Home (../index.php) / Electronics (electronics seminar topics.

php) / Audio Spotlighting

Published on Nov 30, 2023

Abstract
Audio spot lighting is a very recent technology that creates focused beams of sound similar to light beams
coming out of a flashlight. By ‘shining’ sound to one location, specific listeners can be targeted with sound
without others nearby hearing it. It uses a combination of non-linear acoustics and some fancy mathematics.
But it is real and is fine to knock the socks of any conventional loud speaker.

This acoustic device comprises a speaker that fires inaudible ultrasound pulses with very small wavelength
which act in a manner very similar to that of a narrow column.

The ultra sound beam acts as an airborne speaker and as the beam moves through the air gradual distortion
takes place in a predictable way due to the property of non-linearity of air. This gives rise to audible
components that can be accurately predicted and precisely controlled. Joseph Pompei’s Holosonic Research
Labs invented the Audio Spotlight that is made of a sound processor, an amplifier and the transducer. The
American Technology Corporation developed the Hyper Sonic Sound-based Directed Audio Sound System.
Both use ultrasound based solutions to beam sound into a focused beam. Audio spotlight can be either
directed at a particular listener or to a point where it is reflected

Introduction
Audio spot lighting is a very recent technology that creates focused beams of sound similar to light beams
coming out of a flashlight. By ‘shining’ sound to one location, specific listeners can be targeted with sound
without others nearby hearing it, i.e. to focus sound into a coherent and highly directional beam. It uses a
combination of non-linear acoustics and some fancy mathematics. But it is real and is fine to knock the socks
of any conventional loud speaker.

The Audio Spotlight & Hyper Sonic Sound Technology (developed by American Technology Corporation), uses
ultrasonic energy to create extremely narrow beams of sound that behave like beams of light. Audio
spotlighting exploits the property of non-linearity of air. When inaudible ultrasound pulses are fired into the air, it
spontaneously converts the inaudible ultrasound into audible sound tones, hence proved that as with water,
sound propagation in air is just as non-linear, and can be calculated mathematically.

A device known as a parametric array employs the non-linearity of the air to create audible by-products from
inaudible ultrasound, resulting in an extremely directive, beamlike wide-band acoustical source. This source
can be projected about an area much like a spotlight, and creates an actual specialized sound distant from the
transducer. The ultrasound column acts as an airborne speaker, and as the beam moves through the air,
gradual distortion takes place in a predictable way. This gives rise to audible components that can be
accurately predicted and precisely controlled

Theory
What ordinary audible sound & Conventional Loud Speakers lack? What we need? About a half-dozen
commonly used speaker types are in general use today. They range from piezoelectric tweeters that recreate
the high end of the audio spectrum, to various kinds of mid-range speakers and woofers that produce the lower
frequencies. Even the most sophisticated hi-fi speakers have a difficult time in reproducing clean bass, and
generally rely on a large woofer/enclosure combination to assist in the task.

Whether they be dynamic, electrostatic, or some other transducer-based design, all loudspeakers today have
one thing in common: they are direct radiating-- that is, they are fundamentally a piston-like device designed to
directly pump air molecules into motion to create the audible sound waves we hear. The audible portions of
sound tend to spread out in all directions from the point of origin. They do not travel as narrow beams—which
is why you don’t need to be right in front of a radio to hear music. In fact, the beam angle of audible sound is
very wide, just about 360 degrees. This effectively means the sound that you hear will be propagated through
air equally in all directions.

In order to focus sound into a narrow beam, you need to maintain a low beam angle that is dictated by
wavelength. The smaller the wavelength, the less the beam angle, and hence, the more focused the sound.
Unfortunately, most of the human-audible sound is a mixture of signals with varying wavelengths—between 2
cms to 17 meters (the human hearing ranges from a frequency of 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz).

Hence, except for very low wavelengths, just about the entire audible spectrum tends to spread out at 360
degrees. To create a narrow sound beam, the aperture size of the source also matters—a large loudspeaker
will focus sound over a smaller area. If the source loudspeaker can be made several times bigger than the
wavelength of the sound transmitted, then a finely focused beam can be created. The problem here is that this
is not a very practical solution. To ensure that the shortest audible wavelengths are focused into a beam, a
loudspeaker about 10 meters across is required, and to guarantee that all the audible wavelengths are
focused, even bigger loudspeakers are needed.

