Quiet for Android – TCP over sound

Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by joshumax on Saturday February 10, 2018 @04:21AM (#16346556)

For those of you interested, there was an app called Chirp by Animal Systems that allowed you to transfer messages and shortcodes of hosted media content over audible frequencies. Despite being rather ear-piercing each time a Chirp was sent, it was still a very interesting principal. I remember reverse engineering the protocol and error correction mechanisms (it was a varient of the Reed-Solomon algorithm iirc) with a friend for a little household "internet of things" that communicated over sound. I still have a few temperature monitoring devices around the house that sing a little tune based on the RE'd code every few hours to report back to my RasPi on home temperature data.

Judging by the fact that this was in my GitHub stars list from about a year ago, it looks like I was considering transitioning to something more open. With the right encryption and error correction mechanisms I think this type of technology could be really useful for short-range home iot communication.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by pavel_lishin on Saturday February 10, 2018 @08:21AM (#16347182)

Using something that sounds like bird calls - or something else that's pleasant - to transmit data sounds like a pretty neat idea for a smart home. It would expose the otherwise-invisible artificial ecosystem you're living in.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by SimbaOnSteroids on Saturday February 10, 2018 @08:30AM (#16347212)

Imagine your smart home ecosystem that sounds like the Amazon ecosystem. That sounds like the kind of thing that would actually push me the extra edge to wire my home up.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by jhayward on Saturday February 10, 2018 @11:55AM (#16348111)

Back in the mainframe days I spent many late nights in the machine room doing systems janitor work. I could easily identify which workload was running, and what phase, by the ambient noise of disk and tape drives.

I can imagine your house chirping and tweeting about, when suddenly you wake from a deep sleep saying "what was that!" when some unusual pattern of sound happens.

The pattern matching and decoding portions of our brain never, ever, stop their efforts and are wired deeply in to the survival mechanisms we have.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by rhizome on Saturday February 10, 2018 @01:42PM (#16348776)

I once read that Brian Eno did an experiment about this. He recorded something like 30min of outside noise in order to see if he could learn "how it goes," just like you learn how a piece of music goes. "Wind rustle, dog barks, more wind, a horn honk, then the garbage truck goes by and a bottle falls out and breaks," etc. It was a successful experiment.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by jrickert on Saturday February 10, 2018 @02:13PM (#16348942)

I had a similar personal experience. For years growing up I slept to a white noise machine that played a 3-second recording of a mountain stream. I became intimately familiar with the clip and could anticipate every trickle, the changing pitches of different water droplets, and the length of the loop. I can still conjure it from memory in great detail.

Intriguingly, on a single night I experienced some sort of hypnogogic auditory hallucination that caused the sound to lose all familiarity. Instead, I perceived the sound of a male singer arpeggiating rapidly. I found it highly disturbing.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by mgkimsal on Saturday February 10, 2018 @10:13PM (#16350980)

never knew how to phrase it, but I've had that a couple of times in the past few years. I've had to get really picky abouth the white noise sounds I listen to. Eventually, almost all the loops become identifiable - I can tell when the loop restarts, etc. I had two different loops (both of water sounds - waterfalls, maybe? - iirc) that, at some point, started to register as human voices, and it freaked me out more than a bit.

fwiw, the only thing that works well for me is masking any other sounds with a mix of grey and brown noise on top. i use 'white noise app' to achieve this, and it helps me get to sleep, masking out many other ambient disturbances (road/car noises, mostly).

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by Epholys on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @02:09AM (#16374079)

For everything about noises, I highly recommend mynoise.net. It has a ton of high quality sound generator which does not loop. If it is too monotonous, you can automatically "animate" the sounds which modify continuously the sounds at different frequencies.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by Hextinium on Saturday February 10, 2018 @01:37PM (#16348746)

Back when I built robots I could tell when they needed lube or bearings replaced by the pitch change in the motors on full power. I find it interesting that you figured out the same for a mainframe

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by pavel_lishin on Saturday February 10, 2018 @11:40AM (#16348026)

Until 3am, when auto-installed updates roll out :)

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by mongol on Saturday February 10, 2018 @12:30PM (#16348342)

You mean Amazon as the Amazon river..?

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by pavel_lishin on Sunday February 11, 2018 @09:11AM (#16352750)

You know, if I worked at Amazon, I would be very tempted to build something that plays river-and-rainforest sounds to indicate the health status of things.

Smoothly running stream? Everything is green. Rapids? Yellow-status; something needs looking into. Waterfall? Something's gone terribly awry.

Happily chirping birds? Successful health checkins. Monkeys screeching? Unhealthy result. Jaguar growl? Datacenter is on fire.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by ggerganov on Saturday February 10, 2018 @05:03AM (#16346661)

It's definitely an interesting concept. I've been playing around myself recently with implementing a simple data-over-sound protocol (nowhere near as advanced as Quiet). If anyone is interested, here is a quick 1 min showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrMQjFGD_MU

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by icebraining on Saturday February 10, 2018 @04:48AM (#16346626)

It's already becoming common. Chromecast has used it since 2014, and I just bought a $30 Wifi camera on Aliexpress that also uses ultrasounds for the initial configuration.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by natar on Saturday February 10, 2018 @04:45AM (#16346613)

I remember that app! It sounded so cool but was only available for iOS at the time and when I saw the Android app a few years later by change it was only a weird proof-of-concept where you can transmit folder-icons from within the app to another phone with the app.

Mh, looks like they're still around: https://www.chirp.io/

I really like the concept, would be really nice to have a functional app one day.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by moreati on Saturday February 10, 2018 @12:12PM (#16348221)

> I remember reverse engineering the protocol and error correction mechanisms (it was a varient of the Reed-Solomon algorithm iirc)

Wow! Do you have a write up, or code? I tried to do the same [1], but got stuck on the error correction [2]. I'd love to get closure.

1. https://github.com/moreati/chirppy 2. https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/663643/discover-par...

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by joshumax on Saturday February 10, 2018 @01:46PM (#16348791)

I'll see if I can't send something over in a PR or Issue :) I'll have to make sure it's a clean-room implementation, however, to get around legal issues.

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by moreati on Saturday February 10, 2018 @02:15PM (#16348960)

Thank you

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Re:Quiet for Android – TCP over sound by fullstackwebdev on Saturday February 10, 2018 @03:49PM (#16349495)

I've been hearing weird short "chirps" on youtube re-broadcasts of my shows on non-licensed accounts. I was wondering if they were weird leaking ultrasond signals (leaking under 22khz) used for advertisement tracking on mobile devices. I turn off my mobile at night now before I watch the shows.

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