An Index: On mining the ear for the nearly-but-not-quite-there

A short story by JG Ballard, first published in 1960 that tells of a world where sound is an ‘out of place’ material waste and must be disposed off. A world where all forms of audible music have been rendered obsolete and have given way to the atmospherically charged, inaudible field of ultrasonic music.  

Since the introduction a few years earlier of ultrasonic music, the human voice indeed, audible music of any type—had gone completely out of fashion. Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music. 

The first casualty in this change-over was the human voice. This alone of all instruments could not be re-scored, because its sounds were produced by non- mechanical means which the neurophonic engineer could never hope, or bother, to duplicate. 

The earliest ultrasonic recordings had met with resistance, even ridicule. Radio programmes consisting of nothing but silence interrupted at halfhour intervals by commercial breaks seemed absurd. But gradually the public discovered that the silence was golden, that after leaving the radio switched to an ultrasonic channel for an hour or so a pleasant atmosphere of rhythm and melody seemed to generate itself spontaneously around them. When an announcer suddenly stated that an ultrasonic version of Mozart‘s Jupiter Symphony or Tchaikovsky‘s Pathetique had just been played the listener identified the real source. 

A second advantage of ultrasonic music was that its frequencies were so high they left no resonating residues in solid structures, and consequently there was no need to call in the sound-sweep. After an audible performance of most symphonic music, walls and furniture throbbed for days with disintegrating residues that made the air seem leaden and tumid, an entire room virtually uninhabitable. 

An immediate result was the swift collapse of all but a few symphony orchestras and opera companies. Concert halls and opera houses closed overnight. In the age of noise the tranquillizing balms of silence began to be rediscovered.

Against the backdrop of this world is an ex-opera singer who has run out of work, because of this paradigm shift in ways of listening, and Mangon, the sound sweep, who is unable to speak, but thanks to his exceptional hearing ability, is a professional of sonic waste disposal. He cleans the unwanted environmental sonic residues with the Sonovac, a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks out the leftover resonances from architectural spaces, nooks and crannies, to ensure complete silence, uninterrupted by the auditory vibrations from a long forgotten past. 

Understanding her, Mangon switched on the Sonovac, and first concentrated on sweeping the walls and sealing clean, draining away the heavy, depressing underlayer of traffic noises.

Carefully, he ran the long snout of the Sonovac over the ancient grandfather clock in Gioconda’s makeshift home, her antique projector that flickered bygone stars against the stage wall. He swept methodically, moving the sonovac‘s nozzle in long strokes, drawing out the dead residues of sound that had accumulated during the day. 

By the time he finished the air was clear again, the atmosphere lightened, its overtones of fatigue and irritation dissipated. Gradually Madame Gioconda recovered. Sitting up weakly, she smiled wanly at Mangon. 

Thank you, Mangon. 

Mangon grinned back encouragingly, slipped the kettle on to the stove for Russian tea, and reached for his pen to write on his arm pad.

Back soon, it read. In the alley, Mangon clipped the Sonovac to the sound truck. It drained in a few seconds.

(Video killed the radio star playing in the background) 

A device known as the Mosquito has offered police and business people an effective way to disperse groups of young people. It emits a high-pitched sound, around 17.5 to 18.5 kHz, that is only audible to those under the age of 25.

But if like us, and a larger portion of the general public, you live or operate a business in regular neighbourhoods, you’re more likely to have experienced the misery and stress that repeated antisocial behaviour can cause. Well, worry no more. The Mosquito device is the most effective way to disperse such groups and encourage them from returning to their favourite hangout.

The device is 100% legal to own and use, requires no licences or permissions, and will disperse such groups in a matter of minutes, whether from outside a business or domestic premises, without fuss or harm to anyone. The Mosquito doesn’t work by being loud and painful, but rather by being amazingly annoying at a frequency that the vast majority of people over 25 can no longer hear. If you’re ready to dramatically change your life, then the Mosquito is the solution that will do that for you. All we ask is that you use the device responsibly. 

The effectiveness and popularity of the product led the Wall Street Journal to list it as a hot dividend stock. Some suggest, however, that the Mosquito should be banned. They argue that the Mosquito helps perpetrate unfair age discrimination. 

As reported by TimesOnline.com, Sir Albert Ainslie Green, the Children’s Commissioner for England, has set up a campaign called Buzz Off © that is calling for the Mosquito to be banned on grounds that it infringes the rights of young people. He argued that the Mosquito promoted fear and hatred of young people and caused greater dissension between the young and the old. Scottish Children’s Commissioner Kathleen Marshall and other civil liberties organisations also joined the Buzz Off campaign. 

The inventor of the product, Howard Stapleton, has chimed in on the debate as well. He said that he hopes government entities will regulate use of the product so that it is only used for legitimate crime prevention purposes rather than as a means to shoo away unwanted teens.

Suffer no more and reclaim your right to enjoy your property in peace with Mosquito. Select a kit below now. 

* All humans suffer from a loss of hearing, most notably occurring around the age of 65. However, as early as 20 years of age, nearly every human can no longer hear the 18 to 20 kHz range due to a natural loss of hearing known as presbycusis. Teens hearing sounds in this range find them annoying and generally disperse within 8 to 10 minutes. Thus, the Mosquito can target a teenage audience and cause them to leave an area rather quickly. 

(news piece)

Researchers from China’s Zhejiang University just found a way to attack popular voice assistants like Siri and Alexa by sending commands in ultrasonic frequencies. That may sound crazy, but it is a simple technique hackers already use and the researchers just published a paper on it called Dolphin Attack.

They even made a video of it so we can watch and freak out. Those frequencies cannot be heard by humans, but not so for the microphones in your smart devices as you can hear by the faint flip of Siri responding to its command right here. The researchers tested phrases, call 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0, open dolphinattack.com and open the back door for smart locks and you’ll see from this chart the nefarious commands worked on 16 devices and 7 systems total from Samsung phones to Alexa devices and iPads.

All those attacks would leave owners vulnerable to data or real life attacks. It was even able to change the navigation on an Audi Q3. I need to stress this hack only worked to a range of about 6 feet, but if you’re in a public place with your phone unlocked and Siri or Google Assistant enabled, a nearby attacker could probably use it.

For now the researchers recommend device makers either modify microphones so that they do not accept signals above 20 kHz or simply cancel any voice commands at inaudible frequencies. 

One last hacking tidbit. You might have seen our story about targeted US and European power grids because Symantec just reported that a group called Dragonfly is currently targeting those sectors with the intention of learning how those facilities operate.

They’ve even taken screenshots of operating panels according to WIRED. We’ll be back tomorrow with more Engadget Today. 

What is not lost here are the uncanny hyperlinkages to the fourth entry in the list.

Put yourself in a shopping mall.

What do you hear? Maybe the sound of clothes hangers sliding across a rack or a cash register ringing up a purchase. Maybe it’s rustling shopping bags. What you probably don’t hear is this.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

An ultrasonic beacon is an inaudible sound with encoded data that can be used by a listening device to receive information on just about anything. Beacons can be used, for example, inside a shop to highlight a particular promotion or in a museum for guided tours where the ultrasonic beacons can encode the location. Or they can be used to track people consumers. 

There are several companies using this technology, including Silverpush, an Indian firm whose code is in a number of mobile apps. 

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(extract from Twenty Thousand hertz)

A recent Google machine learning project called Tone Transfer lets you transform everyday sounds into musical instruments. Record and upload audio directly into the browser and hear our machine learning models re-render it into saxophones, flutes, and more, it says.

So if all goes well, the tunes in your head, so far unheard by the outside, could be synthesised as well. Sound into sound, soundlessly. Inner voice into music, voicelessly.

Meanwhile, to get your devices to speak to each other, direct inter-device communication via sound has been introduced in the form of Chirp, ToneTag, and other such applications. Chirp’s technology takes data and encodes it into a unique audio stream, before sending it from one device to another. This data over sound technology seems to have found enthusiastic takers in financial tech companies, as one of the primary applications for it emerges in the digital payment space, enabling one to pay through sound waves without the internet.

Chirp is also used for monitoring some of the devices inside one of UK’s nuclear power plants, where electromagnetic signals could interfere and are as such prohibited. 

The 6^th in the list is a short story by Octavia Butler, Speech Sounds 

Published in 1983, it tells the tale of a mysterious pandemic that leaves in its wake, a world where most survivors have been deprived of their ability to read or write, while others lose the ability to speak. With a limited ability to communicate, people identify themselves by carrying objects or symbols as a substitute for names. As an aftermath, uncontrollable feelings of resentment, envy, frustration and fury are at large amongst the populations, over their own impairments and the residual abilities in others.

The tenth instance is encountered in the film from 2011, Perfect Sense, by David McKenzie, about an epidemiologist and a chef who fall in love against the panic-stricken backdrop of a viral outbreak. As the pandemic spreads across the world, it affects the sensory perceptions of humankind, beginning with the loss of the sense of smell, then taste, sight, sound, touch and so on, each loss accompanied by a range of emotional registers and intensified compulsions or urges.

The loss of speech and sound is premeditated by an outbreak of extreme rage. As people adapt and move through the limitations of their collapsing senses, various coping mechanisms, alternatives and responses are seen to emerge, from a musician who begins to perform scents on a violin, to a restaurant serving textures, colours and temperatures. 

of a plant that screams when stressed 

Do you hear it? Can you hear the screaming agony? Well, of course not.

It’s coming from the grass. But according to researchers at Tel Aviv University, the grass is screaming, in a matter of speaking. And the plants nearby, maybe even some animals and insects, can probably hear it.

A new study reveals that some plants emit ultrasonic clicks inaudible to the human ear when under life-threatening stress. And authors say that these findings can totally alter the way we think about the plant kingdom, which has been considered nearly silent until now. In fact, the results suggest that we can now learn a lot about the plant’s condition by its sound, like whether or not it needs water, or is otherwise stressed for some reason.

Any similarities to the screaming mandrake are purely coincidental 

Choosing tobacco and tomatoes to study, the researchers allege that not only do the stressed plants emit more sound, they emit particular sounds based on the specific threats, meaning that interpreting these sounds can lead to better maintenance of plant health. 

“We don’t know the mechanism of response in the plants yet. We have recently shown that plants’ response to pollinator sounds involves their flowers, but we expect that receptors to ultrasound, if such exist, would be in the vegetative parts,” Prof. Hadany says in an email to The Hindu.

The ultrasound emitted is in the range 20-100 kHz and can be detected from a distance of 3-5 metres. The team from the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at Tel-Aviv University which carried out the research speculates that if stressed plants can emit ultrasound, then neighbouring plants should be equipped to hear these distress sounds too.

On one hand, is the efforts to audibilize the ultrasonic ‘distress screams’ attributed to plants. On the other, a complete disavowal of the audible spectrum of screams. 

The disparities and contradictions that thrive in the catalogue of (in)audibles are eventually only a reflection of the limits set up by the military-industrial-entertainment complexes of the world. 

In the 1972 BBC production of the television play, The Stone Tape, written by Nigel Neill, humans become amplifiers for frequencies that are permanently caught in the stone walls of a derelict mansion. This idea of a residual haunting was explored in the narrative and became known as the stone tape theory. The theory claims that the psychological lives of people that carry the traces and impressions of events are in fact spectrally projected onto surfaces and objects which are then replayed under certain conditions.

Prior to this, interestingly, Nigel had written a radio play about a haunted telephone line called You Must Listen. Borrowing from the idea of hauntings as recordings played through humans as tape heads, sonologists have been looking at noise-absorbent materials with suspicion and are resorting to feedback and leakages within deep network listening as a way of arresting sonic time, cancelled synchronicities, and repressed rhythms of a long-forgotten futility. 

Headlines of a report in DNA India in 2019, June.

Special forces will use sound to disperse stone pelters. Centre to replace pellet guns with deafening sound cannons. 

The recording gives us the first tangible sense of what it was like for these American government workers in Havana who were hearing these unexplained sounds in their residences and later developed physical symptoms.

Americans who heard these sounds in Havana have described slightly different sounds and even in some of the recordings that the AP has reviewed, there are slight variations. However, this high-pitched cricket sound seems to appear in all of them. 

The report opens with, The Ministry of Home Affairs has approved the use of sound cannon, a device that can emit pain-inducing sound waves on rampaging mobs in the valley. The move follows criticism of pellet guns that have left several people with eye injuries. Known as Long Range Acoustic Device, LRAD, the sonic weapon was first used in Pittsburgh, U.S. to control an agitated crowd during a G20 summit in 2019. 

The report states, The U.S. Embassy in Havana has played these recordings for Americans who are working there so they know what to listen to. These recordings have also been reviewed by people who heard the sounds firsthand in Cuba and they confirm that the recordings are generally consistent with what they heard. 

Rewinding back to 2004 in Iraq, when perhaps for the first time, the Pentagon deployed the sound weapon known as LRAD or Long Range Acoustic Device. This device has several settings and can be used to give instructions at a long distance or even set to create pulses up to 149 decibels.

As a reference, hearing a jet engine 100 feet away registers 140 decibels. 

We still don’t know what is causing the sound and the recordings don’t appear to have significantly furthered the investigation. Even with the recordings being analysed, the U.S. government still says it has been unable to determine what is causing the sound.

On 23rd August 2011, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli forces unleashed a new, less-than-lethal weapon on stone-throwers at a violent checkpoint demonstration. 

The SCREAM is a vehicle-mounted sonic blaster that shoots repeated pulses of sound at targets, leaving them dizzy and nauseous. Palestinians liken the sound to an earthquake or a huge bomb.

They describe the effect as being hit by a wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing nosebleeds and leaving you shaking inside. 

You won’t be hearing it, but of course it is going into your system. It’s like an acoustic hammer which is hitting you.

You are just not able to hear it because its frequency is much higher. So there were some concerns to it, and if it is really, really high, it could create some, you know, what we call a bio effect. 

It’s possible that what we’re hearing on the recording is actually only part of the picture. Traditional recording devices are only able to pick up certain types of frequencies, such as the ones that the human ear can hear. It’s possible there are additional frequencies, possibly those too low or too high to be picked up, that are also happening when these attacks occur. 

And then more recently, Was a sonic weapon used against protesters in Serbia?

is Calmer, 

: a small wearable device worn in the ear to experience better sound, 

as the promotion claims.

From the product description page, the device reduces stress by removing distortion that would usually trigger the human fight-or-flight response. While this response was a vital part of our evolution to alert us to the slightest sound or threat, in today’s modern world where we no longer need to be alert to the snap of a twig, this added resonance is loading us with unnecessary stress. 

Hi, my name is Davis Roberts.

I’d like to introduce you to Calmer (sounds like Karma). Over the last 10 years, I’ve been developing loudspeakers, headphones, earphones, and even ear protectors, all with the sole purpose of improving the way we hear sound. But more recently, I’ve discovered there’s a barrier in my way, and it’s actually in our own ears.

You see, our ears have evolved into this shape, which is the concha just behind the tragus and an ear canal, and it resonates like a bell, and it does that to alert us to risk in the wild. In fact, it’s adding over 20 dB of resonance, which is in fact distortion. What that means is we can’t enjoy music properly.

It becomes a real problem when we listen to different headphones or listen to loudspeakers at gigs. We all have an opinion on what the sound sounds like, whether it’s good or bad, because of that added distortion. So what I’ve developed is a very simple technology made of silicon that just pops in your ear, and it alters the shape of your ear canal and the concha, so that you can hear higher-definition sound.

