August 22, 2007

Gadget Wars

Let's face it. Modern life can be incredibly noisy. With the sounds of summer at their peak - megawatt car stereos booming, dogs barking, and electric scooters buzzing like mosquitoes on steroids - I am just waiting for the weather to change so I can close the windows and hear myself think.

Keeper and I have given up on expecting people to behave properly and have been reduced to shaking our fists at teenagers as they speed by, shouting on their cell phones to be heard above the rap music on their car radio.

A new type of inventor has surfaced who feels our pain and is designing devices that will give us some power over those who torment us. This new field has been called "annoyancetech" by graduate students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

The idea is to use technology to combat what is essentially a social problem. Take the case of the barking dog. (Did Nancy Drew ever take this case?). There is a new gadget you can put in your yard that emits an ultrasonic squeal whenever a dog barks. Supposedly, only the dog can hear it, and it's annoying enough so that he learns not to bark. The device looks like a birdhouse, so your neighbor need never know that you are pulling a Pavlov on his pooch. As an alternative, you can actually talk to your neighbor and ask him to control his dog, but I have not found this to have a lasting effect.

What if it's teenagers that are annoying you? One device being tested in California is a gadget that, similar to the dog trainer, makes a high-pitched sound that kids can hear, but adults can't, due to natural hearing loss as we get older. The importer is calling it "Kids Be Gone" and claims that it prevents groups of kids hanging around and causing trouble. This one puzzles me. If kids' hearing is more sensitive than ours, how can they stand to have their music cranked up so high? Shouldn't it make their ears bleed? If there really were a particular auditory vibration that teenagers heard and actually reacted to, someone could make a mint teaching parents to speak at that frequency.

For some, the ability to fight back against intrusive noise is empowering. Especially the fact that you can do it anonymously.

Gone are the days when we simply ask someone to turn down the volume and he complies with an apology. We seem to find fighting excessive noise with gadgets to be safer then confronting people, what with the prevalence of Intermittent Explosive Disorder, which used to be called having a short fuse. What if you ask your neighbor to quiet his dog and he goes all postal on you? Next thing you know he'll be training the pooch to jump the fence and attack you. Better you should try the electronic squealing method and let him wonder why his dog is suddenly so well-behaved.