Storing Data in Music | Hacker News Reader

Storing Data in Music

sciencedaily.com

55 pointsmmoez15 comments

This reminds me of stories about coded messages during World War II [1]. This could be used to maybe embed data messages within public broadcasts? I wonder how much data quality could degrade over AM/FM modulations. There is of course packet radio for data transmissions, but I am specifically thinking about public broadcast. A scenario I thought of is a broadcast in distressed areas, similar to the WWII coded messages, but with addition of data layer embedded that could authenticate the authenticity of the messages, for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Londres

Music broadcasts were also used to send secret message to hostages in Colombia:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852772

Another application is DRM, e.g. storing "This song is licensed to ..." in the music. Let's hope we're not heading that direction.

This isn't a problem. Software can find the delta and filter it out.

This isn't a problem if you pay for your music.

Quite the contrary. Pirates can spoof their identities with vpns and stolen credit cards, and won't care if a piece of IP gets tagged with their fake ID. But paying customers will have their personalized codes publicized every time they play a song at a party, use a snippet for a ringtone or put a bit of background music in a video clip.

That is the typical 1-dimensional view of one who has the money to pay for art, literature and culture.

Do you also believe the story that sony bmg etc. loose money because of pirating? The opposite is true! Pirates become fans and eventually buy stuff when they can because they want to support artists so they can bring out new stuff and come to events to play concerts.

I’d be pretty pissed if all my purchased music basically had a notch filter at 10k.

Pretty sure this is old tech now? There used to be a light-show app that relied on the same principle. The app received (audio) signals at high frequencies, and would then use the screen to flash different colors - basically sequenced by the incoming signal.

It was used at sports events and such, so that when all the attendees fired up the same app, they'd create cool light shows.

> Pretty sure this is old tech now?

It seems they're claiming higher bitrates than existing techniques.

That sounds a bit similar to cue tones [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_tone

An obvious marketable application for this is location tracking. Advertisers could embed more detailed positional information into audio / video advertising and use apps to get more granular information on who’s listening to it. A logical extension of https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/life-st...

I was hoping this would be like in the film "The man with one red shoe" where the theory is that a violinist in an Orchestra is encoding secrets into his performance that normal people in the audience would not detect, but it could be detected and decoded if you knew what to look for.

That description reminds me of: https://youtube.com/watch?v=J1p5zOM96f0

[Whistling distractedly] Don't mind me... my microphone ears are just open all the time just to catch the fleeting sound of data encoded into music!

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