Speech jamming

There are all sorts of jam. There’s strawberry jam, blueberry jam, apricot jam, traffic jam, and there’s even toe jam (although this is probably the least preferable spread for your morning toast). That’s not the end of jam of course; you can jam with your funky musician friends, you can jam a basketball, you can jam your finger, and you can be jammed in a crowd. There is however, a new “jam” in town that will make all others jams pale into insignificance; that life changing new jam is the “speech jam”.

The “speech jammer” all began with some researchers who obviously had a laboratory colleague with a little too much to say. These researchers have developed a prototype device that they call the SpeechJammer and which looks like a black cube the size of shoebox mounted on a shaft. Inside the box is a speaker than is direction-sensitive, meaning it can be focused on a particular area. On the top of the box is a direction sensitive microphone.

The researchers have used the machine in two different scenarios showing the capacity to stop people speaking mid-sentence.

In the first scenario workers were in an office at work on their computers. When one received a phone call the SpeechJammer was pointed at her and she stopped speaking mid-sentence. The other instance was in a university lecture room. A university lecturer had run over time and was rambling, but when the SpeechJammer was pointed at him, he became confused, tripped over his words and stopped talking.

The researchers also conducted controlled experiments comparing the effect of the SpeechJammer when people were reading a news broadcast out loud or delivering a spontaneous monologue. The SpeechJammer was more effective for someone reading news out loud than for people speaking spontaneously.

The SpeechJammer works via DAF (delayed audio feedback). It records and then sends the speaker’s own words back to them at a delay of around 0.2 seconds. The theory is that when you speak you use the sound of your own voice uttering words as feedback. However, when that playback is artificially delayed it interrupts the cognitive processing that allows you to maintain your flow. There is also a theory that DAF is involved in stuttering and that a SpeechJammer might actually reduce stuttering.

Whatever the theory, it seems that the SpeechJammer does work. The researchers defend their creation by saying that some parts of speech are actually barriers to communication and by eradicating them we might have better understanding.

So should every person be issued with a SpeechJammer? Imagine the arguments that could be circumvented! What interminable office meetings could be shortened by ending the marketing Sales Manager’s droning rant! Picture for instance, the glorious moment when thirty SpeechJammers in a train carriage are pointed toward the annoying git who has to have their phone conversation about what they will have for dinner at the top of their voice. Contemplate for a moment the improvements that could be made in parliaments around the world. What if instead of taking microphones to press conferences journalists took a SpeechJammer and when pollies drift into meaningless party-line drivel…up come the jammers!

Sure, there may be some issue around free speech and individual freedom to consider, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.