Maker

www.makezine.com/05/interview

HyperSonic Sound is my landmark invention. It The artificial hip problem?
allows you to project sound like a very focused
beam of light. With a normal speaker, sound When someone gets an artificial hip, it can fall
propagates outward as waves in the air. If I out of socket quite easily. It takes many months
point a normal speaker away from you, you still of conscious effort for patients to learn how to
can hear the sound. With a HyperSonic Sound do things in a way that prevents the artificial
speaker, if I point the speaker away from you, you hip from disengaging. When one disengages, it
won’t hear anything. How does it work? Ultra- is very painful and costs thousands of dollars
sonic frequencies are very directional because to reset. Anyway, I was approached by a group of
their wavelengths are so short — the higher the doctors who wanted a way to detect when an
frequency, the more like a beam they become. So artificial hip started to separate and then set
I figured out a way to increase the frequency of off an alarm. In this way, people could stop what
standard audio content to ultrasonic levels. If you they were doing and tense up their muscles to
do this in a particular way, the ultrasonic signal prevent the hip from disengaging. Additionally,
demodulates in the air and turns into audible they didn’t want any active electronics or power
sound. So instead of emitting audible sound from sources to be inside the body.
a single source like a speaker, the sound is actu- Now, around the time they contacted me, I
ally made in the air at an infinite number of points had been playing around with a guitar. I noticed
along this ultrasonic column. It’s like having a that when one string was tuned to the same
billion little speakers lined up and pointing in the note as another string, plucking one vibrated
same direction. It is very cool — like magic. them both. This is sympathetic vibration. So I
started thinking about the string I plucked as a
Can you describe your process of invention? radio transmitter sending out a signal and the
receiver as the other string that is tuned to the

I largely invent by analogy. I find things that are suc- same frequency. The second string did not start cessful in one environment and then think about vibrating for free — it takes energy to get it to parallels in other environments where people have move. It then occurred to me that I could make not yet discovered or exploited the concept. For a transmitter that sends a signal into the body, example, I came up with the idea for HyperSonic and if there was a thing inside the body that was Sound by analogy. I was watching television one tuned to the same frequency, then we could day and I noticed that the logo on the TV had three use the change in frequency as a trigger. So I colors: red, green, and blue. These are the colors embedded a resonant circuit — which is simply that are squirting onto the screen from the back of a coil of wire — in the artificial hip that was the picture tube from which millions of colors are tuned to the same frequency as an externally created. By mixing just a few colors, you can get worn transmitter. If the hip started separating, the millions of colors. I thought to myself that this was pretty cool. And then I thought about electronic circuits, where there are components called mix- 1. American Technology, Norris’ company, ers that allow you to mix a couple of frequencies donated several MRAD “sonic lasers” together to get new ones. So it occurred to me that for Hurricane Katrina crowd control and if you can mix energy optically and electronically, rescue operations. why couldn’t you mix sound energy in a similar 2. A component of an artificial hip alarm, way? Then I started thinking about the possibility which warns patients that their implant is of mixing sound that is inaudible to people — in about to dislocate. this case, ultrasonic sound — in a way that would 3. A HyperSonic Sound speaker. result in audible frequencies. And that is where the _{HyperSonic Sound idea came from. I solved the artificial hip problem in a similar way.} >>