> Yan was even able to embed an ultrasonic version of the Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which became audible at the point where the two signals crossed.
At 33C3 I rode an escalator when I suddenly heard "Never Gonna Give You Up" but apparently no one else did. It was over after a few seconds. At the top of escalator there was a guy pointing a directional speaker at random people.
Only reference I could find is in German, but it has a picture [1].
The story says the guy on the picture is not the inventor of the device.
EDIT: The thing is a parametric ultrasonic speaker and the design files and software are on GitHub [2].
It's actually off-the-shelf tech now. I've been in a number of supermarkets where they use this to beam ads at you while standing in line for the checkout. (All of which have since stopped doing it, for what it's worth. YMMV.)
There was some hope for a while that this might turn out to be a way to hack sound so that you could produce a flat speaker full of those tiny ultrasonic speakers, and then use non-linear interference to produce deep, booming bass sounds, without having to have the much-larger speakers you need today for that to work correctly. Unfortunately, either nobody could crack the technique, or it's simply impossible, because the real speakers that emerged are quite tinny. Here's a commercial offering, where they're only willing to promise down to 150Hz in the text: http://ultrasonic-audio.com/acouspade-technical-specificatio... "The sound is of high-quality, with low noise and great frequency response, which includes authentic reproduction of bass notes and frequencies as low as 150 Hz." Which, if accurate, is better than the speakers I've heard, but still a long ways from "thumping bass" coming out of a square that could be hung on the wall as casually as a picture frame.
I would have thrown a bigger fuss if they didn't disappear as quickly as they did. I assume other people threw a fuss for me, for which I thank them, whoever they are.
The f'ing stupid thing is that the checkout line is already one big ad. It advertises all the things that the stores have already figured out you're likely to buy at the end of a shopping trip; candy, drinks, SD cards (dunno why but it's pretty consistent), etc. It is the most effective possible ad, since everything it is advertising is literally within arm's reach for immediate purchase. You'd think that would be enough!
If you think that's creepy, imagine it with good voice synthesis along with a voice profile of yourself. I wonder if they could get close to making it sound like your internal monologue saying "I should buy that impulse item in front of me"?
recent new improvements in voice synthesis could make this happen soon enough tbh.., capture you speaking in the super market, filter your voice out, then beam that shit in. i like the idea :D i can already see us all comming home... why the fk did i buy this milk, why do i keep drinking this milk.. wtf :D (paranoia 1.0) wonderful world!
Why should the supermarket playing any sort of music on any sort of speakers they want inside of their own building on private property be made illegal?
Who is it harming? Is your association with the supermarket not entirely voluntary?
I think this is a subject of 'customers rights' or something like that, depending on the country. You cannot call yourself a store and do whatever you want inside it because it is yours. Maybe this music/ad is legal (or legally uncovered) for now, but customers are definitely the source of the entire business and have a right to have rights.
What we really need are highly tunable and directional EMP generators, which can be easily concealed. You could “solve” everything from annoying drones, to people listening to Peppa a pig on their iPads, through the speaker.
Of course you could also fry a car’s ECU, but um, swings and roundabouts right?
"You could produce that deep bass if you knew exactly where the listeners are."
I'm unsure what you are trying to say. The problem with deep bass, as far as I know, is not that it only works in certain places; it is that it can't do it at all. See the frequency response chart in the page I linked, which I suspect if anything is probably overselling its bass capabilities. As I said, I don't know if it's merely that nobody has cracked the problem, if it is somehow fundamentally impossible with this technique, or I'll add a third one here, if it's possible but impractical (i.e., "requires a 100x larger piezoelectric array" or something).
If you've really never heard one, they have a very characteristic tinny sound. Usually when you have a conventional tinny speaker, the speaker has a relatively narrow range and is missing both the low and the high ranges. With the ultrasonic speakers, the bass is entirely gone, but the response up through the higher frequencies is pristine pretty much all the way up the human range. So you get voices with no bass at all, but that are extremely, extremely clear and easy to understand because all the higher harmonics are intact, if not outright emphasized. Very distinctive sound, even if you don't notice the highly directional and sharp sound immediately the acoustic signature is unmistakable.
The trouble with bass is you get the product of two factors both working against you.
