The US military’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWD) is developing a weapon that alters atoms using lasers to create a human voice.

The weapon, called the Laser-Induced Plasma Effect, currently resembles a high-pitched screech, but the Department of Defence (DoD) hopes that it will eventually sound human enough to be used as a deterrent during crowd control.

The device creates noise at a specific point in space, meaning soldiers between the weapon and the target are unaffected, as opposed to a speaker which directs sound with a wider scope.

Military scientists created the sound using a femtosecond laser to fire a burst of focused light for 10 to 15 seconds. This rips the electrons from air molecules and creates a ball of plasma, which is then hit with a second nanolaser tuned to an extremely narrow range of wavelengths.