/* Emits a 7-Hz tone for 10 seconds.
True story: 7 Hz is the resonant
frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
This was determined empirically in
Australia, where a new factory
generating 7-Hz tones was located too
close to a chicken ranch: When the
factory started up, all the chickens
died.
Your PC may not be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */
Great little anecdote, although I guess you'd call it a hoax? The volume would have to be so loud that any human in the area would be in a great deal of discomfort before it killed nearby chickens.
Birds are weird, basically totally nuts when kept in groups indoors. A little stress could see them all stop eating or peck everyone to death. A less-than-lethal volume could do real damage. A strobelight cannot kill a horse. But set one up in a barn full of horses and they will probably kill themselves. Horses are also nuts.
Yes, this experiment has been performed many times. It's called a “rave” and people will die from the exhaustion of dancing without eating or drinking anything for days...
the wavelength in water (brain matter) of a 7 Hz tone is somewhat over 200 meters. So probably not the skull cavity unless its some kind of chicken themed Godzilla movie.
The problem is likely not the skull but the neck and tendons and stuff oscillating like a bridge.
Large equipment like fans could generate such frequencies. As they've been linked to ghost sightings in humans, I wouldn't be surprised if chickens got spooked by a similar effect:
Since I was curious, I took the recording from Wikipedia, which is sped up 10×, and slowed it down 10×: http://vocaroo.com/i/s0dMCeANPrbX (No affiliation, just the first no-reg audio host I found.)
Edit: you may need to turn up your volume. Much of it (including the first ten seconds) is pretty quiet.
Edit²: I confirm hearing nothing at all using a laptop's built-in speakers; you'll need headphones or external audio.
The acoustic impedance of water is 3500 that of air: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_impedance so the intensity of that sound will be 3500 times less than it would be in air. Also, the impedance match between the water and the air in your ear canal is terrible (think of how little sound you hear under water if someone above water tries to talk to you, that pressure wave has to pass through that barrier twice, the sound from the whale once).
Even on 8cm speakers you typically have a -3dB point between 100 and 150Hz. For the tiny speakers in notebooks and smartphones it should be even higher. That means they maybe could reproduce 100Hz, but at an extremely low volume. And 50Hz is well out of scope.
With the volume at maximum on my 2015 MBP I get sound... of some description, at least. It just doesn't sound much like it does through headphones. It sounds like speakers trying to reproduce something that's beyond them ;)
My computer is connected to an average HiFi and speakers (£300 / $500 worth) with an on-board soundcard. I didn't need to adjust the volume to hear the whale.
It reminds me most of waiting on the platform of a very deep metro line, and hearing the rumbling of a different metro train, some way above.
That, or the (apparently reasonably authentic) sounds played in a Sea Life centre.
The MBP's sound hardware might not have a problem with it, but I was using the MBP's built in speakers ;)
They're generally pretty good on the newer models, I think, as laptop speakers go. My 3-word review might be "better than functional". So having heard them make a tolerable go of music and games I was interested to see how they'd manage 52Hz. The answer: badly.
Which is a shame. Because if you did, you could engineer Dubstep Whale[tm] after a suitably sophisticated breeding program of additive genetic synthesis.
> As a descriptive term, "ungulate" normally excludes cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), as they do not possess most of the typical morphological characteristics of ungulates, but recent discoveries indicate that they are descended from early artiodactyls.
Are you proposing that this creature might be a hippo, or were you showing off your knowledge of recent re-orderization?
Do non-cetacean ungulates call like cetaceans?
Orca are not whales. Technically, they are really big dolphins. They are in the delphinidae family (dolphins) which explains why they look/act/sound/move so differently than other "whales".
But not all cetaceans are whales. If orca are whales, then so too are the other dolphins. "Whale" is really a lay term covering the really big aquatic mammals. A whale shark certainly isn't a whale, but the term is still used there in the common name because of the association with size. Flipper wasn't a whale.
Yeah, certainly orcas can make some pretty high-pitched squeaks. But I'm guessing they can't interbreed with blue whales.
I guess I find the blue whale + fin whale hypothesis a little odd (why would the hybrid have a call that's higher in frequency than either of the original species'?), but I don't have the expertise to comment on it.
Hybrids don't always get averaged traits. Take my dog, a mutt. She is bigger than both her pure-bred parents, taller by more than an inch. In big cats a tigon, a lion-tiger cross, is bigger than either. The principal even holds true for humans. Obama, of mixed race, is unsurprisingly taller than both parents. This is sometimes called hybrid vigour. My point is that a cross between two different animals doesn't always result in something in the middle. This crossed whale may be very different than either parent.
> In big cats a tigon, a lion-tiger cross, is bigger than either
I don't think this is right. The hybrid with a lion father and tiger mother is the huge one, but the father comes first in the name of the hybrid; tigons (male tiger / female lion) aren't so large.
The reason for the difference is that male lions brand their offspring's DNA with the urge to grow large, while female lions counter with the opposite urge. For a lion/lion pairing, this balances out, but tigers don't have the same war between the sexes going on, and the maternal tiger genetic contribution is defenseless against the paternal lion one.
Humans, by the way, do something similar: the same genetic defect causes "Prader-Willi syndrome" if it came from the father, and "Angelman syndrome" if it came from the mother.
And yet it survived, or at least the sound reoccurs every year for how long? I would think a malformation would doom its ability to communicate and feed correctly, no?
I wonder if it's really a whale, or some sort of man-made source (possibly a classified military technology) that coincidentally happens to be particularly whale-like?
I thought of that, but if I were making some secret military sound I would try very hard to blend in exactly like other whales, not do something unique and identifiable.
Thw wikipedia article mentions that the US Navy partially declassified thoe orginal recordings after the Cold War, and made the array availble to researchers.
If there was a military tech involved (with the source), I highly doubt they would have declassified that or as a conspiracy theory, it is misdirection...
This is a project I wouldn't mind backing on kick starter! Have there been any successfully crowd-funded documentaries with a big budget at all? A quick google search didn't reveal much, all the ones I saw were relatively low budget.
Whales roam the oceans. I expect in some deep devops cave in a military office somewhere, they have a monitor showing the real time location of this whale using their sub hunting tech for a laugh. I really hope that's true.
I think the issue is how quickly they identify the whales location. It seems like they have been able to track the movement fairly well. I imagine it takes a while to get a ship out to the identified location of the sound's origin, by which time the source has probably moved on.
http://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequenc...