In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear. In settings where cellphone use is forbidden — in class, for example — it is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species. “When I heard about it I didn’t believe it at first,” said Donna Lewis, a technology teacher at the Trinity School in Manhattan. “But one of the kids gave me a copy, and I sent it to a colleague. She played it for her first graders. All of them could hear it, and neither she nor I could.”
The technology, which relies on the fact that most adults gradually lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds, was developed in Britain but has only recently spread to America — by Internet, of course.
Recently, in classes at Trinity and elsewhere, some students have begun testing the boundaries of their new technology. One place was Michelle Musorofiti’s freshman honors math class at Roslyn High School on Long Island.
At Roslyn, as at most schools, cellphones must be turned off during class. But one morning last week, a high-pitched ring tone went off that set teeth on edge for anyone who could hear it. To the students’ surprise, that group included their teacher.
“Whose cellphone is that?” Miss Musorofiti demanded, demonstrating that at 28, her ears had not lost their sensitivity to strangely annoying, high-pitched, though virtually inaudible tones.
“You can hear that?” one of them asked.
“Adults are not supposed to be able to hear that,” said another, according to the teacher’s account.
She had indeed heard that, Miss Musorofiti said, adding, “Now turn it off.”
The cellphone ring tone that she heard was the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.
It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.
The principle behind it is a biological reality that hearing experts refer to as presbycusis, or aging ear. While Miss Musorofiti is not likely to have it, most adults over 40 or 50 seem to have some symptoms, scientists say.
While most human communication takes place in a frequency range between 200 and 8,000 hertz (a hertz being the scientific unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second), most adults’ ability to hear frequencies higher than that begins to deteriorate in early middle age.
“It’s the most common sensory abnormality in the world,” said Dr. Rick A. Friedman, an ear surgeon and research scientist at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.
But in a bit of techno-jujitsu, someone — a person unknown at this time, but probably not someone with presbycusis — realized that the Mosquito, which uses this common adult abnormality to adults’ advantage, could be turned against them.
The Mosquito noise was reinvented as a ring tone.
“Our high-frequency buzzer was copied. It is not exactly what we developed, but it’s a pretty good imitation,” said Simon Morris, marketing director for Compound Security, the company behind the Mosquito. “You’ve got to give the kids credit for ingenuity.”
British newspapers described the first use of the high-frequency ring tone last month in some schools in Wales, where Compound Security’s Mosquito device was introduced as a “yob-buster,” a reference to the hooligans it was meant to disperse.
Since then, Mr. Morris said his company has received so much attention — none of it profit-making because the ring tone was in effect pirated — that he and his partner, Howard Stapleton, the inventor, decided to start selling a ring tone of their own. It is called Mosquitotone, and it is now advertised as “the authentic Mosquito ring tone.”
David Herzka, a Roslyn High School freshman, said he researched the British phenomenon a few weeks ago on the Web, and managed to upload a version of the high-pitched sound into his cellphone.
He transferred the ring tone to the cellphones of two of his friends at a birthday party on June 3. Two days later, he said, about five students at school were using it, and by Tuesday the number was a couple of dozen.
“I just made it for my friends. I don’t use a cellphone during class at school,” he said.
How, David was asked, did he think this new device would alter the balance of power between adults and teenagers? Or did he suppose it was a passing fad?
“Well, probably it is,” said David, who added after a moment’s thought, “And if not, I guess the school will just have to hire a lot of young teachers.”
I found it on P2P and I can hear it so give it a listen old timers and tell us if you can you hear it.
That would be so sweet. I needed that last semester i only got my cellphone tooken away once last semester.
nice
i can hear it, and i thought my ears were shit... guess not.
My security guide @ Zeropaid
Unless you are the following people, I do not particularly wish to associate with you:
Krell, HelenaP, mountain_rage, mfgbypooter, Mels_Smileys45, excrement_cranium.
That's it for now. This list will be updated whenever I feel like it.
All I can hear is low rumbling, what sounds like muffled laughter, and two sharp cracks.
How did I do?
I hear it just fine, I am 27 though I can also hear the laughing and the weird noises aside...
______________________________________________
In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird.
Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
I'm hung at haeart. I hope that counts where it counts.
Hard as ever and here to make you people believe...as long as there is one person to hold hope and dream...A GOD...will never die!
If you think that noise can't be heard, think again.
Not only can I hear it, I took it and played it behind the back of my 74 year old partly deaf mother and she turned around real fast and asked what that noise was.
*
Christ that was piercing.
Now stop being so freaking nice, and buy a stun gun. - Krell
I can clearly hear a high pitched noise. I don't think that sounds like a mosquito though.It sounds like one of the old drive wheels on a cassette deck when it gets worn out and squeaks.
Anyway I can hear it fine and I'm old as hell.Not Hunter decrepit type old but still way over the hill.
I don't need no stinking signature
Auggie, I can clearly see your nuts....
ah... the joys of grammar and spelling.
“The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.” - Florence Nightingale
Now you see three. :icon_cyclOriginally Posted by Excrement_Cranium
p
Actually the sound it reminds me of is tape hiss.I used to take cassettes I made on my home 4 track recorder into the recording studio.The engineer would record that onto 1/2" tape and do some voodoo to neutralize the same type hissing sound.Which opens the possibility that what I am hearing is not the "mosquito" but actually some other electronic noise.Oh well.
I knew it reminded me of a cassette.I guess not the wheel though.
I don't need no stinking signature
I've tried isolating what the different sounds are like and one is like a tape hiss or turntable rumble, one is like a baby's heartbeat as heard via ultrasound and then there is the annoying one like a pulsing siren going off all on top of each other with some muffled talking or laughing in the background and a couple of cracking sounds towards the end.
*
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks