Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!minsky
From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: Weirdness Electronics
Message-ID: <3897@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 1 Nov 90 22:03:20 GMT
References: <1089700002@cdp> <1883@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us> <6507@tekred.CNA.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 25

In article <6507@tekred.CNA.TEK.COM> tonyo@tekred.CNA.TEK.COM (Tony Ozrelic) writes:

>Then there's G. Pat Flanagan's Neurophone/Dolphin Communicator and, of course,
>Pyramid Power...


I wondered what happened to that "neurophone". I recall some person
demonstrating it to me and Warren McCulloch in the '50s, but don't
remember the details.  I think it was a smooth electrode that you move
across the skin near your ear, and it is modulated so that you
actually hear some sounds. I think the inventor was a dolphin
researcher who eventually drowned in some accident.  Does anyone
remember his name?

Anyway, I remember concluding that the effect was real but not very
hi-fi, and I concluded it was probably due to electrostatic forces
pulling on the facial skin; the high-frequency carrier produced this
traction, and the drag would be proportional to the audio frequency
modulation, which would thus produce a sonic vibration in the skin
very close to the ear, perhaps transmitted through the tissues.  

The inventor claimed hi-fi audition, but if that had been tru, I'd
certainly remember the episode more clearly.

Do you remember any more about it?