Company Shows Gadget to Turn Off Commercials

A machine to shut off radio commercials was demonstrated recently before the Acoustical Society of America meeting at the University.

R. Clark Jones, Polaroid Corporation physicist, said his machine, a small four-tube device similar in appearance to the inside of a midget radio, automatically silences a radio during commercial announcements. It turns the set on again when music returns.

It has one falling. The patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan--composed of both speech and music--leave it undecided. "But when the words are subordinate to the music as they are in opera," according to Jones, "the device will not interrupt the singing."

A Polaroid spokesman explained the device this way:

"It works because of a fundamental difference between music and speech. It takes advantage of the fact that speech is full of extremely short 'silences' or pauses, like the usually unnoticed but perceptible pause between the 'S' and "T" in the word 'Stay.' These pauses occur much me frequently in speech, and when they occur, they are much more abrupt then in music.

Counts the Pauses

"In effect, Jones' device listens for the pauses, measures their abruptness, remembers how many pauses there have been during the preceding few seconds and makes its 'decisions' accordingly."

When connected to a radio the device silences it after one or two syllables of speech and keeps it silent until about one second after the voice stops, the Polaroid official said.

Jones suggested his automatic speech music discriminator would be no threat to radio advertising "Since anyone who would pay the $15 or $20 that the device would cost would do so only if he strongly disliked radio commercials and anyone who dislikes radio commercials that much can scarcely be considered a profitable part of the radio audience."

Polaroid has reached no decision about manufacture of the device for public sale.