Why would radio-capable transhumans still vocalise to each-other?

Question

In the universe of Pandemonium, humans have been genetically modifying themselves (more specifically, their offspring) for many years, in order to give them a variety of more advantageous traits.

One of these traits is horns that grow on the head that contain radio organs, that allow the person possessing them to transmit and receive (and crudely direction-find) radio signals across a fairly broad section of the radio spectrum.

People with horns are able to use their horns to communicate with others via radio rather than via vocalisation... and unlike vocalisation, a person could hold as many as two or three simultaneous conversations, rather than just one.

Obviously, children aren't born with horns, they have to grow them later, and they continue to grow throughout a person's life, gradually becoming more capable, so people would have to vocalise to their children. Not everyone would have horns either, so people would have to vocalise if they didn't have them or the person with whom they are communicating didn't have them.

My question is that I'm looking for a reason why two or more adults, all with horns, would usually vocalise to each-other if they were close enough to do so, and only radio each-other at a distance, when out of line-of-sight, or when unable to vocalise for some reason.

EDIT

To clarify matters:

• Not all humans have radio horns. Around 75% of transhumans have them, and around 75% of the population are transhuman.

• The horns have multiple transmitter nodes (the number depending upon age and length) that each transmit variable-power FM signals across a broad spectrum of frequencies. This system is capable of three-dimensional beamforming, and effective main beam ranges would vary from as little as 10-20m to as much as 5-10km, though there would still be significant transmission sidelobes.

• The horns also have multiple receiver nodes (again depending upon age and horn length) that allow for range and direction finding.

• Persons possessing horns effectively 'vocalise silently' into them. The neural structures added by the horns' genes translates the imagined sounds into an appropriate RF signal, and the person can choose direction, channel and power.

• Persons possessing horns 'hear' radio signals translated into equivalent audio signals, and can percieve direction to as little as 6° azimuth and elevation, increasing in precision with age from about 22° in early childhood.

• Horn radio communication is language-dependent, though with a broader range of possible sounds than a human voice, since transhumans can transmit any sound they can imagine.

• The nature of many transhuman traits (including radio horns) is such that they are transmitted to the next generation upon artificial chromosomes that will effectively self-duplicate if necessary after fertilisation so that they will always be diploid, even if a transhuman has a child with a non-transhuman. Incompatible artificial chromosomes can also edit themselves out, and some can be selectively transmitted.

So, because there is no reason why a transhuman cannot successfully breed with a non-transhuman and pass on their horn genes to their offspring, making mating dependent upon mutual radio capability would be counterproductive.

Because people with horns 'hear' all radio signals that their horns can receive, they will hear nearby conversations, much as if they were a normal human in a room full of talking people. Horn-mediated radio communications are directed to a recipient by choosing appropriate power levels and beamforming. Recipients can tune out extraneous noise to a degree, much as normal humans can hear one audio conversation in a room full of talking people, with the added advantage that RF comms allow different carrier frequencies to be selected.

This is in contrast to modern digital radio communications, where the recievers do not usually direction-find, and different streams of data are identified by the recipient address in the data packets.

Answer 1

Habit

The children must learn to speak long before they get their horns. They need to be educated, which means the adults teaching them are speaking, too. Then they'd be speaking to their grandchildren... and to the neighbor's children... and to the kids at the playground....

There may be periods in the average person's life when they didn't need to vocalize, but by habit they would when people are nearby. I'll give you two real-world examples of why I think this would be rational.

1. A family immigrates to the U.S. from Mexico. The first generation only speaks Spanish. They may pick up some English by the time they die, but unless they really work at it, it won't be comprehensive and they'll think in Spanish all their lives. Each succeeding generation would grow up speaking English because that's what they need to speak in the schools (generally speaking), so why would the children speak to the grandchildren in Spanish? Because that's what they grew up with.

2. This one might be politically unpopular, but it's reality. I grew up with only two gender pronouns: she/her and he/him. I can be (and, to a degree, have been) taught to politely use a wider array of pronouns — but I'm fooling myself (and anybody who says otherwise is fooling themselves) if I were to ever say that I believe it. Unless I'm concentrating, I will always fall back on just two gender pronouns — the two I grew up with.

So... habit. The children must vocalize and the adults must vocalize to teach them and each succeeding generation. There will always be times throughout their lives when they must vocalize... and habits can be hard to break.

Answer 2

Private time.

Disadvantages of radio signals

Having radio signals to communicate is like broadcasting through the air to everyone (or at least anyone is able to "tune" in and listen...). The signals travel through the air, penetrating most walls with ease (it's like switching on a radio set). This also makes it necessary to filter out "radio dialog" from others filling the aether. Well, maybe they can somehow "shut off" that horn. Maybe they can even "encrypt" their signals some way so not everybody can eavesdrop in. Maybe they even speak different languages still, since they communicate via radio and not telepathy.

Advantages of vocal sounds

1. Sounds do not cross walls that easily and are therefore beneficial. They use it generally for the communication within the local vicinity, like within the family also, or generally to not be heared by all others via radio.

2. You can compare it with our behaviour: We can shout, we can speak, we can whisper. Maybe it is the same for them, just with one level on top.

3. The radio communication might be exhausting or it is considered rude to use it (like we do not like to hear a car horn all the time). Therefore they generally don't use it, except for certain occasions. And especially if their communication partner is within arms-reach, there is no need to.

4. Maybe it is a mating ritual to be able to produce radio signals. Like singing birds, a rutting stag, or just like having antlers to attract females. Therefore it is not used all the time.

5. Sounds a little like a built-in cellphone. You could use this as an analogy. We can use it, but we do not do it all the time. We need to charge it, to make it available and dial a number to contact someone (takes time, is not instantly possible).

6. Maybe it is not so easy to get the horn communication going. It may need up to a minute or so to tune into the aether and be able to be "online" afterwards. If they should be "always connected", then you can introduce a warmup-time to synchronize frequencies with one another (like a longer time for "dialing a number"). Maybe this works best, when they are alone, to make it easier to concentrate. Especially if adults who havn't met before come together, they won't take the time to synchronize to each other, because this would be inconvenient. Anyways, vocal sounds do not come with such caveats. Therefore it is still used primarily.

• Maybe they need to "rub their horns with each other" to exchange their "phone numbers". And "rubbing horns" could be also considered something sexual, so you do not do it with "everyone".

Answer 3

Politeness

Using the Radio Horns is considered the equivalent of Shouting. Broadcasting the signal far and wide for all to hear. Acceptable when out in the middle of nowhere or if one has to communicate with someone far away - but in day-to-day usage, it is considered rude to be within visual range of someone and to use the horns for communication.

All manner of Horny jokes

This is both a serious answer and an answer that is inviting all manner of Puns.

Children dont have Horns - and so it could be conceivable that the Horns are a part of puberty and therefore part of Sexual Maturity. As such, usage of the Horns is reserved for all manner of Horn-y speech.

That is - any invitation to sexual activity is done via the Horns (you did mention simultaneous conversations... Menage-a-Horn) Since usage of the Horns is reserved for Flirting, Dirty talk, propositions, invitations to come in for Coffee etc. Day-to-day speech is done via the Mouth so as to avoid confusion:

A Person saying a risque joke with their mouth is just cracking a joke, someone saying it with their horns is something more.

Being in close proximity to the signal hurts the listener

This is kind of similar to the first answer - where using the horns is considered shouting - well, if we put aside a Societal Norm argument for a moment - if you are standing right next to an Amplifier, it hurts to listen to it - and so there is a minimum distance where it no longer hurts the listener - and this just so happens to be just outside the practical distance a vocal conversation can be had.

Answer 4

Hardwired biology

Biology is a tricky thing. There is a host of signals you do not consciously pick up on in real life that you can miss in other forms of communication. Video calling is a great example. You would think that seeing and hearing, our two most important stimuli, would be enough. Yet watching a 2D picture with the sound from speakers is simply not the same. We miss just tiny parts of how your eyes focus or how the voice should reach your ears. You miss smell or even the feeling of a voice.

Now put this to radio horns. You'll miss so much more. You miss you visuals of not just the mouth, but the whole face contorting. Intonation of a voice is underlined by facial expressions. It'll be unnatural to miss this on some level, even for people using radio horns a lot.

It gets weirder, as you never hear yourself as others hear you. My twin sounds exactly like me, which I can only hear when I record my own voice and play it back to me. People talking via horns likely sound different from their real voice. This leads to trust issues.

Anyone can sound like anyone, as long as they can imagine it. How can you trust you are talking to the person you think you are talking to? Maybe your much more social friend sits right behind you and talks with that person you like, while you act as if it is you talking, as a random example. It can be used and abused more easily.

