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Patrick Bergel CRUNCH
NETWORK - CONTRIBUTOR techcrunch.com
How do birds communicate? By singing. And now it’s the turn
of the machines. A new crop of businesses are now creating what’s referred to
as the Internet of Sound.
A
Brief History
Let’s rewind. The history of sound-as-signal is deep. In the
beginning, horns, drums and bells rang the alarm, roused the congregation and
directed military troops and urban workers: city-sized ringtones guided our
lives. These sounds were primarily communicative, musicality was a
secondary concern.
Analog sonic codes can be found in unlikely places:
composers from Mozart to Schumann hid private audio-numerological jokes in
their music, underwater modems guided naval vessels, telephone networks babbled
dial-tone enharmonics.
For many (including me), the first experience of the
Internet was the grackle squawk of a modem, of PCM-encoded games on
cassette — sound not as data per se but as a by-product
of data transmission, designed neither for the air nor the ear, but for the
wire.
We arrive at the digital age in modern systems encoding URLs
as sequences of notes for over-the-air transmission as tiny audio clips that
can now be decoded in real-time on mobile devices. In the weightless world of
digital, it’s easy to forget that information is a thing, it’s stuff — so
why not sound? Now in the modern era, the machines can sing. And they can
sing anything, from pictures to payments.
The
Internet Of Sound Is Here
This is what is called the Internet of Sound, the
speakernet. Using sound to send links to remote networks is one thing, but
local lookup tables on-device obviate the need for another network: the
sound is the network. Today’s technology is sufficient at
present only to send tiny amounts of data through or above audible ranges, but
good enough to encode every URL ever created as audio lasting a few seconds or
less.
Why
Is This A Powerful Idea?
Consider this: There are more tiny, cheap speakers on the
planet than there are people. Why not leverage this ubiquitous, commodity
technology? We see a huge opportunity to connect a very large number of devices
simply and intuitively.
Sound is in many ways the first, and yet the most
neglected, network.
Sound can go where other networks do not, and sound can be a
valuable part of the network ecosystem alongside existing protocols. We can
trivially repurpose ATMs, TVs, toys, radios and tablets already — if it
carries sound, it can send data.
How
Does It Work?
There are a number of techniques for building the Internet
of Sound, loosely comprising three categories:
Descriptive: Selected pre-existing features
of the signal uniquely disambiguate one signal from another, aka ‘audio
fingerprinting.’ Examples include music-recognition services, like Shazam orSoundhound. Network
geeks, forgive me: While it’s a stretch to call these true speakernet
technologies, even music can be repurposed for point-to-point communication.
Additive: Retrievable but
human-indetectable features (aka ‘audio watermarking’) are added to an
arbitrary audio signal. Examples include codes used for audience-tracking in
broadcast radio. One method uses tiny, imperceptibly fast echoes, normally
suppressed by human hearing, used by companies like Infrasonics, mufin and Civolution.
These give roughly equivalent bitrates to fingerprinting.
Coded: Instead of plucking a sound
from a large online library of known sounds, or adding watermarks on the fly,
the entire audio signal (pitch, tone-color, phase or amplitude) is itself the
code. Modern examples designed to be robust to noise, distortion and
compression include multi-pitch systems like Chirp and LISNR. Latterly, Google Tone, another
form of multiple frequency encoding, has entered the market. Pure-code signals
‘in plain hearing’ have the advantage of being much faster than the first two
techniques.
But…
All methods have relative strengths and weaknesses. Often
these are strongly orthogonal from usability and engineering perspectives. The
signal can be rich in data, but hideous to hear. The signal can be embedded
imperceptibly in a string quartet, but encode miniscule amounts of data. The
signal may be hopelessly fragile to real-world noise or reverberation, and so
on. The signal may be both unlovely and unreliable at the same time.
Data over audio is necessarily slow. Data over pleasant-sounding
audio is slower still — thus, the trick is to send pointers instead of files.
Sonic data raises issues of security: One-to-many data sharing is hugely
useful, but insecure (by design); but what if you want to share to just one
person? This is an interesting challenge — novel solutions are being worked on
as we speak.
Lastly, most importantly, do we really need the Internet of
Sound? I believe so. Sound is in many ways the first, and yet the most
neglected, network — a bridge over the last few feet, a medium that goes where
other networks cannot.
Take
Care
The sound itself matters. It is vital that sound is used
respectfully, with care for the sonic environment. We have enough casual and
arrogant noise pollution as it is, from headphone spill to street noise, to
sonic UIs as a tedious afterthought: mere keypress beeps.
As audio geeks and sound designers, we take great care when
designing the sounds we send, and we explicitly model our audio on sound from
nature, specifically from the language of birds. The Internet of Sound needs to
be a humane form of communication: that is, one that respects users by
putting the human ear first and foremost.
Sound
Is Everywhere
It’s time to get excited. The opportunities for the Internet
of Sound are frankly mind-(if not ear-) boggling, from the range of
applications available to the ease of deployment. The potential now exists to
re-engineer speech, music and sound design for data sharing, and my company is
active here.
New hardware will accelerate uptake: Ever-cheaper dedicated
DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chips in mobiles and connected devices for
always-on listening and hands-free UIs increase the reach and efficiency of Internet
of Sound products. We have already seen audio used in payments to send bitcoin
over the radio, in classrooms to share pictures and on web pages to pass maps
to mobiles. And we’re only just getting started. Bottom line — wherever there
is sound, there is data — from dumb phones to doorbells.
The Internet of Sound is coming, and one thing is for sure —
you ain’t heard nothing yet.
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