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So. our boss is kinda... nuts. His current pet project is to create a device that can play his theme song whenever his location is revealed to someone within a 50 meter radius. Naturally, he outsourced it to us.

  • The device has to play the song in high-quality and loud-enough to drown out gunshots and explosions within 50 meters.
  • The device should be resilient to all kinds of damage.
  • The music has to follow the boss around.
  • The boss also requested that the music shouldn't appear to originate from the boss himself.
  • It has to play on land and in water. It doesn't have to play in vacuum.

And now, we outsource it to you.

How could a device fulfill the criteria in the list?

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  • $\begingroup$ @Alexander Vacuum excluded. $\endgroup$
    – Mephistopheles
    Oct 29, 2019 at 17:35
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    $\begingroup$ "loud-enough to drown out gunshots and explosions" - do you want to put a decibel limit on explosions (or music)? Close explosions are eardrum-ripping. You don't want the music to cause the same effect, right? $\endgroup$
    – Alexander
    Oct 29, 2019 at 17:39
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    $\begingroup$ I was just about to point out the same issue as @Alexander. "Loud enough to drown out gunshots and explosions within 50 meters" means it's probably going to cause permanent hearing damage to anyone inside that radius. I hope your boss brought his earplugs. +1, though, because I love questions that try to justify weird video game mechanics (like this one). $\endgroup$
    – F1Krazy
    Oct 29, 2019 at 17:39
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    $\begingroup$ Would it be OK to have a drone with speakers and a sensors to detect "someone within a 50 meter radius"? The drone flies to new person, blasts music at them, and then returns to boss. $\endgroup$
    – Bald Bear
    Oct 29, 2019 at 18:20
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    $\begingroup$ In I'm Gonna Git You Sucka!, the hero has an entire band follow him around playing the music. It's better than a device. You can use the old Emperor's New Clothes gambit, and tell your insane boss that only fools and chuckleheads will see the ghostly figures instead of the device. $\endgroup$
    – user535733
    Oct 29, 2019 at 19:12

3 Answers 3

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A very smart long range drone outfitted with a sound laser

Sound is kind of similar to light in a few aspects, and one of the aspects is that it usually functions as a wave, but it can be directed in a tight beam, a sound laser, if you will (or, simply just Soundlazer if you want to see it in practice). Such a drone could be clear of the area, but be able to fire the beam of sound directly into the protagonist's / antagonist's ear during plot-critical moments. This also solves the problem of playing over explosions and gunshots - directed sound doesn't need to be blasted so everyone in the radius goes deaf.

As for water, that's where the intelligence comes in. Water refracts and messes with sound, kind of similar to how it does with light (another similarity), but if the drone is built well, it should be able to determine the acoustics, compensate for the adjusted speed (sound travels faster in water) and beam in the music anyway. Something like this.

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A small legion of tiny drones (as in really tiny) that fly around, land on the people facing your boss and take position behind the ears, on the skull. There they will send the music by vibrations through the skull.

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The problem is simpler once you break it up, We can break this one up into 3 parts and solve them separately.

First part, is to limit the audible range as 50m, this can be done, with a force field generator placed inside your boss' pocket, It generates a bubble of force field with an effective range of 50m, and can be configured to decrease or increase the range. This bubble is unaffected by any kind of EM changes in the environment and works fine on both land and water.

Second part, noise cancellation, remove any noise from the environment within the bubble, for this, there are a swarm of nanobots flying inside the bubble, they identify and drop themselves on ears of other people, or on microphone receivers or other such things and create a force field bubble of their own around the listening piece (ear or mic) and create a noise cancellation field, thus removing any unwanted explosion sounds.

Third part, play the theme song, the same nanobots will play the required theme song in surround sound, onto the listening piece, taking a cue from the device placed inside boss' pocket to judge the distance and loom over the sound accordingly as the boss moves around.

Though you have outsourced the problem to us, we only provide the design specs in the allocated money, implementation is up to you.

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