First of all, to produce a sound that is identically loud to the human ear, the sound wave pressure amplitude has to increase tremendously as you go down in frequency. At 40 Hz, which is not very deep bass, you're talking a 40 dB SPL increase necessary over 1000 Hz.
Furthermore, as the frequency drops, the sound waves become longer, meaning that with constructive interference, the volume of space in which you have to produce significant sound pressure increases with the inverse of frequency.
Taken together, this means that at 40 Hz, this type of speaker must output 16*25 = 400 times as much sound energy as at 1000 Hz. To reach deep bass territory of 20 Hz, you're looking at a 1600 times increase in the energy required.
Haha! What if we had a website where people could post such ideas and discuss them? The process of discussing and refining an idea would make it un-patentable?
That would be an interesting forum for geeks / problem solvers AND would kill stupid/obvious patents as a side effect, and act as a repository of prior art!
Since such discussions might articulate at least the broad ideas (even if they don’t get to a specific implementation) this might discourage at least overly broad patents.
PS: Did I just make this idea un-patentable by anyone else? :D
Hmm... thanks for that link!
That website says nothing about patents and prior art, so its purpose seems somewhat different. Shouldn’t takeover someone’s website meant for something else :-)
I remember reading about this in Popular Science when I was eleven years old. They compared it to the difference between laser light and conventional light.
I had a Yamaha soundbar some years ago, which could be calibrated via a small microphone, that you would place in the location in the room, where you wanted the sound to be beamed. During calibration it would create some beeping and whooping sounds, I guess to learn about the room it was in and you could then sort of have a sound bubble in your sofa, when watching a movie late at night.
There are two key phrases in this article "intermodulation distortion" and "when signal processing equipment behaves in a nonlinear way". While there is not a concrete description of the signals that might have been present in the building, I completely understand how these non-linearities can cause havoc.
I previously spent almost 30 years in the cable television industry and the transmission of broadband signals requires linear amplification over almost three magnitudes. The two main distortions we worry about are Composite Second Order and Composite Triple Beat. This distortion represents all the permutations of sums and differences of two and three signals respectively.
In narrow band communications, we amplify the signal and then filter out everything except the desired signal. In wide-band electronics, these products of distortion will often fall on top of other signals you're sending. The only way to succeed is to create very, very linear amplifiers (usually by burning a huge amount of bias current relative to the signal power).
While I tossed out the idea in that thread that it could be related to pest control, I think the most likely explanation would be an improperly aimed high-powered microwave antenna. I can't imagine any ultrasonic signal being at such a power level as to cause physical damage at a distance, let alone through walls. In fact, I'm not sure that's ever been shown to be possible. We know for a fact; however, that high powered microwaves can be highly damaging and in combination with the microwave auditory effect, would explain it quite well.
high power microwave/millimeter wave can also be focused pretty tightly, down to 1.5 degrees central beam width... Telecom grade point to point millimeter wave stuff (71-86 GHz) can be +19 dBm into a 52dBi gain 60cm antenna. But if you're not actually trying to communicate and just want to flood the spectrum with shit at high powers, it's totally feasible to build something that has a power of like +30 fed into a 56dBi gain directional parabolic antenna.
one possible explanation is that they were trying to do a more "modern" version of the famous battery-free bug that was found in the US moscow embassy, where the listening apparatus and its transmitter were powered passively by receiving RF:
the weird part is that a number of people reported these phenomena not while they were at an embassy, but it's staff members and people who live in privately rented accommodation offsite. Various Canadian diplomats in Havana experienced the same thing and they live in random rented apartments/townhouses around the city. Mostly the phenomena were reported while people were asleep or in bed at locations other than the embassy.
That’s certainly possible, and in fact it could have been part of a routine sweep for unpowered bugs that went wrong. It would also help to explain the impressive range of bullshit “explanations” that keep getting printed. Mass hysteria? Really?!
Did someone debunk the STD hypothesis? That sounded the most plausible to me when first reported (didn't involve any conspiracy, just humans being humans - plus was shameful enough to justify spinning stories about sonic attacks).
Well the info from the doctors who examined them debunks it, but that assumes that as you say, it isn’t being spun. I think the truth is that we just don’t know, and may never be in a position to know.