Here comes the acoustical device “AUDIO SPOTLIGHT” invented by Holosonics Labs founder Dr. F. Joseph
Pompei (while a graduate student at MIT), who is the master brain behind the development of this technology

Audio spotlight looks like a disc-shaped loudspeaker, trailing a wire, with a small laser guide-beam mounted in
the middle. When one points the flat side of the disc in your direction, you hear whatever sound he's chosen to
play for you — perhaps jazz from a CD. But when he turns the disc away, the sound fades almost to nothing.
It's markedly different from a conventional speaker, whose orientation makes much less difference

Audio Spotlight Transducer

• 17.5”/445mm diameter, 1/2”/12.7mm thick, 4lbs/1.82kg

• Wall, overhead or flush mounting

• Black cloth cover standard, other colours available

• Audio output: 100dB max

• ~1% THD typical @ 1kHz

• Usable range: 20m

• Audibility to 200m

• Optional integrated laser aimer 13”/ 330.2mm and 24”/ 609.6mm diameter also available

• Fully CE compliant

• Fully realtime sound reproduction - no processing lag

• Compatible with standard loudspeaker mounting accessories Due to continued development, specifications
are subject to change

Non-Linearity Of Air
Audio spotlighting exploits the property of non-linearity of air. When inaudible ultrasound pulses are fired into
the air, it spontaneously converts the inaudible ultrasound into audible sound tones, hence proved that as with
water, sound propagation in air is just as non-linear, and can be calculated mathematically. A device known as
a parametric array employs the non-linearity of the air to create audible by-products from inaudible ultrasound,
resulting in an extremely directive, beamlike wide-band acoustical source. This source can be projected about
an area much like a spotlight, and creates an actual spatialized sound distant from the transducer.

The ultrasound column acts as an airborne speaker, and as the beam moves through the air, gradual distortion
takes place in a predictable way. This gives rise to audible components that can be accurately predicted and
precisely controlled. However, the problem with firing off ultrasound pulses, and having them interfere to
produce audible tones is that the audible components created are nowhere similar to the complex signals in
speech and music. Human speech, as well as music, contains multiple varying frequency signals, which
interfere to produce sound and distortion. To generate such sound out of pure ultrasound tones is not easy.

This is when teams of researchers from Ricoh and other Japanese companies got together to come up with the
idea of using pure ultrasound signals as a carrier wave, and superimposing audible speech and music signals
on it to create a hybrid wave. If the range of human hearing is expressed as a percentage of shift from the
lowest audible frequency to the highest, it spans a range of 100,000%. No single loudspeaker element can
operate efficiently or uniformly over this range of frequencies. In order to deal with this speaker manufacturers
carve the audio spectrum into smaller sections. This requires multiple transducers and crossovers to create a
'higher fidelity' system with current technology.
Conclusion and Future Scope
“Being the most radical technological development in acoustics since the coil loudspeaker was invented in
1925... The audio spotlight will force people to rethink their relationship with sound…”
-NewyorkTimes

So we can conclude- Audio Spotlighting really “put sound where you want it” and will be “A REAL BOON TO
THE FUTURE.”

References
• www.thinkdigit.com

• www.holosonics.com

• www.spie.org

• www.howstuffworks.com

• www.abcNEWS.com

Previous (electronics seminar topics.php) Next (Artificial-Intelligence-In-Power-Station.php)

Are you interested in this topic.Then mail to us immediately to get the full report.
email :- [email protected]

Related Seminar Topics

3-Dimensional Printing (3-Dimensional-Printing.php)
Silicon on Plastic (Silicon-on-Plastic.php)

Hydrogen Super Highway (Hydrogen_Super_Highway.php)

Smart Antenna (Smart_Antenna.php)

Super Capacitor (Super-Capacitor.php)

Vehicle-to-Grid V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid.php)

Seminarsonly
Follow Page

© Copyright (../Copyright.php) 2006-2028 www.seminarsonly.com

(https://www.seminarsonly.com/) Privacy Policy (../Privacy-Policy.php)