Sweet Vibrations

In yet another example of the way technological advancements are creeping into everyday life, a Silicon Valley company has added computer chips to lollipops and produced a unique method for listening to music.

Sound Bites are actually fancy lollipop handles with buttons that play music. When a user sucks on a lollipop and presses the buttons, the reward is a stereo music sensation completely inside one’s head.

“The best part is watching people use it for the first time,” said David Capper, president of Campbell, Calif.-based Sound Bites and a six-year veteran of toy giant Mattel.

Instead of sending sound waves through the air, Sound Bites transmit music from a chip inside the handle, through the lollipop stick, into the candy and to the teeth. From there, the vibrations travel through the lower jaw and other facial bones directly to the cochlea in the inner ear, where they are converted into sounds.

Andrew Filo, an aerospace engineer who co-invented Sound Bites with Capper, got the idea after learning that the nearly deaf Thomas Edison used a bite bar to hear sounds from his phonograph in his inner ear.

“The wave travels with higher fidelity through the teeth and jaw than it does through your ear” because sound waves propagate better through solid materials than through the air, Filo said.

Sound Bites went on sale in a handful of select markets in June and quickly became a top-selling item in the toy candy segment, Capper said. The $9.99-lollipops will go on sale in Los Angeles and nationwide today in Toys R Us, Target, FAO Schwartz and other stores, he said.