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From Pragmata:





Now imagine a less cute 40K Tech-Priest doing it or sounding like a modem. The spoken form would be hideously slow in comparison and probably only used by menials or Guardsmen trying to please their equipment's machine spirits.

From memory, the lore suggests spoken binharic is modem-screech or white noise like. This is entertainingly cute.

This is correct. The binharic "spoken" by admech sounds more like a glitching speaker and is presumably transmitting the two possible tones in an orders of magnitude more rapid succession than having to spell out each zero and one as individual words.

As the comments say, this Pragmata scene shows "F, Q" being said in binary. The admech are able to convey full complex sentences and concepts in a similarly short span of time.

On the dial up thing? Remember that was inherently limited by processor speed and how much info you could squidge down a telephone wire.

Remove those speed constraints more or less entirely, rendering it high bandwidth WiFi? And to those uninitiated I expect it would just sound like white noise. But for those able? It’s probably just rapid speech patterns. Like a cattle auctioneer.

In terms of non-Adepts? Binharic Cant is a deliberately secret language. Any prayers spoken to a machine spirit would be in high or low gothic, rather than a standard human voice box approximation of a modem.

Dial up modem data had massive limitations due to the 8kHz (ie only 4kHz of frequencies, per nyquist) telephone line bandwidth. That's already 4,000 vibrations per second. If you increase the bandwidth to even something like 48kHz (which yields a 24kHz bandwidth), you can fit significantly higher cycling of binary data.. thats 24,000 vibrations per second, which is 6 times more than in a telephone dialup modem. That should be enough for practically any kind of lenght of a message in ASCII to be sent in a very short amount of time

Lets not go to sillyness like wifi bandwidth. Not even bats are going to be hearing anything in those frequencies.. Those wavelenghts are way past the audible and even visible spectrum..

Wifi bandwidth has other nifty use cases though, such as imaging:




Even modern malware uses smartphone mics and speakers to spread itself over the air, and uses such high frequency sounds for the data transmission that you cant even hear it. So basically the whole binharic thing is just a "Hollywood" gimmick, if admech really wanted, their binharic communication would be inaudible to unaugmented humans. I suppose one way to interpret it could be that indeed, its just for show, and the real data is sent using ultrasonics, safe from prying biological ears (unless you're a tyranid organism with highly complex aural sensory capabilities, and even then, good luck decoding that stuff)

Binarhic would definitely sound like static or white noise, particularly if a lot of info is being transmitted. Its probably done by transmitting along all available frequencies, both normal sound waves as well as electromagnetic, which is why even unaugmented people can hear "something" most of the time.

I expect that what frequencies are used is also subject to the situation. A group of techpriests might keep certain "channels" clear for specific messages, like how Radio frequencies are used. Personal messages between X and Y individual are on a certain band, those between X and Z are on another, etc... If they want to secretly talk to someone without alerting unaugmented people they can use frequencies they can't hear.

You could get into some crazy encryption and decryption combinations as well as information density by using multiple bandwidths across both sound and the electromagnetic spectrums. Petabytes of download/upload in mere seconds.