That Annoying Buzzing Sound You Can Only Hear If Your Under 25 -- C/D

I think he's called "Soulja Boy"

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2435893/2/istockphoto_2435893_open_goal.jpg

I want to try one of these out on the Lex for lols. Either eventuality would be funny.

it's called Mosquito - the device that council tried out in places where Feral Youths would loiter (shop entrances...er, that's it).

presumably doesn't work on noise dudes

So, what happened? Did youths start loitering dressed in mosquito nets? (xpost)

yes

Some clever producer incorporating this sound into a record specifically aimed at the under-25s kids-on-bus strawman would be an awesome move.

does it work on people wearing headphones?

Does it work on motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane?

how old are these motherfucking snakes?

Dunno, never seen the movie.

there's a movie?

motherfucking snakes don't have motherfucking ears

there's a plane.

oh it's in 'children of men', isn't it, where dude talks about you losing hearing range or something as u get older.

faced, southall, we can't hear talk talk right anyway.

motherfucking snakes don't have motherfucking ears

-- DG, Wednesday, 13 February 2008 13:51 (57 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

Pretty sure the ones in the movie did, they were more advanced snakes.

made by Predators?

I dunno about that.

What I do know though is...

Snakes On A Plane!

while snakes lack external and middle ear structures (including the tympanum, or ear drum), they do have inner ear structures which have been shown experimentally to receive airborne sound waves.

Thus, like many other animals, snakes have two ways of detecting sounds: earthborne and airborne. The earthborne vibrations are passed through the belly muscles to special receptors along the spine and thus transmitted to the brain. Airborne sounds are transmitted to the lung from the skin receptors to the eighth cranial nerve and inner ear.

Most snakes can hear a person speaking in a normal tone of voice in a quiet room at a distance of about 10 feet (3 m).

FACED.

yeah but it bet they can't hear the buzzing outside a branch of spar tho

You can certainly hear this "mosquito" sound if you are over 25 - I've heard it at Potters Bar railway station and I'm 43.

Stop loitering there then.

the under-25s kids-on-bus strawman

Is this a strawman now? Just because it's been hijacked by Have Your Say doesn't mean it's not real.

You can hear it, but I thought it was really loud and nasty if you're younger? cf the dog whistle on Sgt Pepper - I can hear that, but it's really loud for dogs. We need an under-25er to report in and tell us whether it's as bad as R4 make out.

TS: Mosquito buzzing vs classical music

vs background whine of ilx mods

Wait, it's used for shooing away kids? I just read a small article about this thing last night, but there it said it was a somewhat popular ring-tone with the young'uns.

I'd love to hear what this thing sounds like, but my ears are so crap that I can barely hear police sirens.

god i hate this noise

I'm 20 and I can't hear it.

I'm 40 and not only can I hear it but it's annoying as hell.

where do you hear it?

I just went to their website thinking I'd be too old and deaf. Man, is it annoying.

Fucking A, is THAT it? That could set-off a headache in about seven seconds flat.

i can hear that shit and i have tinnitus

there's probably a difference between what you hear online intently and what you'd hear (without expecting to) in practice tho. maybe.

the idea of playing classical music in places where loitering is a problem was a better (if dearer) approach.

haha for a brief second i thought blueski was proposing hiring string quartets to play outside 7-11s

"Enough with the Vivaldi, already, play some fuckin' Brahms or something!"

I can hear that noise, just. It's nice, sounds like something Pan Sonic would use.

They had the classical music thing at Goole train station for a while, I think. Probably best to avoid Beethoven's 9th if you go down that route.

WTF is this bullshit, I'm 42, have seen Motorhead numerous times, sonic youth, mudhoney etc etc etc and I can hear that as clear as day. It sounds horrible.

The local shopping mall used to blast classical music at the radgies, which was OK, but then they hit on the idea of using midi file arrangements of easy listening hits, which just made everybody miserable.

they should just turn the hoses on teenagers, or make them work in shoe factories, or make them stay at home and watch detergent commercials or something.

radgies!

'safe-tergent' i think you'll find

well, that .wav sure made my cats freak out.

yeah the point with classical is that unlike all these other approaches it sounds good.

