In the newspaper this weekend, there was an article about a device called the Mosquito that shop owners are buying to discourage gangs of teens from hanging out by their stores. The way it works is by emitting a high frequency sound that teens supposedly find annoying; so annoying that they will flee from the sound. Sounds sort of like a dog whistle, doesn’t it?
I don’t know much about sound frequencies, other than the fact that there are some on the high end that I can’t hear with my right ear. I discovered that during my brief stint of working for a pediatrician. One day I was playing around with the little machine that tests hearing, learning how to operate it. I was standing there listening, moving the dial when I said, “Uh, something’s wrong with the machine. I don’t hear anything.” My co-worker told me to switch it to the other ear and, sure enough, it wasn’t the machine that was broken but my right ear. My only disappointment in that is that my hearing loss is in the high frequency end and not the low. I keep thinking if the sounds I couldn’t hear were bass, I’d be much happier. Then I couldn’t hear the sonic blasts from teens driving past with their radios blaring but that’s a story for another day.
Getting back to the Mosquito, we decided to test it. The claim is that your ability to hear high frequency sounds diminishes when you get into your mid twenties. Since I discovered that article on the weekend, I just happened to have my own under twenty test-teen handy. I did a Google search to see if there was an mp3 file of this sound somewhere on the Internet. I found several. I played the first one & was able to hear it (Click on the little blue arrow to play the mp3 files):
I wondered if my hearing had suddenly improved so I called Frank in to see if he could hear it. He did. Theresa wandered in wanting to know what the heck we were doing. I told her about my experiment and we found another website with the sound:
This time none of us could hear it. As a result of this experiment, I have come to a conclusion. There are only 2 possible reasons why our experiment failed – either Frank & I are immature and have the hearing of teenagers or Theresa is so mature that she cannot hear what other teenagers hear.
My darling son posted a note here consisting entirely of smilies which I warned him I would delete & did. But that’s not the important point I need to make here. We had 2 under 25 year olds here in the house tonight. They were both able to hear the second mp3 file even though Stephen couldn’t, same as the rest of our household. I guess this does confirm that there is truth to the whole high frequency thing. (Being a skeptic, I didn’t fully believe it until tonight, when I finally saw proof.)