[HN Gopher] Send Data with Sound
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Send Data with Sound
Author : amrrs
Score : 17 points
Date : 2025-03-03 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| vbekkerm wrote:
| i thought the MODEM days were behind us...
| pdh wrote:
| Cool to see this done with webaudio. Reminded me of
| https://github.com/ggerganov/ggwave
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Discussed on 24-feb-2025, 69 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43162793
| knorker wrote:
| Turning data into audio is a big thing nowadays with amateur
| radio.
|
| Ironic that the author overlaps so much with that field, without
| noticing that they chose the same name as probably the most used
| amateur radio programmer in the world.
|
| If you're interested, the state of the art is VARA. It's closed
| source though, so NinoTNC may be a more interesting choice.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I'm struggling to find the protocol for VARA, although maybe my
| Google abilities are just failing me.l The protocol at least
| should be openly available according to the FCC
| knorker wrote:
| It's unclear to me too.
|
| I'm not a lawyer, nor is my ham license even in the US, but
| perhaps "you can decode it by using our software" satisfies
| the legal requirements?
|
| It's not, to my knowledge, deliberately obscured. That would
| be a legal no no, I think.
|
| But yes, people have fought over VARA's state here.
| matja wrote:
| There's also http://www.whence.com/minimodem/ which implements
| some standard methods:
|
| > standard FSK protocols such as Bell103, Bell202, RTTY, TTY/TDD,
| NOAA SAME, and Caller-ID
| deathanatos wrote:
| I've never gotten minimodem to actually work.
|
| E.g., printf 'Hello, world\n' | minimodem --tx
| 440 minimodem --rx 440
|
| (you can choose any freq.) results in a lot of,
| ### CARRIER 440 @ 800.0 Hz ### ### NOCARRIER
| ndata=1 confidence=1.507 ampl=0.060 bps=439.96 (0.0% slow) ###
| ### CARRIER 440 @ 800.0 Hz ### ### NOCARRIER
| ndata=1 confidence=1.858 ampl=0.053 bps=439.96 (0.0% slow) ###
| ### CARRIER 440 @ 800.0 Hz ### ### NOCARRIER
| ndata=1 confidence=1.832 ampl=0.063 bps=439.96 (0.0% slow) ###
|
| and even when it does hit, ### CARRIER 440 @
| 800.0 Hz ### Helln, world ### NOCARRIER ndata=14
| confidence=2.939 ampl=1.167 bps=438.67 (0.3% slow) ###
|
| If I try something like the example where he cats a man page:
| ### CARRIER 1200 @ 1200.0 Hz ### -O,=~`|_=???o|~`|w-U>mi>
|
| ... I'm in a quiet room.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Probably this post was inspired by all the fuzz gibberlink made
| last week, which uses ggwave, another data-over-audio protocol.
|
| https://github.com/PennyroyalTea/gibberlink
| karmakaze wrote:
| I don't feel great about gibberlink. LLMs have got AIs to
| interact like humans do. Similarly for the multimodal models.
| gibberlink could evolve into a highly efficient machine
| communication which leaves humans out of the loop for
| better/worse. We/it could make it more efficient by applying
| AI.
| tdeck wrote:
| This is a cool concept but it actually seems slower than if
| they'd just continued to speak words.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Text is incredibly efficient and compressible. Combine it
| with some of the other projects mentioned here, and it would
| be like:
|
| - Shall we switch to audio data for more efficient
| communication?
|
| - Yes. [MODEM NOISES START]
| thamer wrote:
| It's probably not slower than words, the rate for English
| pronunciation is something like 150-200 words per minute
| only.
|
| That said, the "gibberlink" demo is definitely much slower
| than even a 28.8k modem (that's kilobit). It sounds cool
| because we can't understand it and it seems kinda fast, but
| this is a terribly inefficient way for machines to
| communicate. It's hard to say how fast they're exchanging
| data from just listening, but it can't be much more than ~100
| bits/sec if I had to guess.
|
| Even in the audible range you could absolutely go hundreds of
| times faster, but it's much easier to train an LLM that has
| some audio input capabilities if you keep this low rate and
| likely very distinct symbols, rather than implementing a
| proper modem.
|
| But why even have to use a modem though? Limiting
| communication to audio-only is a severe restriction. When AIs
| are going to "call" other AIs, they will use APIs... not
| ancient phone lines.
| littlekey wrote:
| I had no idea this was real! I saw the video earlier and
| thought it was just faked for social media.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| What's the baud?
| pdh wrote:
| const CHARACTER_DURATION = 0.07; // seconds - balanced for
| accuracy while still fast (up from 0.055s) const CHARACTER_GAP
| = 0.03; // seconds - balanced for accuracy while still fast (up
| from 0.025s)
|
| 10 symbols per second
| tanepiper wrote:
| 12 years ago, I worked on this prototype -
| https://github.com/tanepiper/adOn-soundlib
|
| The original plan was to develop essential "audio QR codes" that
| would allow short codes to be transmitted that could be parsed by
| certain apps and used to drive different interactions.
| xnx wrote:
| How much greater is the capacity over open air vs POTS lines that
| maxed out at 56K?
| karmakaze wrote:
| Sending ascending/descending ascii punctuation is fun.
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