Watching the runways at New York Fashion Week can be an overwhelming experience for the editors and buyers who will descend on the city in the next few days.

Several dozen models will sashay up and down the stage in just over 10 minutes, leaving the diligent members of the audience practically no time to note which outfits deserve more considered attention when the music stops. This year, Made Fashion Week, one of two major Fashion Week venues, is using a new technology that may make this process a little easier — and give a glimpse at how companies may try to grab the attention of their smartphone-toting customers in the near future.

Made Fashion Week’s mobile app, which will be available for iPhone, iPad and Android, has been designed to listen for specific sound waves that will be played over the speakers during runway shows throughout the week. These sound waves, inaudible to the human ear, are synched to the shows themselves and tell the app which outfit is on display at any time. The app will then automatically pull up a photograph of the outfit — taken by a photographer on the scene — as well as the designer’s name, biography and contact information. Users can share the photographs through various forms of social media and save looks to their phones. The app also works for people watching Webcasts of the shows.

The app aims to be a more orderly version of the frantic note-taking that editors and buyers engage in as they shoot through various shows and presentations within Milk Studios, said Mazdack Rassi, the co-director of Made.

“We can take over your device and, depending on where you are, send you the looks,” he said.

If the technology proves successful this week, it will make the lives of small groups of people more convenient — and liven up fashion Twitter feeds. But Sonic Notify, the company that developed the technology, is setting its sights wider. On its Web site, it has demo videos to show how it might be used. A record company could notice that a viewer is watching a concert and then provide information about the song that is playing. A consumer’s phone could recognize an audio file embedded into a football game and get an offer for a New York Giants ring tone.

The company rolled out the technology at last year’s CMJ Music Marathon. It partnered with Spotify and Turntable.fm to send users of the app playlists compiled by D.J.’s when users entered the rooms where they were playing. People could then vote on whether they liked the songs that were playing.

Another use of the technology is to let companies advertise to potential customers who have come close to their products. Sonic Notify is planning its first such campaign, with Pampers later this year. The audio files can be transmitted by small beacons that cost only a few dollars. Working with the GPS capabilities of a smartphone, apps built on this technology would be able to wake up on their own and send information to a user without her turning the app on manually.

“It’s that ‘Minority Report’ moment, and when it’s contextually relevant, you’re passed an ad about that,” said Alexander Morgan Bell, who developed the technology.

This kind of location-aware advertising has many marketers licking their chops, and it is largely responsible for the money circling around companies like FourSquare that encourage users to share their locations. It certainly has the potential to be an efficient way to put ads in front of faces. Whether people will like the idea of allowing their phones to keep a digital ear out for deals is another question altogether.