Audio Jammers - Noise Audio Recorders Won't Like?

 

Audio jammers are popular tools used during confidential meetings. They produce a unique sound for masking and protecting conversations from external listening devices, such as a smartphone running an audio recording app, hidden in one of your guests' pocket.

The sound of a jammer should be very difficult to filter out or remove when present in an audio recording. While commercial audio jammers often rely on white noise, this generator, however, uses a more efficient sound with articulation similar to speech. It is also buried under severe distortion, which makes recovery algorithms have a hard time producing exploitable results.

For further privacy, increase the generator's volume to play louder than your voice. Then, if you are holding a conversation in person, speak quietly, and very close to your partner so they hear you over the sound.

The My Noise Net Noise Machine lets you experiment with a 'speech blocker' to see if you could in fact block someone from recording your conversation with a smartphone recording app, or some other similar recording device.

Our experiments with this site found that while we could generate sound that somewhat masked speech, conversations within a small office were still intelligible on the recording. By increasing the volume of our speakers to 80% or more and the having a very quiet conversation much of the conversation was masked, but it was also masked when we played a loud music video and had a similar quiet conversation.

Our findings were that if individuals could hear each other in conversation, "the smartphone running an audio recording app, hidden in a pocket" could record the conversation, even when the audio jammer / speech blocker was running.