If “shhhh” doesn’t work, the Speech Jammer might. This device renders chatterers speechless! Who knows, the Speech Jammer may one day find its way into classrooms and debates. This device created by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada won the 2012 Ig Nobel prize in acoustics.
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.
The Speech Jammer uses our own speaking to silence us. For the average person, speaking requires us to hear ourselves. If that feedback becomes distorted, the person slows down and then stops talking.
The Speech Jammer records a person’s voice and plays it back with a slight time delay (a few hundred milliseconds). This feedback of hearing your words again, slightly after you’ve said them, is so disruptive that it renders you speechless. Perhaps, with practice, one might be able to overcome the speech jammer and continue speaking, but to the best of our knowledge, it hasn’t been done yet. Kurihara and Tsukada have posted a YouTube video of their Speech Jammer in action, which you can see below.
The speech jammer is composed of a directional microphone, a time delay integrated circuit, and a directional speaker to play the sound back. All of the components are well known, but the novelty stems from how they are used together.
For further information about the physics behind the Speech Jammer, please visit Physics Central.
