There are many differences between New York and Amsterdam. For one the Dutch are way more comfortable with acknowledging that as humans, we might have sexual urges and be okay with paying someone to satisfy them.
But another big difference is the noise. New York has a much higher decibel count.
Waking up at 7am this morning to a symphony of jack hammers, i was inspired by a thought. an idea so obvious, i am surprised it doesn’t already exist:
Sound Seeking Bullets.
The sign of a good idea, to my mind, is one, that when said, causes a metaphorical tap to open and allow other ideas or uses to pour forth.
So let’s take a look at a few applications. I’ll start with my own situation.
It is 7am. i am having a good night’s sleep. Dreaming of being a professional COD4 player, when what should be a grenade going off in an Iraqi-esque war zone, suddenly has a beat. It doesn’t turn into some weird middle eastern disco disco musical with Adam Sandler as the Zohan, rather, some construction workers breaking up the road with a massive jack hammer.
Now, i know it is New York, but with all my windows and curtains closed, some music playing and a pillow over my head, i should not be able to hear the jack hammer. To this end, i feel that my space has been invaded, and already dealing with a size deficient environment, my feeling is that i have the right to attack to defend the sovereignty of my space.
Enter SSB’s. Lock the sound of the jackhammer engine in with an easy to download iphone app, then fire and forget. sound gone, peace restored.
Then there are the birds. It is 6am. you have just got back from a crazy night out. All is quiet, until that first bird, the ring leader, sets all the rest off, and suddenly the whole city is a caucophany of bird sounds. Without SSB’s, you’d be saying good-bye to your sleep, but now, you lock in the ringleader, and quietly fire off a rocket propelled bullet, that does what everyone else in the neighbourhood will thank you for.
Some other uses:
Honking cab drivers
Cats on heat
Boybands
Sound Seeking Bullets, is an open source project, protected under a Creative Commons license. Please feel free to add any ideas you might have.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: amsterdam, bullets, COD4, construction, decibel, new york, Zohan |
The Synthesizer 
I get the joke, but thats probably a good idea for an app… using the iphone, someone should be able to build an app that detects the annoying sound and turns your regular iphone headphones into noise cancelling ones. All you need is a mic, and a hi/lo filter or whatever, and some clever software. I think anyway, i’m not that kind of engineer. Cheap noise cancelling headphones dont have mics, they just assume you’ll use them on a plane and cut out the white noise you’ll find on a plane. I’m guessing the iphone should be able to at least approximate some of the more expensive ones that adapt the filtering to the source of the noise.