(Long Island, NY) I recently attended the Audio Engineering Society conference in San Francisco; curious to see what kinds of cool new gadgets are available for musicians, documentary filmmakers, and pod-casters. The whole convention is sort of a music-geek’s paradise, complete with people playing bad Van Halen guitar licks on fancy new amplifiers, vast piles of new speakers, and huge TV screens showing off the latest innovations in computer audio editing software.
The most unusual thing I saw there was presented by a company out of Finland who were showing off something called Directional Audio tiles. These things looked like college-dorm wall decor –white felt or fiberboard — but when you got up close, you could hear music coming out of them. These tiles are made for people to mount on walls or ceilings for special purposes, like art installations or product booths. You get people in a particular location, and they can hear music or your sales pitch, but nobody else can, because the sound is so “directional”.
The reps were demonstrating these odd things, bending them back and forth and showing off how versatile they are. There was even a claim made that you could cut the speakers into any weirdo shape you could think of while the music was playing! How bizarre. Speakers you can slice.
I immediately thought of the Long Island art scene, and began arranging some kind of freaky art show in my head using these audio tiles. Imagine an art show where you took snippets of the President’s speeches, and arranged the tiles in a corridor so that you could hear one campaign promise in one step, and hear it broken a few feet down the hall.
Or how about a “War in Iraq” corridor where you could hear the claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction down one hallway, only to hear everyone backpedaling as you turned the corner? Wouldn’t that be something?
Of course, at the convention, nobody was interested in politics. They were all gaga over the latest toys. Those toys included high-profile equipment used to do Super Bowl half-time shows, Cirque du Soleil, and other big-time stuff, and there were also more mundane devices including microphone signal processors and guitar effects software. But no matter how many tiny-but-powerful mics I saw, no matter how cool the software and hardware got, I kept thinking of those zany musical tiles.
I wondered what would happen if some enterprising rapper made a jacket with these tiles cut to fit and sewn into the material. Imagine three or four guys all performing with these musical coats, each with a different instrumental part of a whole song blaring out of their shoulders? it could bring break dancing back
in a major way, somehow.
The next step is more annoying. Imagine what will happen when some Madison Avenue type gets a hold of this idea and starts blasting commercials at you while you’re in the bathroom at the burger joint, or trying to buy a candy bar in the theater lobby. They are already doing this at the checkout counters in grocery stores with those expensive, fancy monitors. Now the technology is lightweight, easy to install, and ready to crank up your annoyance level to the 100th power.
I was so impressed by those crazy tile/speakers, all weekend long I kept thinking about different applications for them. Then I remembered the grocery stores that have those annoying TV monitors, and realized that we are doomed. Any peace and quiet we might have had shopping ANYWHERE is about to be destroyed thanks to a cool little innovation sold by a Finnish company. Surely they must have known that Directional Audio tile could be used for such nefarious purposes. Did they realize this, and sell them anyway? Is this a plot? Why do they hate us? They must understand American companies will only use their tiles for evil, silence is already an endangered commodity around here, and it just got even scarcer.
Still, maybe the only people who will wind up buying these damn things are the artists with snotty political statements to make. We can only hope.