You could also get unexpected results using two beams of microwaves which constructively interfere. A simple misalignment could shift the intersection and lead to cooked noodles. Microwaves are as capable of that as sound waves, and more likely to be generated by relatively compact devices, while causing brain damage and auditory effects. I can also imagine that it’s the kind of “sources and methods” talk our government doesn’t appreciate.
microwave/RF engineer here: I have seen speculation from people with 25+ years experience in my field that what was being experienced was not acoustic at all, but was some sort of SIGINT apparatus gone wrong, or millimeter wave at very high power and focused. Very curious what the results would have been if the US had carried a 4 to 120 GHz capable portable spectrum analyzer and set of horn antennas in a diplomatic bag to the locations where this was experienced, and done thorough scans of various power levels/frequencies in the millimeter wave frequencies.
quick edit: the weird part here is that DoS (department of state) has an entire division of people who specialize in TSCM (technical surveillance countermeasures). I would be surprised if most embassies did not have RF detection apparatus capable of up to the high millimeter wave frequencies on hand. These things are pretty pricey, $20,000 or so for a full setup, but compared to the anti-bugging budget of the DoS as a whole it's a tiny drop in the bucket.
Not an expert at all, just curious; could this kind of radiation have caused the high-pitched sounds, or perception of sounds, as purely a side effect?
not the RF itself, no, but the effect of high powered millimeter-waves focused at a person's head could very possible have that effect on a neurological basis. It's not the sort of thing that has ever been voluntarily tested on humans (for obvious reasons), and if tested on animals, animals can't tell you if they're observing auditory hallucinations...
Though the science behind avoiding high RF exposure is known and observed (ex: tower climbers don't want to hang around on the front side of a large sector antenna with high EIRP in the 2.5 GHz band).
Would have to ask a MD that specializes in the brain.
Might have better luck with a PhD neuroscientist, but my guess (as a lowly MS) would be that it's something we can't really experiment with because of ethical issues, as you mentioned. While I studied the auditory system in grad school, I wasn't until today aware of effects of RF on hearing, but there does seem to be an effect at fairly high exposures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect
probably the closest we could get to studying it would be to emplace a lot of instrumentation inside of a cadaver brain and focus the same power/frequency of microwave at it. kind of a messy process since to duplicate real world conditions you'd need to have the brain inside a skull...
Another issue is that you wouldn't have any sort of active responses that may induce or attenuate any effects of the radiation. An example from the auditory world is that for much of the history of auditory system research, it was thought that the cochlea was a passive system (with a little more nuance, the idea of an active cochlear mechanism was theorized but not confirmed). But that was because the technological limitations of the time only allowed experiments on dead cochleas (primarily by von Bekesy) - once otoacoustic emissions were first recorded (70s or early 80s) we finally had verification of the cochlear amplifier.
The two "accidental" intermodulating devices still have to emit the levels of energy sufficient to damage brain tissue. We're not talking room occupancy sensor levels, more like industrial ultrasonic washer levels.
Is it not equally likely that the source of high intensity, high frequency RF modulation lies inside the US communications infrastructure associated with an Embassy inside a declared enemy state? I.E. the reason there is no external source, is that it was a product of faulty US SIGINT in the first place.
Is Guantanamo Bay reachable by microwave link from Havana? Day traders prefer RF to complex internet routes, if they can show speed advantages. Direct RF might have some SIGINT advantage over other choices here, to talk between US assets in the economy.
I'm not a cuban or a russian, and nobody pays me for my opinions btw. I just find it strange everyone externalises the source, when we probably all believe the investment the US makes inside its own communications is actually sufficiently at scale to be the source of the problem.
the people who experienced this, many of them lived outside of the embassy compound.
and no, havana and guantanamo are way too far apart for line of sight microwave. really doubt that the US and Canadians accidentally did this to themselves.
i am actually somewhat familiar with the technology the US uses for two way satellite earth stations on the roof of latin american embassies (for a telecom link that can't be easily cut off by the host nation-state). the other end of some of those links is on the roof of a major internet IX point in miami. the people at the DoS who are responsible for two way satellite and microwave stuff would have no cause to aim a roof mounted antenna anywhere other than at the sky, at a geostationary satellite.
the weird thing about this is that microwave and millimeter wave really does not go through matter (walls, windows, wood, brick, concrete, etc) very well at all above 5 GHz. At very high frequencies you need an extremely focused antenna and very high transmit power to possibly affect peoples' heads while they are asleep in their bedroom.
