#1

I’m working on a project for a uni subject at the moment and am thinking about trying to make use of parametric and/or ultrasonic speakers to really isolate the sound in a specific beam, basically to make people in a gallery space have to follow a moving speaker around to hear what’s coming out of it. A friend of mine from the US pointed me in the direction of this little guy from Soundlazer, and I was wondering if anyone had experience with it. I’m not expecting pristine sound quality, but it’s quite hard to find reasonable or similarly priced products in the same vein in the EU, so I thought I’d ask if anyone on here has experience with similar speakers, or recommendations in general for working with this sort of ultra directional sound.

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#2

I played with something like this a decade ago, basically if you’re in the directional beam the sound’s like it’s coming from inside your head. Very different than listening in front of a mono speaker, and also somewhat disturbing. If you’re outside the beam you can still hear it, but it’s attenuated and more diffuse like a “normal” sound.

No ultrasonics just a really big planar speaker array.

So don’t expect perfect cancellation, do expect and embrace the disembodied spectral quality of the “inside voice”.

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#3

Has anyone looked into using parametric speakers for live monitoring in performance? I know there is some DSP involved to encode the audio signal into the carrier and modulated ultrasonic waves but I don’t know how much latency that introduces. Basically I’m interested in using parametric speakers for monitoring live processed sounds so that the processed sound doesn’t feedback into the microphone used for capturing an instrument signal.

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