I was just in a Walgreens (American chemists chain) and they were playing 'Muskrat Love' and I was trying to imagine how that got programmed.

There's a McDonalds' in downtown Ottawa that BLASTS what sounds like Stravinsky at his most dissonant, passed through an eight-bit filter that makes it sound like Super Mario had a bad acid trip. It's apparently done to keep homeless from sleeping there overnight. I want to record it or something.

Re: the mosquito tone, I think I'll be able to hear it for the rest of my life (considering I can barely handle the whine of most cheap CRT TVs, and I'm 23). High frequencies are teh suck but funny with dogs.

WMan I hear so much about Soulja Boy but I live in this hilarious bubble where I sitll have no idea what/who that is. Someone sum him up in 20 words or less (somewhat unbiasedly plz)?

There's a McDonalds' in downtown Ottawa that BLASTS what sounds like Stravinsky at his most dissonant, passed through an eight-bit filter that makes it sound like Super Mario had a bad acid trip. It's apparently done to keep homeless from sleeping there overnight.

!!!

I KNOW DUDE it's actually kind of straight-up SCARY

that's AWESOME!

it's open 24h and all of the drunk rich univeristy kids end up there at 3am, it's the only place i've ever seen where it's clear that they're taking active steps to make people uncomfortable. super-dissonant music, three beweaponed rent-a-cops walking around staring everyone down, purposely not cleaning tables so that many people don't want to eat there. pure insanity.

Some clever producer incorporating this sound into a record specifically aimed at the under-25s kids-on-bus strawman would be an awesome move.

-- Matt DC, Wednesday, February 13, 2008 8:38 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Link

this happened a few years ago

http://www.bastwood.com/projects/aphex_face/aphex.png

I'm 26, and I can hear it. Some old lady who lives by my nan has one on the outside of her HOUSE. It's a designated old people's street with a warden and stuff, so no kids hang around there anyway.

35 and I can hear it, but goddamn don't these snotnose punks have vibrate?

how is it this thread has gone on this long with no one linking to to the story about British police using sonic weaponry based on this frequency to dispel groups of kids

NOIZE POLIS

JW's picture is what how snakes see whilst on a plane.

i think it's just my computer

That website claims that it's a 17kHz tone, but you don't often get that in an MP3, so perhaps what's left (15kHz with lots of harmonics) is the result of psychoacoustic encoding:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2397/2263748858_ba61f91003_o.jpg

Maybe the original uncompressed file is harder for an old geezer like me to hear, but this is certainly audible (don't know what kind of crap the laptop speakers are adding to the tone though).

My hearing's fucked, I can't hardly hear it at all. (I'm 28 btw)

Hm I cant really hear the wav on the website - on headphones I can *just* hear it, but its so faint it doesnt bother me at all (its like, REALLY faint even in headphones full blast)

Apparently our TV makes this noise when its on blank (like, a DVD's finished playing and the screen's only emitting bluescreen). my bf (who is in his 20s) goes nuts and demands it be turned off. I cannot hear the noise at all.

There's an Autechre song with this tone in it too, and its like I'm having the piss taken out of me: "cant you hear that? lol" when I swear its silence :(

Then again I have bad tinnitus so I hear extreme high pitched sounds, bell like noises, and low-freq humming in my ears/skull bone all the time. So maybe its all just drowned out.

According to the site, "Some people as old as 30 have reported being able to hear the mosquito, but most adults can hear nothing."

I'm 40 years old, have tinnitus, and can hear it loud and clear at low volume. What a scam.

Hrm, I have tinnitus too, but could hear it. I'm not sure what volume my speakers were supposed to be set to, but I could hear it down to a fairly low volume. Hooray for me.
Anyways, I'd rather not hear that ever again srsly k thx.

my hearing seems to tail off arounf 15K so i doubt i'd hear this

I can hear really LOW frequencies easily but not high ones. What causes this? Obv it isnt tinnitus if some answers here are anything to go on.

