Tag Archives | Sounds

Computers Can Be Hacked Using High-Pitched Sound That You Can’t Hear

By Matt Staggs on December 18, 2013 in News 3

Getting pissed off and screaming at your computer still shown to have no effect.

Using the microphones and speakers that come standard in many of today’s laptop computers and mobile devices, hackers can secretly transmit and receive data using high-frequency audio signals that are mostly inaudible to human ears, a new study shows.

Michael Hanspach and Michael Goetz, researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics, recently performed a proof-of-concept experiment that showed that “covert acoustical networking,” a technique which had been hypothesized but considered improbable by most experts, is indeed possible.

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Experts Still Cannot Explain The Mysterious Hum Of Bristol, Taos, And Largs

By JacobSloan on July 30, 2013 in News 2

mysterious hum Yahoo! News on the continuing saga of the sound that defies explanation:

It’s known as the Hum, a steady, droning sound that’s heard in places as disparate as Taos, N.M.; Bristol, England; and Largs, Scotland. What causes the Hum, and why it only affects a small percentage of the population in certain areas, remain a mystery, despite a number of scientific investigations.

Reports started trickling in during the 1950s from people who had never heard anything unusual before; suddenly, they were bedeviled by an annoying, low-frequency humming, throbbing or rumbling sound. The cases seem to have several factors in common: Generally, the Hum is only heard indoors, and it’s louder at night than during the day.

Only about 2 percent of the people living in any given Hum-prone area can hear the sound, and most of them are ages 55 to 70, according to a 2003 study. Most of the people who hear the Hum (sometimes referred to as “hearers” or “hummers”) describe the sound as similar to a diesel engine idling nearby.

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Authorities To Study Mysterious Hum In Windsor, Canada

By JacobSloan on January 26, 2013 in News 8

Researchers are prepared to uncover the truth behind the ominous sound haunting a city, Michigan Radio reports:

Researchers in Ontario will spend the coming months trying to get to the bottom of the noise and vibration known as the “Windsor Hum.” People in Windsor have complained about the low-frequency rumbling for the past two years.

“What we’re attempting to do is pinpoint the source…but also understand how it might affect quality of life for the people of this region,” said Bob Dechert, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa.

Windsor city Councillor Drew Dilkens says he knows of one resident who recently sold his house to get away from the hum. One study has already suggested the hum might be coming from near Zug Island, which sits in the Detroit River on the U.S. side of the border.

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Psychotronic Soundscapes: Top Twenty Mind-Bending Albums for 2012

By Matt Staggs on December 28, 2012 in News 13

Picture: Maf04 (CC)

Disinfo pal Thad McKraken has written a run-down of this year’s top mind-bending albums, complete with samples for your enjoyment:

Say what you will about 2012, but since consciousness is comprised of linguistic information, the idea of a coming apocalypse in itself propagated some rather delicious undercurrents of sound rippling through the Akashic record this year. I’ve never written more than a top five list in my life, but when I was thinking back on the insane amount of mind-bending albums that dropped in the last 12 months, I was kind of in shock. Most of this stuff’s fairly obvious, at least in my world. Was it people like Terence McKenna and his mechanized Timewave Zero prophesies, inspiring people like Grant Morrison to write the great Invisibles hypersigil, that summoned this record deluge of psychoactive soundscapes into motion? I have no idea. Did the Mayans get in every band’s head and subconsciously encourage them to bring their A game in 2012 as it might be their final chance?

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Linguist Says Tapes Reveal Bigfoot Speaking

By JacobSloan on November 17, 2012 in News 11

In the early 1970s, a group of hunters in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains captured sounds of an alleged encounter with Bigfoot. Now a professor and former Navy crypto-linguist says he has analyzed the strange audio recordings, and claims that they not only are legitimate, but reveal a primitive, grunt-based language. Decide for yourself — either way, the Sasquatch sounds on the tape are disturbing:

Eerie Sounds Emanate From New York’s Freedom Tower

By JacobSloan on November 12, 2012 in News 9

Two weeks ago, passersby noticed a haunting humming seemingly originating from the still-unfinished Freedom Tower. One possible explanation is that the the strong winds of Hurricane Sandy vibrated the metal beams at the top of the structure, turning them into musical instruments:

Why Some People See Sound

By JacobSloan on October 27, 2012 in News 2

The senses are more intermingled than we realize — what we hear influences what we think we see, Live Science writes:

Some people may actually see sounds, say researchers who found this odd ability is possible when the parts of the brain devoted to vision are small.

Scientists took a closer look at the sound-induced flash illusion. When a single flash is followed by two bleeps, people sometimes also see two illusory consecutive flashes. They found the smaller a person’s visual cortex was — the part of the brain linked with vision — the more likely he or she experienced the illusion. On average, the volunteers saw the illusion 62 percent of the time.

“The visual brain’s representation of what hits the eye is very efficient but not perfect — there is some uncertainty to visual representations, especially when things happen quickly, like the rapid succession of flashes in the illusion,” de Haas said.

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Mysterious Ringing Hum Baffles Seattle Residents

By JacobSloan on September 9, 2012 in News 22

Mass auditory hallucination? Military experiments in the Pacific Northwest? Hear a local’s alleged recording of the eerie, low tone here. Washington’s KING5 writes:

Julie Schickling stood out on her porch in West Seattle just after midnight because she couldn’t explain what she was hearing. So she recorded the sound. “It gets high and lower, and goes away, then comes back,” said Schickling.

Some of her neighbors report being shaken out of bed by the low rumble, also described as a growl. In fact, as many people you talk with is about how many different words you heard to describe it. “It is kind of creepy,” Kay Kirkpatrick, the West Seattle resident said of the sound. “It creeps you out a little bit.”

Some long time residents say they’ve heard this sound before over the years. Others say it’s the first encounter they’ve had with the eerie noise.

The neighboring large industries say they aren’t to blame.

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The Museum Of Endangered Sounds

By JacobSloan on June 22, 2012 in News 2

How do we preserve the fabric of everyday life from other eras? The online Museum of Endangered Sounds is a marvelous emporium of aural preservation, simulating what being alive in the 1990s sounded like, with tones unheard for years available for listening. Creator Brendan Chilcutt explains:

I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR. As you probably know, it’s a wonderfully complex sound, subtle yet unfiltered.

My ten-year plan is to complete the data collection phase by the year 2015, and spend the next seven years developing the proper markup language to reinterpret the sounds as a binary composition.

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How Man Changes The Soundscape Of Nature

By majestic on June 1, 2012 in News 2

Alastair Leithead profiles the fascinating work of Bernie Krause for BBC News:

A landscape may look healthy, but how does it sound, and what does that say about how its wildlife is doing?

It’s a question Bernie Krause has spent much of his life trying to answer. To do so, he’s recorded the sounds of thousands of places in far-flung corners of the world.

Dr. Bernie Krause: The Great Animal Orchestra from California Academy of Sciences and California Academy of Sciences on FORA.tv

He coined the word “biophany” to describe these recordings…

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