The people who experienced this, may have lived outside the embassy compound, but they presumably worked inside the embassy compound.
Why do you really doubt they did this to themselves? On what basis do we automatically assume an external agency did this to them? Thats the underpinning argument I'm running.
Since you are familiar with the technology, you have a basis to believe, but the rest of us, have none. You just said the comms are sat based, homed in Miami. So, unless there is a LEO component, this means secure channel dialogue incurs a minimum Geo orbit RTT. Well, maybe thats the price you pay.
sorry to dispel your theory: but the communications technology used by the DoS to talk to LEO satellite is so low power that it's safe enough to use next to your head. pretty much every embassy has a few Iridium phones on hand. An external antenna (attached to a 50 ohm coaxial cable) on a roof, connected to a docked iridium base station, has the same EIRP and rf parameters as the built in antenna in an iridium handset. which are completely safe to use for multi-hour periods in an active call held next to your head. an iridium antenna is about half the size of a hockey puck and operates in a range from 1400-1600 MHz (you can use the same antenna for GPS Rx-only if you want).
The DoS puts a lot of effort into knowing what RF emissions are going on in and around an embassy. For instance they're quite cautious with where and how wifi access points can be deployed.
The DoS rarely if ever uses point to point microwave, and even if they did, ptp microwave is completely safe to shoot from building to building. If you live in a medium to large sized city the big-4 cellular carriers in the US probably have at least several hundred PTP links in 6, 11, 18, 23 GHz and other bands operating between rooftop sites right now.
If the DoS is so RF aware, why aren't they citing the RF meter evidence of what was externally pointed at the site? I think the state department has guidelines, for sure. I also think their analysis of the specifics here are either shrouded in secrecy, or absent. I tend to incompetence over malice. Hence, absent, and probably internally sourced, or if externally sourced, less an attack than an unexpected side effect of something else. (and, I did not intend to imply LEO was a source of RF poison. More, that high RTT was a consequence of GEO sat comms)
I actually subscribe to the mass hysteria theory in this case. Again, with no role to play and purely on what I read, I feel it is as plausible, and equally simple as a cause. Nobody much likes it because hysteria is such a loaded word, but I believe it because I frequently find myself falling into placebo effect. Those aches and pains go away with paracetemol, when its ability to heal those aches and pains is at best moot. The mind is strange. The lesions, certainly are odd. Maybe there is a sub-culture of motley crue headbanging inside state, and they share signs of too much metal?
So the researchers are proposing the U.S. Embassy in Cuba has brain-altering levels of noise in the ultrasonic region somehow caused by two or more simple,low level and possibly common ultrasonic emitters without malicious intent...
Xu's other recent works has been lacking meat and are better at fear-mongering (Tesla ultrasonic 'hack', Smart grid 'hack').
The researchers describe a mode of malfunction where the interference patterns of two separate audio sources can create the same audible effects recorded in Cuba.
The course of reasoning I see proposed is:
-> Personnel in Cuba received an odd class of injury
-> High frequency sound can cause this class of injury and seems the most likely candidate
-> HF sound doesn't propagate well in air and has many other properties that make it a poor tool for espionage/malicious actions
-> Xu's work demonstrates that sound interference from two HF sources can create unexpected effects due to non-linearities in the physics behind sound/air
Xu's work is the last piece in the puzzle IMO. It offers a plausible scenario: the building had Cuban tech and when we moved in we installed non-Cuban tech that, due to some benign like motor speeds, creates sonic problems for building occupants. The reason this doesn't really happen anywhere else is because of the unique situation surrounding the building.
The next steps I'd take were I investigating this is to look at what equipment was installed at the facilities and then determine what frequencies the equipment operates to try to find a likely candidate.
Edit:
I realized you may not be familiar with equipment noise problems, these two articles described problems in the infrasound range.
Reading the article, it seems that they are trying to explain the sound recording posted on the internet. They are not privy to any other data and it is just speculation on how this may relate to symptoms reported by the diplomats.
There was an article published awhile back that seemed to indicate the noises people heard (and still here) are due to tinatus and speculated they were poisoned with one of the many prescription medications that can cause tinatus. I can’t remember if they had any clinical testing but it seems a lot more plausible than some kind of sonic attack.
