This project is perhaps the single most passive-aggressive thing we’ve ever seen on this site: rather than tell someone directly to ‘shut up’, [Blytical]’s speech jammer lets you hack their brain from across the room to stop them from speaking. It’s also a bit of an object lesson in why you shouldn’t just copy reference implementations without careful study — by his own implementation, [Blytical] was forced to learn a lot more than he intended going into this project.
The brain hack behind it is called ‘delayed auditory feedback’: by feeding their speech back to the target with a short delay — only 50 to 200 ms — it creates a confounding effect that is apparently very difficult to speak through. The array of ultrasound transducers is used to accurately aim the audio by serving as an inaudible, low-spread carrier wave, as we saw in another project this year. A shotgun mike picks up the audio from the speaker you wish to harass, and an array of audio processing circuitry takes care of the rest.
That’s where problems happen, as [Blytical] admits he just tossed some reference implementations onto a PCB without bothering to think too hard about what he was doing. It’s the datasheet version of vibe coding, and it usually goes about as well — sometimes perfectly, but rarely without a lot of troubleshooting. That troubleshooting is really, really hard when you don’t quite understand why things were laid out the way they were on the datasheet. We don’t blame [Blytical], you can learn a lot when you bite off more than you can chew. The fact that he risked this failure mode rather than do the whole thing in software with a Pi says good things about how he’s conducting his education.
It’s a shame, though, because we’ve been waiting to see another one of these speech jammers in action for quite some time. Perhaps someone will try again; the ultrasonic array portion seems solved, so if the delay circuit was the problem, perhaps a tiny tape loop would suffice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_arfIPgL5U
It doesn’t work for everybody.
I’m deaf and while I can speak, I can’t hear myself talking so yeah.
“rather than tell someone directly to ‘shut up’, ”
I live in a high tourism district. During certain events we get “preachers” and politically intolerant blowhards spouting off endlessly at a zillion decibels through bullhorns for days on end. Crowds will chant counter statements at them trying to directly tell them to “shut up” to the only effect of them increasing their amplification.
While the whole directional speaker driven solution is certainly more elegant and doesnt add to the auditory assault of the surrounding community, In the last year or two there has been a new counter measure being deployed.
Several locals have taken to more advanced countermeasures.
A couple of guys have been using microphones and bullhorns equipped with a slight delay to reflect these “activists” chanting back at them. They actually DO get tongue tied, stumble on their words, and occasionally get annoyed enough to move to another part of the tourism district.
Theres another guy who has been using a “guitar pedal?” with an amp to create an endless echo effect that doesnt seem to trip them up as much as the slight delay but does seem to annoy them away as well.
My favorite though, one of the local buskers created an entire streamdeck full of deepfaked off color off brand messages of a local street preacher and spent an entire PRIDE afternoon blasting them into ever moment the street preacher paused. He was so flummoxed by it he started yelling at the guy, called the cops, who told him the freespeech that protected his actions protected the other guys as well. Finally, defeated he put his teenage son on the microphone for a few hours. The next day, the busker showed up with a new set of comments in the sons voice. The pair left within a couple of hours.
As someone who lives right on the edge of the park where this goes on, Ive often wished there was a way to show my appreciation to these guys. So yeah, just telling people to shut up is a simple idea that is rarely effective. Im not keen on jackboot government sorts using speech jamming, nor them using deep fake countermeasures, but I applaud the efforts of counteractivists using them against the intolerant or the establishment. Color me hypocritical, I dont mind.
This is horrifying.
Imagine if the crowd and the preacher in these situations had been the opposite way around. Ends justifying means?
Not only do the ends justify the memes, the typical refrain these days in activist circles is “there are no bad tactics, only bad targets.”
Let that sink in a minute and it is horrifying.
Less than a hundred years from the last time, and the outcomes are already forgotten.
History never repeats. Overzealous pattern recognition generates false narratives so that you think you know what happens next. You don’t, and that’s half the fun!
History never repeats, but it often rhymes.
If you’re on the losing side, I guess. What, you expected to exist on earth without a fight?
One person’s protester is always the other person’s bully.
I see an arms race here anyway. Tape record comments, program the playback to counter whatever delay you counter-broadcast at—and now his voice is coming out of his box and yours.
If the roles had been reversed you would still have an individual verbally assaulting a crowd of revelers. Ive no issue with aggressive speech being countered with aggressive measures, especially when they are not physical in nature.
And that’s what’s called “tone policing”. It’s not arguing against what is being said, but how it is being said, so it attempts to justify the suppression of speech on the point that it’s not said nicely enough.
Works both ways. You can have a bunch of protesters arrested on the point that they were aggressively picketing against a bunch of peacefully goose-stepping members of a political organization on their festive rally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
All speech is not equal in real societies.
James O is right.
We need to aggressively ban any speech that suggests we be intolerant of religious figures and prosecute those counter protesters with truncheons and jackboots toot suite! They’re too intolerant to be allowed in the public sphere!
if you didn’t let the skinheads talk, nobody would know that they are full of various forms of human excrement. free speech is great when you want the freedom to say whatever you want, but where it really shines is allowing the opposition an opportunity to make utter fools of themselves.
