Yamaha Noise Generator: The Next Best Thing to the Cone of Silence
March 9th, 2011
If you need to have a private conversation, you could find an office with a door on it, but if you happen to work in a cubicle farm, it might be difficult to have a conversation without your neighbors eavesdropping. Now thanks to this gadget from Japan, you could keep prying ears out of your business.
Yamaha’s VSP-1 [JP] is designed to mask conversations by projecting “camouflage” noise that covers up what you’re saying. Created to cover up voices specifically, the device is said to mask as much as 89% of the spoken word. And on a bad day, as little as 48%. So even when it’s not blocking everything, it would be pretty difficult to make out an entire conversation with this thing turned on. The compact gadget offers 8 sounds including forest sounds, a babbling river, waves, urban crowds, music and other variants designed to cover voices without being too annoying.
Unfortunately, the VSP-1 isn’t cheap. It’ll sell for ¥105,000 (appx. $1268 USD) when it goes on sale in Japan this April. Still, it might come in handy for locations such as nurses’ stations at hospitals where you might need to provide privacy without walls.
[via Akihabara News via Oh Gizmo!]
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Categories: Gadgets Strange + Wonderful Technology
The little box plays sounds such as a babbling river, a forest or “urban clutter” to help mask what you’re saying. Apparently, they work very well! So well, in fact, that Yamaha thinks they’re worth a whopping $1,200 apiece. Yeah, I’ll stick to whispering, thanks.
The little box plays sounds such as a babbling river, a forest or “urban clutter” to help mask what you’re saying. Apparently, they work very well! So well, in fact, that Yamaha thinks they’re worth a whopping $1,200 apiece. Yeah, I’ll stick to whispering, thanks.
Is the noise source truly random (and not pseudorandom?) Useless otherwise
This looks good for offices that need a deluxe speech privacy machine, engineered to optimize for effective performance using low decibel levels.
For single cubicles, a simpler (and much cheaper) system will probably do the trick, like one of these:
http://www.speechprivacysystems.com/store/white-noise-for-individual-office.html