As someone who recently started suffering from mild tinatus I can assure you it’s a very bizarre sensation. If I didn’t know better I’d assume I was the victim of some kind of attack on my hearing as well.
Their paper doesn't identify where the signals came from. "The emitter source remains an open question, but could range from covert ultrasonic exfiltration of modulated data to ultrasonic jammers of eavesdropping devices or perhaps just ultrasonic pest repellents. It’s also possible that someone was trying to covertly deliver data into a localized space using ultrasound to say, activate a sensor or other hidden device."
I think depending on the size and shape of the region of constructive interference it's possible to apply force selectively to somebody's head. In my old apartment, one of the cabinet doors in the kitchen would rattle when the music in the living room played a certain note. Putting my hand in that area I could feel the force of it and it had fairly discreet boundaries in all 3 dimensions. I can imagine it would cause quite a headache if that were suddenly applied directly to my brain. And that's just from my stereo. Work a moving source with broader range, it's theoretically possible to"sweep" an area for susceptible targets. When the source is outside the audible range it would could be largely unnoticeable. Selectively applying pressure to certain parts of the brain can cause a range of symptoms. Like if all of a sudden somebody squeezed your pituitary gland how would you feel?
The level of energy at work, required to cause harm like that would have to operate on the level of two sonar pings from hell, fortunitously converging to form a node with appropriate geometry to harm a watermelon-sized organ.
We know that blasts from high explosives can transmit brain damaging pressure waves through durable vehicular armor, and there aren’t many other sources of energy known to send opportunistic signals through mediums, quite like that.
If I needed to surreptitiously send an accoustic message to an audience positioned at a distance, I might need to use a very powerful source, with a locally inaudible signal that only incidentally becomes audible when crossing other signals, but...
Such a transmission would probably only be effective up to the horizon, and require line-of-sight reception. Provided that the distance for line-of-sight access up to the horizon is about 25-ish miles, depending on topography, and the loudness required for that kind of reach, generating two beams (as powerful as noises produced by attenuated explosive blast waves) seems like it would require some pretty heavy equipment. Like room-sized equipment.
Think about what it takes to push a sound wave several miles, like a ripple across a pond, and what that sounds like up close. Race tracks, rock concerts, passenger jets. These things all readily occupy a three meter cube, at least. Not to mention that the fidelity of such loud noised is very low, and blurred by the intervening air, the further away you get, meaning any digital packet-based transmission would require really coarse, slow bandwidth.
That rules out a lot of sneaky carry-on luggage sized equipment, for generating such signals. Which points, maybe, to no less than two off-site phased-array tone generators forming crossed noise beams for receipt by someone.
Still a lot of mystery to suss out, and a lot of gray areas to speculate upon. And I’m tossing a lot of assumptions into the mix, like whether there was deliberate intent at all, and whether side effects were emergent or not. And while there’d be limits and ceilings based on line of sight, that doesn’t rule out scale of equipment or range of activity.
The only takeaway is that brain damage at a distance requires a lot of intense energy, usually explosive, although deleterious explosive energy and associated noise can scale from sizes relative to something as small as fire crackers and .22L rounds on up.
Wow that's actually really quite relieving news. I heard a recording of the clip and afterward read that people experienced some brain damage (!) luckily the ultrasonic waves aren't replicable through my headphones. I don't recommend listening anyway, it's not pleasant and does sound like interference.
I read another article describing what doctors concluded after examining the symptoms, which was it was likely poison, as no acoustic effect could have produced those symptoms. They believed the noise complaints were actually a resulting effect of the poison. My guess is a heavy-handed pest control technician.
You're assuming the audio recording is causing the symptoms, which the authors disclaim. The noise could be real, but the symptoms caused by another vector.
It's mass hysteria.
Not fucking hard to work this out. All evedence points to this from day one. Only thing of interest is they continue to not say this.
At 33C3 I rode an escalator when I suddenly heard "Never Gonna Give You Up" but apparently no one else did. It was over after a few seconds. At the top of escalator there was a guy pointing a directional speaker at random people.
Only reference I could find is in German, but it has a picture [1]. The story says the guy on the picture is not the inventor of the device.
EDIT: The thing is a parametric ultrasonic speaker and the design files and software are on GitHub [2].
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/de/article/784z74/33c3--hacker-...
[2] https://github.com/niklasfauth/parametricspeaker