It is no doubt a great method of communication that'll be used easily. You wouldn't need to shout to get the attention of you kid watching youtube or something, or talking to each other in noisy scenarios, or when you can hardly see each other. Face to face people are more likely to prefer actual talking. You'll get the full 'biological' experience, as well as more trust of who is speaking. They might use their horns as an addition, 'singing' music or some special sound, but in the end practically everyone is hardwired to want to talk.

Answer 5

Same reason we do not use our phone to talk to each other when we're in the same room:

• maybe typing (or radioing) is slower than speaking
• maybe its considered bad manner (in some place its considered disrespecting your conversation partner to use your phone when speaking with them)
• maybe people prefer hearing sound directly instead of hearing via radio

Also, here's more technical reason:

• maybe encoding/decoding radio signal take more brain power than encoding/decoding sound by ear (imagine radio communication can send picture/sound/file, therefore there needs to be some kind of protocol that would have a lot of metadata included like what kind of file is being sent, what codec/compression algorithm is used, in what language, etc)
• maybe before communicating via radio, both party have to agree on something (e.g. what frequency to use, what encoding to use)
• maybe if everyone used same freq, you need to take turn speaking

Other reason that I can think is secrecy: you cant know who's listening to your radio (on second thought you wont know if anyone in the room have voice recorder on either but anyway...)

Answer 6

Start with the basics first

I'm Dutch and that is the first language I got taught. First speaking, then writing letters, to words, to sentences. Then comes grammar and more complex vocabulary. By the time you reach grammar, much Dutch kids get introduced to basic english. This is now easier, because you already know the concept of words and sentences, past and present.

To communicate via radio waves, you first need to get a feel for harmonics. How do certain words sound, higher and lower pitches. How does emphasis work? When you are in a classroom, how do you differentiate the teacher from the noise?

You first need the basics before you can do your second 'language'. And because everyone needs practice it's just normal to use normal talking as prime communication. Why would I speak english when everyone uses dutch?

Answer 7

It's just simpler and less "tiring"

So, humans (and, probably, post-humans and trans-humans) are lazy creatures. We like the less convoluted and less energy consuming path for routine tasks. And radioing messages, off the top of my head, with no knowledge of how much energy radio consumes, sounds like it would consume way more energy than speaking, so doing it for extended periods of time would end up being exhausting.

But even leaving that aside, with radio you may have all sorts of perks and advantages, extra reach, directed projection, channel selection, whatever, but you have to "handle" all of that even after you learn and "internalize" it; it's extra steps that their bodies may not be naturally adapted for and adjusting can't be done fully subconsciously. Imagine every time you had to talk to someone you had to, for a fraction of a second, think about your diaphragm, and your lungs, and your vocal cords, and your larynx, and your tongue, and your nose, and your teeth, and your lips, and where their ears are are with respect to your mouth.

Even when using our nature-provided phonation systems, it's hard to control everything when we're tired or something or other is hindering our mental faculties for whatever reason. Our speech is slurry when we're tired or doozy, we lose control of our pitch and volume when we're excited, etc, if we're really exhausted or busy we will resort to raising our voices rather than move our emitter to properly align with the receivers, etc. Same would happen with radio signals, Radioing a signal is probably a more complex process than just "make air vibrate in a particular way using your fleshy bits" and radio signal error correction on the receiving side might not come as naturally as it does for audible speech.

This is pretty much the same reason you don't go around your house with bluetooth headphones connected to a "In-Home Voice Chat" and instead you just speak to people and raise your voice if you need someone far away to hear you. The added complexity of the process just defeats any advantage it has over raising your voice or just walking over to their room and speaking to them normally.

Answer 8

Culture. Sure, you can communicate with radio, but as a sense it's more primitive than sounds.

The paralysing beauty of a choir of voices? You need to hear that.

Answer 9

In the US, the FCC exists for a reason. Radio is a very public, very limited resource. There is a limited set of frequencies, and any given transmitter or receiver will cover a range of those frequencies over a large distance. Cell phones only allow the large number of simultaneous, private radio users by splitting individual frequencies in different ways:

• Time - each user might be given 2 milliseconds out of every 100 milliseconds, allowing 50 users to use the same frequency
• Frequency - A usual frequency range might be broken up into even narrower frequency bands, requiring all users to be able to both transmit and receive over that narrower range
• Code - everyone transmits over the same frequency at the same time, but encrypts their communication with a code specific to the person they are communicating with. The receiver gets a bunch of noisy signals, but only one is decipherable, and they try to lock in on that one. However, all the other noisy signals require more packet retransmission.

