The Mosquito Ring Tone: This Adult Can Hear It!
The NY Times published a story on the Mosquito Ringtone (also known as Teen Buzz) this morning. Allegedly inaudible to adults, this 17Khz ringtone has become popular among teens looking to be able to send and receive text messages surreptitiously in class. They even included a sample of the ringtone, so you could determine for yourself whether it’s audible or not.
Well, I had no trouble hearing it, and according to the convenient chart provided (reproduced at left), at the age of 42 most people my age can’t hear anything beyond 13Khz. Apparently, I am more youthful than I thought…
Wondering what I could hear, I took a quick trip to the NCH Swift Sound website, and downloaded the NCH Tone Generator application. This little tool is used by audio engineers to generate various different kinds of tones ranging from square waves to pink noise to sine waves, and a bunch more. I generated a four different sets of tones at 15Khz, 16Khz, 17Khz, and 18Khz and listened to them, comparing them with the mosquito. The mosquito is a very dirty tone, with lots of noise in it. Perhaps that’s because it’s been converted to MP3, or perhaps it’s not a pure sine wave. In any case, while the allegedly 17Khz mosquito tone is quite audible, I had difficulty hearing a true 17Khz sine wave. The 18Khz tone was inaudible. You can listen to all four WAV files for yourself and do your own comparison. I recommend not turning the volume way up. Despite the fact that they are nearly inaudible, they are still very high energy sound, and my ears were sore after several listenings.
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