Silence in Movie Theaters With Japanese Speech Jammer

While watching an amazing film at the movie theater, did you ever wish that you could press a button to silence one of the chatty folks talking up a storm during a pivotal scene? Well, now it’s possible thanks to Japan! Of course, there are messier, less civilized ways to get someone to be quiet in a movie theater, but that just takes too much effort.

Japanese researchers invented a speech-jamming machine to painlessly make people stop talking. Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University developed this bad boy that can silence people up to 30 meters or more away.

Here’s how it works: The speech jammer records the target’s speech, then sends the words back at the target with a 0.2 second delay. This affects the brain’s cognitive processes, causing the target to stutter before silencing them altogether.

The speech jammer is suggested to be used in libraries or wherever important group discussions may be held, but of course there are always the negatives to using the machine. The speech jammer sort of gets in the way of one’s freedom of speech in some cases; however, a movie theater is a perfect place to put this invention. Nobody wants to hear what some random person thinks is going to happen next or some teenager’s immature remarks on a particular scene, so there should be a speech jammer sniper in every theater.