This Stutter Gun Hacks Your Speech

Imagine this: some new Dark Ages figure like Rick Santurom is sliming all over a microphone with some bit of evangelical creepiness or anti-science straight-up nonsense. A figure in the back of a room raises a particularly weird, ungainly gun with a laser sight and a few buttons on the back. Suddenly, the speaker looks confused and a bit uncomfortable; he shuts up mid-sentence. The speaker then clears his throat, smiles awkwardly at the crowd, and starts talking again. And then stops. He’s lost his ability to speak, and can’t quite understand why. He’s been speech-jammed by a very real device, outlined in a recent paper posted to the arVix pre-print server by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukad. Meet the SpeechJammer, aka (to me, at least) the stutter gun.

The principle of thing is simple (simple-ish). Normal speech relies on a certain amount of delay and feedback; you hear yourself talk within a very, very precise time interval from when you actually create the sounds. That process is important in the creation of new sounds. Stuttering is, in many cases, the result of some disruption in this system. The mechanism devised by Kurihara and Tsukad mimics this disruption. Basically, it listens to a voice and fires it back at the speaker with a touch of finely calibrated artificial delay.

“It is thought that this delay affects somecognitive processes in our brain,” they write. “This phenomenon is known as speech disturbance by Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF).” Medical devices using DAF are actually used sometimes to correct stutters, and only way this really differs from medical devices aside from being used for the opposite effect is that it utilises remote mechanisms.

They outline two of these. One of them is the gun, which uses a directional mic coupled with a directional speaker and a laser sight. The second uses a carefully hacked PA system: microphones and speakers with a delay snuck in somewhere (that takes account of the system’s natural delay). You can imagine this in a presidential debate: the moderator hits a button and, with no argument, whoever’s being moderated just shuts up. Sinister and beautiful.

Connections:

• How the Vocoder Helped Save Us From Nuclear Apocalypse
• Julius Von Bismarck Invents Against the Machine

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv, @everydayelk.