Given a biological basis of radio transmission, it would be easy to build a concept where having a "private conversation" over radio is next to impossible, especially for the less mature individuals.

Code modulation would be akin to high-level martial arts or international spy training. A highly specialized training that allows the few who spend the years honing their art to communicate with each other over the same channels that everyone else is using, but to encode their communication in a way that only they and their intended recipient can understand.

Time (or Pulse) modulation might be reserved for the very young. A child could send a transmission so fast that only their fellow high-brain-plasticity humans could interpret.

Frequency modulation would be the mechanism that the majority of the population would use for private communication. The problem is, each person has a native frequency genetically encoded - a radio thumbprint. Talking to someone privately in this way requires knowing them very well - having many conversations with them over radio. It also requires a certain level of maturity - society would have evolved such that the "public channels" are outside the usual range of personal channels, so that most of the population isn't normally inundated with public chat unless they are mature enough and choose to listen in on the public channels. However, people who are naturally attuned to frequencies near your targets channel would be able to hear your conversation unless they actively tune it out. Since radio is biological, it is almost certain your girlfriend's entire family could hear anything you say over her "private" channel if they wanted to.

So, since sound travels a significantly shorter distance than radio, almost all private conversations are held over local voice communication. Conversations that are meant to be private but are not necessarily sensitive might be held over radio, but probably not with extended family around. The only radio conversations people would be willing to have would be those they wouldn't mind posting on the internet.

Answer 10

Audio is a more intimate form of communication than radio.

Hearing someone's voice through your ears incites emotions that the new radio wave transmission won't. So if you want to have a true heart-to-heart with another person, you talk to them verbally.

Answer 11

Legal privilege.

The issue of privacy has been raised but not in terms of legal process. The law tends to lag behind technology and culture leaving things legal that should long ago have been changed (the law about Scotsmen on Manx beaches for example) and leaving things technically illegal that have in fact been commonplace for decades. So even with a majority of the population able to transmit and receive radio signals at will they probably still don't enjoy the same legal protection as the spoken word, such as the assumption of privacy. Rather all radio conversations are considered broadcasts and remain liable to recording without any notice, cause, or process, and are considered fully admissible in court.

Even if not discussing anything particularly private or at all incriminating/otherwise improper the idea that someone could be listening to and/or recording ones every word is deeply unnerving for the average person so most avoid broadcast conversations where possible.

Answer 12

Comfort

Using your horns a lot makes them warm up, and having warm horns on your head all the time feels gross. So when you don't have to use them, you prefer not to. You could also wrap this into a reason why some people don't "listen" with their horns all the time, thereby giving you a narrative hook as to why someone doesn't "pick up".

Answer 13

Art, humor, and speech impediments.

Ears and mouths can do much more than simply communicate. Onomatopoeia is a good example of this, so is music. Telling jokes that normally incorporate "sound effects" may be difficult in a non-verbal mode of communication. Singing could be impossible.

Someone whose conversation regularly incorporates sounds, music, or their descriptions may be tiresome if you have to regularly switch between verbal and non-verbal communication. It may simply be easier to have the whole conversation verbally.

Alternatively, one or both speakers may have some sort of radio-based "speech impediment", where their regular communication is garbled or interrupted in a minor fashion. In this case, verbal communication may not have that problem.

Answer 14

Many good reasons, given above, but one more that only relies on human nature...

Nervous system hardwiring.

Why is gesticulation such a common phenomenon, when we speak with our voices? English has 'handwringing' to describe showing signs of emotional duress, and dozens of other terms involving the hands that indicate some form of communication.

Sure, absent visual line of sight I can still raise my voice and communicate - but the communication is richer when they can see my facial expression and I can use hand gestures and other body language to add metadata to my speech.

The human mind is a extremely efficient system, and such systems do not 'leave money on the table' as it were. So we have radio communication now? Great, that's another layer not a discrete and exclusive alternative. People will now radio, speak, and gesticulate all simultaneously and without specific training to do so (in fact it would take special training or rigorous practice to get them to stop).

Conscious choice is required to use only a single channel of communications - many of us even still gesticulate while we're on the phone and there is ostensibly zero communicative value. Many of us speak out loud while we text or type, narrating the words we're putting to pixel. Some of you are reading this very text out loud even though there is zero technical requirement to do so.

Speech is a typical part of being human (stressing 'typical' here, before anyone reads this as ableist) thus: so long as the channel is available, the human brain will use it.