What we’ve also discovered is because we’re lowering distortion, you can wear these during the day. You can wear them out in a busy city or on public transport, and it drastically reduces your stress, so you can’t be triggered by the sounds that were distorted anymore. So Calmer is a really exciting product, and we hope you enjoy it.

Experience better sound. Wear whilst listening to music for a clearer sound, increased definition and an upgraded listening experience, says the ad…

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2 01969401049973

in the 2019 film, The Sound of Silence by Michael Tybursky. 

Honestly, I haven’t slept this well in months. Thank you for whatever you did to my blender.

The house tuner visits people’s homes to detect the inaudible, discordant resonances that are the cause of anxiety for the residents. 

Hello, you’ve reached the answering machine of Peter Lucian. If I’ve given you my number, you’ve dialled it correctly. Describe your situation. If I’ve given you my number, please describe your situation and leave a telephone number.

The audio-acoustic artefact could be from an unbecoming frequency coming from the refrigerator that could be interfering with someone’s sleep, or the way the floorboards squeak, or the toaster. It’s almost always the toaster. 

Hey, Peter, this is Brian Marston down in Tribeca.

Listen, you know I was a little sceptical at first, but I honestly haven’t slept this well in months. Thank you for whatever you did to my blender. 

Hi, I got your number from my friend Alex. I’m looking to set up an appointment for Alex. He and his girlfriend are getting along great right now. 

The radiator is contributing to your anxiety 

Can you hear the noise no, right?

It’s a  B flat.

What is? 

Your —

His own residence in the heart of the city is a bunker, like the one in Kafka’s burrow.

Perfectly secure from the outside, insulated from the din and clamour of the city. But then one day, there is a leak. 

Walt Disney and his artists were once made seriously ill when a sound effect, intended for a short cartoon scene, was slowed down several times on a tape machine and amplified through a theater sound system. The original sound source was a soldering iron, whose buzzing 60 cycle tone was lowered five times to 12 cycles. This tone produced a lingering nausea in the crew which lasted for days.

Sometime before this, the central research theme of Vladimir Gavreau, a French scientist born in Russia, was the development of remote-controlled automatons and robotic devices for use in battlefields and industrial fields. To this end, he assembled a group of scientists in 1957.

Housed in a large concrete building, the entire group periodically experienced a disconcerting nausea which flooded the research facility. Day after day, for weeks at a time, the symptoms plagued the researchers. The source was finally traced by building engineers to an improperly installed motor-driven ventilator.

It was found that the loosely poised low-speed motor poised in its cavernous duct of several stories was developing nauseating vibrations. It became obvious that the slow-vibrating motor was activating an infrasonic resonant mode in the large concrete duct. Gavril and his research team now carefully investigated the effects of their infrasonic organ at various intensity levels and pitches.

Gavril’s experiments with the infrasonic whistle were extrapolated by William Burroughs, who described the possibly fictional device as follows. 

In developing a military weapon, scientists intend to revert to a policeman’s whistle form, perhaps as big as 18 feet across, mount it on a truck and blow it with a fan turned by a small aeroplane engine. This weapon, they say, will give forth an all-destroying 10,000 acoustic watts.

It could kill a man five miles away. There is one snag. At present, the machine is as dangerous to its operators as it is to its enemy.

The team is working on a way to focus it. Various systems of baffles have been tried, but the most promising method appears to be propagation of a different and complementary sound, a wavelength backward from the machine. This changes the frequency of air wavelength moving in that direction, thus protecting anyone to the rear.

There is, of course, a much simpler means of protection. Turn the machine on from a safe distance. This summary of Professor Vladimir Gavreau’s experiments with infrasound is based on the Sunday Times article. A much more comprehensive article has appeared in an American periodical, The National Enquirer, Vol. 42, No. 27, March 10, 1968.

Professor Gavril’s discovery has been patented, and anybody can obtain the plans and full description from the French Patent Office upon payment of 2 francs. 

Not much amplitude is required for infrasound to produce physiological malady. Several researchers accidentally did themselves great harm when, by deliberate intent or accident, they succeeded in generating infrasonic vibrations. 

