the Mosquito Alarm, aka Teen Buzz: an “ultra-high sound can be heard only by youths but not by most people over 20“. that’s what some kids are using as their cellphone ring to avoid it being heard by their teachers in school.

this fascinates me, especially given the essential slap-back to the technology’s original intent, to “drive teenage gangs away from shopping centers”. imagine if some enterprising youth found a way to develop a speech synthesizer that used this same frequency. they could broadcast messages with it through, say, a megaphone in a crowded place, and only fellow “young ones” could hear and respond to it. the opportunities here for mass covert behavior, “silent” civil disobedience or just plain hilarity are endless.

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