I guess its probably going to be hard to write a world famous blog or achieve fame and fortune if I forget about the blog for months at a time…but…
I was just setting up the small studio at work so that one of the youth producers could record a voice over. That small studio control room has this terrible, awful high pitched noise spilling out of it all the time that usually makes me not want to hang out in it. Its a pretty cramped spot, and with the door closed and the sound proof walls, all of that whine hangs out with you. I was playing around with the knobs and turned off one of the camera monitors (which in the small studio, that doesn’t get used a whole lot, is probably circa 1986) and there it was, the whine went away. One of the community productions producers, who uses this studio a lot more than I, was walking by and I asked him if he ever noticed the noise. He didn’t know what I was talking about; I turned the monitor on and off again to show him, and he couldn’t hear it at all. Anyhow, all of that reminded me of a radio story that I heard a while back, about stores which were using high pitched noises that only the younger set could hear as a deterrent to keep them from loitering in front of the stores. In Germantown, where I went to high school, they just used polkas for that purpose.
The interview is with the inventor of the Mosquito, which creates the high pitched sounds, and his daughter. (If I remember correctly, I haven’t relistened to the interview.) His daughter, Isabel, recorded the sound with her cell phone to create a ringtone that her teachers couldn’t hear. That way, her and her friends were able to text message in class without their (older) teachers being able to hear the tones. I still dont’t know how they could be typing the messages without getting caught.
I just started texting, maybe I’m a little late there. I also just figured out how to use bluetooth and garage band to make ringtones from .mp3s and put them on my computer, maybe I will try recording the sound from the control room and using it to pass messages at staff meetings.
You can listen to the interview, which originally aired on All Things Considered, May 26, 2006 here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5434687
