Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman's voice right in her ear asking, "Who's there? Who's there?" She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, "It's not your imagination."

Indeed it isn't. It's an ad for "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it's another story.

Ms. Wilson, a New York-based stylist, said she expected the voice inside her head to be some type of creative project but could see how others might perceive it differently, particularly on a late-night stroll home. "I might be a little freaked out, and I wouldn't necessarily think it's coming from that billboard," she said.

Four types of invasion of privacy claims exist under common law:

o Unreasonable intrusion upon the seclusion of another. The following three elements must exist before a plaintiff can prevail on an unreasonable intrusion tort claim:

1. The intrusion, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another must be intentional.
2. The intrusion must be into the private affairs or concerns of another.
3. The intrusion must be highly offensive to a reasonable person.

o Appropriation of another’s name or likeness.
o Unreasonable publicity given to another’s private life.
o Publication that unreasonably places another in a false light before the public.

Intrusion on Seclusion

A parallel might be made between a house, its occupants, and a person who invades the privacy of that household.

A couple might be relaxing in the house, then some salesman barges in through an open window unannounced and begins to give a sales pitch. The couple runs him out, then contacts the authorities.

The salesman might have had no desire to gain anything from the couple, other than to communicate his sales pitch, to make them aware of his product so that they might purchase it later from another. So the 4th Amendment might not apply as directly as torts on right to privacy claims.

The action was intentional, if for no other reason that the mechanics of coming through the window took more effort than other mechanisms to communicate the sales pitch. (wrt the ad, ultrasonics were used with explicit intention to counterfeit what might be perceived as a paranormal event.)

The intrusion was upon the private affairs of a person in that it intruded into the private domain of that person in order to communicate.

To the reasonable person, entrance to the house would have come by the front door with a courteous knock. Entering the house without permission isn’t defense or benign, but about as offensive as a home invasion. To the reasonable person, projecting an advertisement into the mind of a broadcast audience is about as offensive as possible. (I don’t know of anything less offensive in nature.)

Nowhere in the intrusion of seclusion is it required for something to be removed from the victim, other than their privacy.

It fails on points one and two. Because it’s out in the public space the person has no solitude or seclusion, and there’s no intrusion into private affairs. They’re projecting sound, which assuming decibel levels are not over legal limits is perfectly fine, just because the sounds aren’t audible unless you’re a small 3D space doesn’t make it illegal, all sound is only audible in a 3D space, only difference is this one here is the size of your head.

Your parallel doesn’t work, this is something out in the public space, on a sidewalk. So any analogy that includes private property fails completely.

My mistake. Your interpretation is correct as I understand it.

After investigating the technology as presented we aren’t observing ultrasonics which are used to communicate within the cranium, rather a remote loudpeaker system using utrasonic waves as an intermediate transmission medium, which later attenuate predictably into audible harmonics. The ears still function in the hearing and communication process.

From the article, we are not speaking of 2 ultrasonic waves producing lower frequency audible frequencies, in which case the laws/ordinances/regulations governing such public volumes might be pertinent. The significance of the issue is a new form of communication bypassing normal modes of reception.

Audible sound is generally accepted as between the frequencies of 20Hz - 20,000 Hz. (Most sound reproduction rarely dips below 42 Hz, and most sound tests of adults show diminishing auditory perception with age at above 16,000 Hz)

Medical Ultrasonics are in the region of 20,000Hz - 3GHz. Metallurgical Ultrasonics focuses generally between 1-3GHz.

They are not audible frequencies. Hence the name, ‘ultrasonics’ (ultra- beyond, sonic- sound).

They can penetrate tissue. The area which is private is the person’s body, soul, and spirit. My understanding from the article was that the communication perceived as sound had been generated by ultrasonics and were received within the person’s cranium, not from the normal vibratory modes of the ear.

This is still using audio pathways. It is just set up so that the sound is generated at a point rather than along a line, as typical sound generators do.

If you were wearing earplugs, you shouldn't be able to hear the sound. So that would be a good test as to whether the voice was from a supernatural source or a natural source.

That being said, current cell phone technology use a technique where they vibrate your jaw in order to send the sound to your ear. At least I believe that is what is happening.

So if the remote source can vibrate your jaw in the right way then it should be able to transmit a sound to your brain even if you were wearing ear plugs.

There is probably some way to damp out this form of transmission as well in order to make sure whether or not it is the voice of god.

Finally, if moving away from a certain spot causes the voice to go away, and then moving back to that spot causes the voice to return, then it is probably not from God.

Of course if they pay an agent to follow you around and constantly focus the sound point to where you are located, then you could become pretty paranoid rather quickly.

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