Those of you who follow my Twitter feed are aware that this afternoon, the German public television station ZDF is coming to my apartment to interview me about the rise of ultrasound technology, as pioneered by a company called Holosonics. 

Since most of you don’t have access to ZDF—unless digital cable is a lot more inclusive that I realize—I want us to talk about this stuff, too.

Here’s the deal: Ultrasound technology tightly focuses sound so that it can only be heard by a limited number of people in a given environment. When a sound is played from normal speakers, everyone in a room can hear it. When a sound is played from a Holosonic system, you might hear it, but the person two inches away from you might not.

There are many uses for this sort of invention. Artists have already created installations with it, and in a recent display of contemporary fashion, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts gave each collection it’s own soundtrack. The collections were inches apart, but the music supporting them didn’t overlap. 

And unsurprisingly, advertisers are all over this thing. After the jump, check out a video of an A&E promotion using the technology:

Demonstrations like this are too impressive to be ignored. This technology is not going away. It will only become more prevalent as it becomes cheaper and more widely known.

And that fills me with ambivalence.

If the social contract I’ve  signed with a space allows for my ears to be invaded, then I’m all for Holosonic’s breakthrough. If I step into an audio installation at a museum and have sound beamed directly at me, then I’m prepared to experience and evaluate it. If I go to a Gap (a la Minority Report) and sign up for ultrasonic discount offers based on my previous purchasing habits, then I’m down for hearing about pocket tees that are on sale just for me.

But the people getting hit with that A&E promotion didn’t agree to have their aural space invaded. The noise was thrust on them. If that happened to me, I would be pissed. Is the inside of my head no longer private? (Clive Thompson addresses that question quite well in this NPR interview.)

I realize, of course, that my visual space is constantly invaded without my permission, and that when billboards and magazine ads first started appeared, plenty of people who were outraged by them. (I’d imagine plenty of people are still outraged by them.)

But everyone can see a billboard. If it’s a sensory assualt, at least it’s a public one. It seems especially pernicious to me to invade an individual’s ears without her permission… to force a private experience on her when she’s just trying to walk down the street. Can you imagine how disorienting it would be to suddenly hear something that no one else can hear? How destructive it could be to a private thought or even a basic sense of physical equilibrium? You might think you were schizophrenic, and when advertising mimics the symptoms of a mental disease, the need for caution is obvious.

I just hope that as this technology develops, the industries using it do exercise caution, instead of wildly assaulting the public until government regulations have to be created to protect us from running a gauntlet of whispering commercials or getting sounds piped into our homes from a hundred miles away.

I’m not counting on that judiciousness, but I’m hoping for it.