We’ve all heard the high school lesson about wave interference — like when sound waves hit an object, bending around it and crashing into each other to create a whole new pattern when they reach the other side. Now researches say that it might be possible to create a “cloak” for an object that would make the sound waves pass and emerge from the other side like they were never disturbed.

Such a cloak is only theoretical at this point, but engineers at Duke University say they’ve come up with a “recipe” for an acoustic material that would make anything within disappear from sound waves, much like that invisibility cloak did for microwaves. Anyone designing a concert hall would love to have that recipe so they could negate the acoustic effect of structural components like beams. And if you could make it big enough, the cloak would even hide a submarine from sonar. Hell, paranoid about bats? This could be your ticket, too. The possibilities are endless!

Duke University Pratt School of Engineering, via Technovelgy