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They've always said kids have selective hearing...

20:33 / 13.10.06

I feel guilty even posting this here without more to go on, but I figured you folks might have the skinny on this to fill me in. Okay, here goes:

I was at a party on the weekend, and several people there claimed they had heard about research that had discovered a sound only young people can hear. I would assume, given the crowd in question, that they heard the piece on CBC Radio, and one of them did mention that they played the sound on air, and to her great disappointment she heard nothing. Apparently, they've been using this noise to drive off undesirable demographics from venues targeted at the mature, by blasting the sound out from loudspeakers - for everyone older than about 20, nothing; for the youth, irritation. In a slick turnaround, however, more enterprising young'uns have allegedly captured this sound and begun using it on their cellphones, yielding a ringtone that can go off in class and leave the teacher none the wiser.

Anybody know anything about this?

Bubblegum Death

00:18 / 14.10.06

It's a device called the Mosquito and it was designed in the UK. It emits a high frequency noise that only younger people are supposed to be able to hear.

Here's an article from the New York Times. And here's a more recent one describing the cell phone usage.

00:40 / 15.10.06

That is most weird.

I can't hear the WAV file (click on the link here to see if you can) but TBM and the dog can. I can hear the MP3 which is apparently lower quality so more people can hear it, but it's a sound which makes me feel a little like I do when I am car sick.

I can't believe I can't hear the real one. I'm so old.

01:04 / 15.10.06

I can't hear either of them, but both make my eardrums wobble, the second more than the first. Quite unpleasantly.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

06:25 / 15.10.06

Hah! I'm in my mid-twenties and can hear both. Go me. The first sort of fades in and out, though.

Whatever frequency that is, I hear it all the time. Before now I had just assumed my ears were ringing or I was imagining it. Crazy.

12:16 / 15.10.06

It's the noise that televisions make in the background. Which explains why most teenagers are completely mad - they've been driven insane by the high frequency.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

21:28 / 16.10.06

I wonder about the cel phone tone working. I don't think most commercially available cel phones can play such high frequency, but I am far from being an expert.

Also, MP3 cuts of at a frequency lower then the one that only kids can hear, so makes sense we can all hear that one. Don't know what the feq. cutoff on a wav is though.