No, it’d just be an arms race. Welcome to the party!
If this can shut up chanting morons, then I’m for it.
I doubt it can, groups of idiots can’t stay synched in the first place.
You’d think that deepfaking someone’s voice and blasting it out in public, contradicting the person to undermine their reputation and arguments, would legally constitute slander.
I mean, if someone copied your voice and started broadcasting you saying “I’m a nazi”, you’d have a pretty good case.
In our state to legally constitute slander the statements would have to have included False accusations of criminal behavior,.False imputations of sexual immorality, or.False claims of having a contagious, loathsome disease.
Our local police force does everything it can to avoid pressing charges against anything that falls short of incurring bodily harm. We have a force that is estimated to be 60% of the number of officers a city our size should have, while having one of the nations highest murder, violent crime, and property crime rates.
They certainly have no interest in generating headlines around the tourist districts petty squabbles given that tourism is one of the largest sources of revenue in our city generating ~40% of our cities operating budget and employing 12% of our workers.
I suppose there would be some standard or test for what amounts to sexual immorality. Otherwise the preacher could claim that their sexual morality is being falsified by broadcasting pro-gay agenda in their voice.
But if that was the case, we would have a situation where the law starts to define morality, which is an issue because morality justifies the law. In other words, there would be an arbitrary standard of correct opinions that define who can claim slander.
Implications of sexual immorality is not the same as falsifying someones opinion of sexual morality.
t is understood that the phrase of law means to declare that the person engages in sexual acts that are outside of accepted norms generally considered to include sexual activity involving minors, animals, non-consensual acts, or public acts that violate community standards. The most relevant possibility in this instance, homosexual acts, was striken from law in the late 90s/early 00s.
Under state law the use of deepfakes including audio fakes is protected under parody or satire. Our current deepfake law would only be triggered if it simulated a sex act or involved a minor in a sexual scenario.
Your opinions are your morality. Immorality is acting or thinking against that better judgement – knowing what’s right and still doing wrong, or arguing from bad faith. From the preacher’s point of view, homosexuality is a moral fault and arguing for it would be immoral, so the falsified statement would be slander.
Here the law appears to take sides. Instead of considering slander as a matter of the person, it applies its own morality, and that’s a dangerous thing to do.
No it doesn’t, and the law has no need of being justified in the first place. All that matters is the will and the power to enforce it. Democracy essentially makes laws arbitrary; there is no coherent underlying moral foundation. If we don’t like something, we ban it. If we like something, we subsidize it. Simple as that.
‘All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.’
Mao
How tight are your groups?
You can do this with headphones and a computer
Used to do this back then, like it’s an immediate drunk talk effect.
You get this same effect if you are an announcer at a stadium (which I did for a bit). When you speak your voice gets delayed because of the distances involved, and it gets back to you delayed by a few hundred milliseconds. Some of the guys I worked with could do it without headphones, but if I didn’t have headphones with non-delayed audio I would get really messed up.
I remember a comedy sketch (was it Tim Conway on Carol Burnett ?) where a baseball player wins an award and gives a speech where the echo in the stadium is more truthful…..” I want to thank someone who inspired me….my wife …..(echo) girlfriend… girlfriend…. girlfriend…..” 🤣
I’ve been able to experience one of the better-engineered units a couple of years back, and it’s been covered on HaD in 2018:
https://hackaday.io/project/159467-open-source-ultrasonic-phased-array
check out the amount of work that went into this build:
https://hackaday.io/project/159467-open-source-ultrasonic-phased-array/log/148694-things-i-learned-from-version-2
The project is still a great resource should you intend to develop your own phased array.
Another great idea is infrasound. Just below the range of human hearing,
Infrasound’s just sound below ~20Hz — too low to hear but you can feel it as a rumble or pressure. made by quakes, storms, big engines or elephants. can make you feel weird, dizzy, or downright creeped out.
This device is interesting, but a set of earplugs can basically defeat it.
Universal appeal… fix a constantly barking dog from barking…. but then you are fixing the behavior that the dog’s owner should be addressing…. so…. Provide audio of their barking dog back to the owner, who should enjoy it…. until they don’t.
I have frequently thought about recording the neighbour’s dog at 6am and then playing it back around 11pm from a drone parked on their roof.
an evil college radio trick was to put a short tape delay into the DJ’s headphones. 15 IPS tape machine with about 2″ between the record and play heads was more than enough to tongue-twist even the most experienced DJ. The only thing you could do if someone did this to you was remove your headphones.
Do I get to use my eyeball jammer (laser dazzler) in return! It’s just photons being.
You could try “shut up”, something like this device or do what SEIU does when they disagree with something/someone; send a group of their thugs out to beat and intimidate them.
The acoustic equivalent of “you could have used a 555 timer”: You could just get some foam earplugs!
Ah I wanted to read more od “Dude’s” comments… I find it amazing that one person can be so confident in his correctness on every single topic to ever grace the comments, that it fills up a whole page of “wElL aCkChYuAlLy” posts