It sounded v high and hurtful to me. Get that shit away owow

i'm 27, and i can hear it very loud, even sped up 100%

They had the classical music thing at Goole train station for a while, I think. Probably best to avoid Beethoven's 9th if you go down that route.

haha.. they started playing classical at vauxhall tube at rush hour last year. one time it was "ride of the valkyries", no word of a lie.

i don't know if i can hear it. i got nothing through computer speakers. through phones i got a definite 'ping' at the start, then a very quiet pan sonic-type whine. no biggy. other people really hear 'something'.

shakey, yeah, that's kind of the subtext of this thread, it's in the news a lot at the moment.

I can hear really LOW frequencies easily but not high ones. What causes this? Obv it isnt tinnitus if some answers here are anything to go on.

-- Trayce,

Ah, this explains your burgeoning taste for drone music.

27, hearing I'd describe as pretty poor for my age overall (can never hear in noisy pubs, cranking headphones ever louder, very different frequency responses in each ear) and I can hear it ok, though it wasn't too annoying, unlike the sound of the TV on blank as mentioned by Trayce, which drives me crazy, mildly annoys my mother (aged 60) and my father has always sworn does not make a noise. I thought TV sound frequency was scanline refresh frequency, so in the UK 625 scanlines * 25 fps = 15625Hz? It does sound pretty similar to me though.

Probably best to avoid Beethoven's 9th if you go down that route

Ah yes, slooshy a bit of lovely Beethoven before a bit of the starry ultra-violence, bliss and heaven, oh my brothers...

Hahah moley =)

Sunno))) are playing in my head 94/7 ;_;

they started playing classical at vauxhall tube at rush hour last year.

Yeah, what happened to that? They played Hawaii Five-O one morning rush hour.

I can only hear it in my right ear, not my left!

More ringtone options:

http://gizmodo.com/356090/inferno-speaker-blaster-makes-you-vomit

I can hear that, on my 29th birthday. STILL DOWN WITH THE KIDS.

high five

Perhaps they'd be better blasting Mick Jagger's "Let's Work" ...

> it said it was a somewhat popular ring-tone with the young'uns.

"ver kidz" use it as a ringtone so they can tell at school when their 'phone is ringing but the teacher can't.

i can just hear faint background noise in this sample http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/audio/mosquito_sound.mp3
some kids laughing, someone tapping twice.

a quick play with audacity's tone generator tells me my hearing tops off around 14750Hz

"ver kidz" use it as a ringtone so they can tell at school when their 'phone is ringing but the teacher can't.

And they say the kids aint smart thesedays!

Heard the 1st one but not the bbc sample.

Found a freebie tone generator - http://www.world-voices.com/software/nchtone.html - which suggests I can go up to about 15.1khz. And around 14.5 it is quite unpleasant.

"ver kidz" use it as a ringtone so they can tell at school when their 'phone is ringing but the teacher can't.

And they say the kids aint smart thesedays!

but how do they manage to actually answer the call without the teacher noticing?

Tapping the phone in morse code.

They still do play classical music at Vauxhall tube. It's great.

> but how do they manage to actually answer the call without the teacher noticing?

good point, well made. maybe it's a text-alert tone. if such things exist.

yeah that makes more sense. probably swapping insults with their friends in other classes.

what's the punishment for a kid's phone ringing during class?

Kid gets asked "who is it?" and then "Does anyone else in the class want to talk to xxxx?"

So, at least, everyone gets their meds...

Neat tone and all, but where oh where can I hear....
Stravinsky at his most dissonant, passed through an eight-bit filter that makes it sound like Super Mario had a bad acid trip.
???!!!

yes this needs to become the official ringtone of ilxors - that way we can sniff each other out in crowded bars.

If this exists in ringtone form (and lives up to how I think it might sound) I'll break down and buy a cellphone.

Mosquito ringtone to be banned?

http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/02/15/026209.shtml

I was just in a Walgreens (American chemists chain) and they were playing 'Muskrat Love' and I was trying to imagine how that got programmed.

I was in a McDonald's once, and "Alone Again Or" by Love came on over the speakers via whatever weird Muzak-y thing they had going on there. It really did a number on me at the time...

The kids at my library asked me if I could hear it and I couldn't, but I'm not sure if the were just messing with me.

RINGZIETY!