-
American geographer talks in an interview about the neo-liberal cities, those individual paradise to the very individual enjoyment. This gadget reinforces the sense of neo-liberal individuality. There are no longer “common” spaces to share, the space of the living-room, or the kitchen, to let space to the very “private” space, selfishness neo-liberal in the age of capitalism decay. Happy new year
Audio should be fixed now. Thanks Charles.
This similar type of technology exists in a larger form, and I have been able to record it being used at my house (it also transmits death threats & such) and now I was able to identify the same computer system being used / or pointed at a commercial flight, putting lives at risk. Please help uncover this mafia using this. I have contacted CSIS and the FBI and RCMP, and I continually get ignored.
@ Gus. That’s really interesting. I think about that sometimes as I walk to work with my mp3 player on, how it effectively cuts me off from the collective experience of life on the street.
But is it any different from walking down the street or riding the bus, listening to a cassette walkman? Or reading a book in public? We used to do that before and no-one complained.
Do you really feel like you’re missing something?
Interesting analogy. One of the things I find is that living in a big city, the environment around me is often very loud and can be irritating, (the noise of construction and traffic is really oppressive at times) and hence shutting it out and replacing it with nice music is appealing. A couple of years ago, I was in the town of Lucca in Italy, which is entirely pedestrian in the very old core, and it was a delight to be in the midst of that city, with nothing but the sounds of footsteps, conversation, and the occasional bicycle bell. You wouldn’t want to shut it out.
When you and your guest talked about using invasive “Audio Spotlight” soundbites in advertising for a TV show, the alarm bells went off. This technology could have very good uses, but its use in advertising should quickly be made illegal. Our mental environments are polluted with thousands of visual ads every day. That is no exaggeration. We don’t need to add to this problem by assaulting even more of our senses with consumer messages.
I agree that listening to the piece about the audio spotlight made me wary of one more way people can be bombarded by advertisements or more sounds in general. Nevertheless, my imagination also ran with it and I could see it having some really neat, experiential uses in various art installations where people move around and discover different soundscapes as part of the display. Dreamily, I also envisioned ‘nice surprises” an audio-spotlight could potentially offer to passers-by, which I wrote about today (March 2, 2008) on my blog at the website url above.
Crimes are provoked in this way, by pointed similar devices at people for years at a time. Please help these devices are weapons. Look up http://www.youtube.com/rhyspaulhovey
Yes, I agree with Rhys and David here, this piece of technology is a gateway to a much more advanced system that is of the utmost importance to international organized crime. The community of victims are being labeled as mentally ill, but are growing in numbers at a rapid pace.