In one historic instance, Samuel Clemens, Tesla’s close friend, refused to descend from the vibrating platform. Tesla was sorry he had allowed him to mount it. After repeated warnings, Tesla’s concern was drowned out by both the vibrating machine and Clemens’ jubilant exaltations and praises. Several more seconds and Clemens nearly soiled his white suit, the effects of infrasound being “duly recorded”.

is Steve Walker’s science fiction satire, The 21st Century Blues. 

First published in 1995, it imagines a world threatened by accumulated sound.

The novel frames the looming catastrophe by the aquatic metaphor of a global sound pool, which is on the verge of overflowing with disastrous consequences. An excerpt. 

Theory was […] that all the noise in the history of the world, every bang, bark, guitar twang and boisterous yell had gathered somewhere. Frinton-upon-Sea, I suggested, when I first heard the theory. But I think it was supposed to be in some dimension of its own, a pool they called it. This pool, whatever it was, was getting full and if we all weren’t quiet, then it would overflow like a left-running bath, and the world would be drenched in its own history of sound, enough to crack to bits, the way a singer cracks a glass.  

As a reaction to this problem, in the novel, the so-called Noise Abatement Society, which gradually becomes the most powerful political organisation on the planet, pursues its goal of reducing world sound levels.

They silenced the whirr of every single industrial machine. Babies slept in force fields, which turned their cries into a fly’s buzz. Music disappeared overnight. Backed by the population’s majority, they enforced new laws, handing out noise tickets to offenders, and armed their executive force with guns equipped with thick silencers, with which they murdered rowdy drunks. 

The Noise Abatement Society also implants characters with so-called noise inhibitors, technical devices which automatically explode when the individual who carries it produces a sound that exceeds a certain decibel level. 

is the Musica Universalis, also called Music of the Spheres or Harmony of the Spheres.

Pythagoras conceived that the distances between the planets would have the same ratios as produced harmonious sounds in a plucked string. To the Pythagoreans, the solar system consisted of ten spheres, revolving in circles about a central fire, each sphere giving off a sound the way a projectile makes a sound as it swishes through the air. The closest spheres gave lower tones while the farther moved faster and gave higher pitched sounds.

All combined into a beautiful harmony, the Music of the Spheres, or Musica Universalis. 

This idea was picked up by Plato, who in his Republic says of the cosmos; 

“. . . Upon each of its circles stood a siren who was carried round with its movements, uttering the concords of a single scale,” 

Kepler, 20 centuries later, wrote in his Harmonice Munde (1619) that he wishes “to erect the magnificent edifice of the harmonic system of the musical scale . . . as God, the Creator Himself, has expressed it in harmonizing the heavenly motions.”

And later, “I grant you that no sounds are given forth, but I affirm . . . that the movements of the planets are modulated according to harmonic proportions.

<from wikipedia>

While Kepler did believe that the harmony of the worlds was inaudible, he related the motions of the planets to musical concepts in book four of Harmonices. He makes an analogy between comparing the extreme speeds of one planet and the extreme speeds of multiple planets with the difference between monophonic and polyphonic music.

He was certain of the link between musical harmonies and the harmonies of the heavens and believed that “man, the imitator of the Creator,” had emulated the polyphony of the heavens so as to enjoy “the continuous duration of the time of the world in a fraction of an hour.”

is a short story by Algernon Blackwood, The Human Chord, which features a scholarly clergyman who aspires to reach the higher realms of spirituality through finding the sound that’ll unlock access to those previously unattainable dimensions.

The story begins with ‘to those who hear’…

It involves taking the different types of acuteness of any one sense, and the results, to the level of the fantastic.’ 

~from The Order of Sounds, A Sonorous Archipelago by François Bonnet 

This is what all the chronicles, all the regional explorations of the indefatigable otographer, on the road with his journals and logbooks, work toward. 

[…]

For ‘to leave a trace’, as the otographer tells us. to be a trace, is already for a sound to be ‘somewhat more than a sound’.