Can you hear this?

[K.B.]

For classrooms where cellphone use is forbidden, students have found a ring tone that many adults cannot hear.

NYT article: "A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears"

• "...the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.
  
  "It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent... to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.

link to mp3 here

So far I've only tried to hear this on my PCs speakers, so the high end on them is probably not high enough anyway. If I turn it right up I do start to hear something nasty, but that's distortion from system overload. But it proves there's something there to begin with. It's at 17KHz. So can anyone here hear this? If you can you're either very young or very lucky.

Let's do a survey: If you can, what's your age? (Be honest )

[spkguitar]

Yes. 38.

[Naagzh]

It's probably your speakers. On my not-so-awesome monitors, I heard it easily, and I'm a 29-year-old working drummer.

I ran a quick test myself, and I can only detect a sine wave up to 16kHz with headphones, and up to 18kHz for square, triangle, and saw waves.

I think the tone is around 14.5kHz, not 17kHz.

Seriously, though, if you can't hear it at all, you're long overdue for a visit to a hearing specialist.

[K.B.]

There's a lot of other noise here to mask it at my PC, and this is budget Yamaha monitoring (but v good for the price! ). I must have a proper listen on decent speakers later.

You're right though - this isn't at 17K at all. A closer look tells me the bulk is spread between 14.85 and 15.2, with some stuff at -80dB between 14 and 16KHz. So most folk should hear something. Nothing here above 16KHz though. Has someone screwed up? I assumed this was the original ringtone featured in the article...

Anyone here got a deliquent kid with access to that tone and can paste a link here???



The whole thing begs several other questions for me:

- Can a mobile phone reproduce 17KHz anyway? I guess the speaker cone is small enough... And does MP3 support that?

- Isn't it ironic that the very people that can really hear the difference between good and not-so-good sound reproduction are migrating in droves to low res MP3s?

- If your target audience for music is kids (be realistic now) maybe you should have a 'sniffer kid' in on your mixes to listen out for nasties you quite simply might not be able to hear!

- Who's going to be the first to make a small fortune out of marketing 'musical' ultrasonic ring tones for kids. Come on now - who's got the savvy here? It's wide open, but you'll have to be quick...

[lemix]

Karel,

- Can a mobile phone reproduce 17KHz anyway? I guess the speaker cone is small enough... And does MP3 support that?
- Isn't it ironic that the very people that can really hear the difference between good and not-so-good sound reproduction are migrating in droves to low res MP3s?

Actually...first time in a long while..these points do make sense
Did you change diet ?
Oh..I didn't hear a thing..

bob

[ChaplainPC]

I hear it. Now seeing it is another thing! I just had a corneal transplant. I am half a century.

[Mozepy]

Can hear it (31) and definitely not 17k. I can barely hear 17k.

[K.B.]

Corneal transplants? You really do have my total sympathy! I had a scare recently where my doc said I may have a detached retina, and there was nothing I could find on the internet that night to cheer me up about it. Fortunately, he was wrong. Did it turn out ok for you? Do you have to sleep face down in a special contraption?

A few years back I used to get really irritated by often hearing the high pitched noises made by some large CRT TVs - no-one else could hear them though and they thought I was nuts. Then I stopped hearing it, and assumed the TVs were being better manufactured, but maybe nothing's actually changed...

Similarly I used to regularly see fluorescent lights flickering out of the corner of my eye. Again, as my perception of that disappeared (at around 19) I assumed they started making them better...

So how many babies do you think there are who just have to put up with high pitched noises from TV sets and flickering discharge lights that us adults are blithely unaware of? There's a whole world of irritating noise there that's invisible and inaudible to us...

Cats and dogs see and hear this stuff too don't they?

I found this web page on the subject of the 'teenager repellent'. After reading the main body of text (if you're interested ) scroll down to bboy's comments.

[RobMacki]

I hear it (46)
As I play it I see Captain James T Kirk holding his ears as he is being tortured.

What I thought was interesting was to import the file and analize it.
One peak -6db at 14492hz.
If you drop the pitch by one cent there is an audible "ring"
I wonder if we are all hearing the same sound though.
Some of us may be hearing the fundamental others overtones or sidebands

[K.B.]

Yes, I was wondering that. As I mentioned above there's stuff there at 14K so if you turn your speakers up you should hear it (and drive the cat nuts! )

Reminds me of the whole thing about how some color blind people aren't aware of anything lacking - they assume that what they see is what everybody else sees.

You know, I can remember what 20k (or thereabouts) sounded like, even though I can't hear that high any more.


This thread has some deep philosophical overtones...