Frank Swain can hear Wi-Fi, and he’s been tuning in to London’s networks for the past week.
It’s not “the result of a sudden mutation or years of transcendental meditation,” the writer insists. Instead, he’s hacked a hearing device to translate wireless frequencies into sound, enabling him to listen in to London’s multitude of hotspots, as the rest of us pass through them oblivious.
Swain, 32, who has been going deaf since his 20s, created a project called Phantom Terrains in conjunction with sound artist Daniel Jones. Funded by UK innovation charity Nesta, the project aims to “challenge the notion of assistive hearing technology as a prosthetic, reimagining it as an enhancement that can surpass the ability of normal human hearing.”
The idea for Phantom Terrains began when Swain finally decided to wear hearing aids. “I got fitted about 10 years after I learnt I had an issue”, he told Mashable. “I quickly realised the world didn’t sound like it should; it was completely different.”
I was listening to this computer’s vision of what I should hear. Traffic was dampened down, it wasn’t really a faithful reproduction of the environment. I thought, ‘Why should some engineers in a hearing aid lab decide what I hear.'”
Railing against this “editorialisation” of his hearing, Swain approached Nesta, who paid Jones to help with the project.
The platform uses a hacked iPhone’s Wi-Fi sensor to pick up data on nearby fields, including the name of the router, signal strength, encryption and distance. As Swain points out, your phone only shows you a handful of the networks it picks up, but there can be as many as 100 in close proximity.
“The strength of the signal, direction, name and security level on these are translated into an audio stream made up of a foreground and background layer: Distant signals click and pop like hits on a Geiger counter, while the strongest bleat their network ID in a looped melody,” Jones told New Scientist magazine.
All of this is transmitted to a pair of Starkey Hearing’s Bluetooth-connected Halo hearing aids, “using the same Bluetooth the Fitbit uses,” Swain told Mashable.
This extra layer of sound is blended with the normal output of the hearing aids, and becomes part of Swain’s own, editorialised soundscape. In Phantom Terrains’ first case study, he walked around the BBC Broadcasting House, producing a visual landscape (top graph, below) as well as a soundscape (bottom graph).
A short recording from the walk from Phantom Terrains’ “sonification interface” features an otherworldly soundtrack of bleeps and clicks, whose tempo and volume change according to signal strength. Routers with particularly strong signals “sing” their network name (SSID), with pitch corresponding to the broadcast channel, and a lower sound denoting the network’s security mode, according to the site.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/176608630″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
It sounds somewhat familiar to this distant memory of a noise:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/14372315″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Swain is planning to wear the specialized hearing device for around four to six weeks, the “usual amount of time to adapt”, and is looking forward to taking them to the countryside to see “how far from civilization I need to go to escape the smog of Wi-Fi.”
Swain thinks augmented hearing aids could catch on quicker than Google Glass, pointing to the movie Her with its “always-on earpiece”, and highlighting the difference between our scope of seeing and hearing.
“Google Glass is very in-your-face,” he said, “and vision is a very narrow band. You can only focus on one thing at a time. Hearing is fantastically broadband; you can hear 50 conversations in a room, and focus on just one while being aware of others, even if you don’t think you’re paying attention.”
