The idea behind HSS is simple. Take two beams of ultrasound, the stuff of bat squeaks and dog whistles – separately, totally silent to the human ear. Modulate the beams just right (high speed electronics comes in handy here) and where these two silent beams intersect, there will be audible sound. Soft-as-a-whisper, loud-as-a-jet-engine, concert-hall-quality, however-you-want-it sound. Take a step away from this invisible intersection point and the sound is gone. Totally gone. Consider that ultrasound beams act more like laser beams than floodlights; the intersection point of these two beams can be controlled and steered hundreds of feet away from the “loudspeaker” that generates them. A little imagination and you’ve got an audio revolution on your hands, er, in your ears.
You can get on Google yourself and find all the neat stuff about using HSS as the killer ap for music lovers, new advertising techniques for customers walking around in a store, and safe walkways where the blind don’t need to use a cane. Folks, American Technologies Corporation is selling HSS gear today, and the weapons potential of this technology is right out of a sci-fi novel. A version of HSS called High Intensity Directed Acoustics is already an ace-in-the-hole U.S. military trump card. “HIDA can instantaneously cause loss of equilibrium, vomiting, migraines — really, we can pretty much
pick our ailment,” Norris told one interviewer. “We’ve delivered a couple dozen
units so far, but will have a lot more out by June. They’re [US DOD] talking millions!” Notes the interviewer, “…the noise isn’t so much a noise as an assault on my nervous system. I nearly fall down and, for some reason, my eyes hurt. When I bravely ask how high they’d turned the dial, Norris laughs uproariously. “That was nothing!” he bellows. “That was about 1 percent of what an enemy would get. One percent!”
Two hours later, I can still feel the ache in the back of my head.”
Let’s hope cheap, simple HSS technology doesn’t get into the wrong hands.