I may be old but I can still hear!

A few months ago I heard about a product called Mosquito that emits a high-frequency sound that only young people can hear. The idea is to install the Mosquito in locations where business owners don’t want teens to hang-out. The sound is so annoying that eventually the teens will move on- but it can’t be heard by adults. At that time I looked around for an mp3 of the sound to see if I could hear it, but I couldn’t find one. Today I stumbled upon a New York Times
article that contains an MP3, apparently teens are now using the sound as a ring tone to get around adult phone rules.

This was interesting to me because of a college physics experiment that I participated in many, many years ago. We had a device that emitted a high-frequency sound and we were supposed to record the highest frequency we could hear. I never did find out how high I could hear because my lab partner got bored. Guess I can understand better now why he got bored! But I’ve always been curious about it. I suspect that my curiosity on this was fed by the fact that TRS-80s made me sick. The machines made a high-pitch whining sound that made me nauseous. I was in an experimental math class that was the first to use computers at my high school and I used to write my programs by hand and have the guys type them in (Thanks guys!) because if I stayed in the room too long I started getting ill. Wasn’t much fun but I have always wondered. I can also hear many types of electrical equipment from pretty far away; I’m a good person to send around the house to make sure everything is turned off!

Anyway, here is a direct link to the tone. I may have to wear glasses now to read but at the ripe old age of 40 I can hear it...can you?

Technorati tags: mosquito , ring tone