Listen carefully to this mp3. Do you hear anything? If so, try stepping five feet or so away from your speakers. Do you still hear it? If so, you're in good shape for dealing with clandestine cell phone ringtones, or super high-frequency cell phone rings that juvenile delinquents (i.e., your students) may be using to bamboozle you. You know that bs in your syllabus about turning your cell phone off? Heh heh...You see, only young people are supposed to be able to hear the tone. Obsolete human beings who haven't "gone green" in the sense of soylent green--well, you guys can't. Awesome, eh? And, yes, I can hear it very plainly, even from a mile away. Because I take my vitamins and am really a very sensitive person.
Can you hear this sound?
Submitted by platypus matt on June 13, 2006 - 00:32.
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funny thing
I turned up my speakers so I could hear. Wouldn't say I could hear it a mile away. But the funny thing is my dog came running in the room immediately once I started playing it :)
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Charlie | cyberdash
We don't all hear only with our ears
The NYT article was pathetic. Many people who hear sounds in the range 15KHz - 30KHz do so through large bones in their heads, the maxilla, I believe. I do not believe that ability declines the way that hearing through nornmal channels does. The old Sonic alarms were just as annoying as these tones. The article never mentioned how humand hear high-pitched tones.
-- rdr
barely heard it
Had to crank my speakers to do so. Too many Fog Hat, Rolling Stones, Journey type concerts in the 1970's, too many Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Fartz, X type shows in the 1980s and too many Seattle Grunge shows in the 1990s and Beck in the new millenium, never mind the work I did in dance clubs "greeting" the clientele. I already have mild tinninutus or however you spell the fancy-pants version of ringing in my ears.
I heard a story on NPR about this, about how the guy in England developed an emitter to put out this frequency in odd ways in shops where rowdy kids hung out. Drove the kids batty so they didn't hang around wreaking havoc. But the smart ones among them have turned it against us old farts. Danged whipper snappers!
bradley || bleckblog.org
Black Women Have Better Hearing
Looks like your ability to hear this sound might be racially and sexually biased...Damn you, Weird Al, I want my hearing back! (Yeah, I, er, cranked Weird Al).
eh?
Now _this_ is weird. This sounds just like the whine I always heard when I turned on the old-fashioned TV in my parents' home, during the 4-5 minutes before it warmed up. I'd hear this in a classroom--unless it was overcome by a badly calibrated CRT monitor.
I think that's it
I think that's it then -- that's what it sounds like to me, at least. This story was on the NYT most e-mailed articles for quite some time.
It made my day to know that I could hear it; like some other posters, I assumed that I would have lost that hearing range years ago.
Well-Read Article
I must say that I'm happy with how many people have read this one. 826 as of Sunday afternoon! Looks like it's jumped up high in the Google searches.