Hearing Things in Noise

There is a false rumor that snopes.com reported on recently ("Doll Talk", 14 October 2008): an email is circulating, claiming to be from a woman in the Texas panhandle (possibly true) who went to a Wal*Mart store where she listened to the (recorded) sounds made by a Fisher-Price "Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo" doll.(what an ungainly name!). These dolls make wordless pre-baby-talk vocalizations, occasionally actually saying "mama".

However, this woman distinctly heard the dolls (she tried more than one) say "Islam is the Light" and "Satan is King". She demanded the immediate removal of the dolls and vowed to visit every Wal*Mart in the Texas panhandle with her demand.

I don't want to make any over hasty generalizations, but it would seem that the woman was a little keyed up about something. Perhaps she had finally worn out her vinyl recording of "Abbey Road" from playing it backwards. (I hope I have the correct album title. I was never a big Beatles fan and I never played one backwards — or was it Pink Floyd? Or both!) Perhaps the irate woman had just gone shopping after a Sarah Palin rally.

It can be freaky what one can hallucinate aurally from white–or pink*–noise. Back when I was a graduate student I often worked late at night, partly because I was a night owl, and partly because I got much better data when the building was very quiet (people quiet and electromagnetically quiet — I would see glitches in my data when solenoids in the building's elevator switched).

Anyway, our low-temperature lab was a noisy place, mostly from all the vacuum pumps (of different sizes) that were running, which made for quite a bit of random noise. Late at night, when it was otherwise very quite, I'd hear the most unexpected things.

I kept a radio in my lab, but late at night there was nothing being broadcast. However, I would start to imagine that there was music coming from the radio! The only sound, of course, was that of the pumps and the other pings and pops of the lab, but I was convinced I heard music coming from the radio. Even odder, the music usually sounded like orchestral music by Debussy, very rich in color, melodic but rhythmically indistinct, rather like "La Mer". Sometimes the "piece" I was hearing could be quite clever in its musical development so that I wished I were better at taking musical dictation so that I could just write down all these fabulous pieces of music.

But never, not even once, did I ever hear someone saying "Islam is the light" or "Satan is king". My graduate-school career was clearly deprived.

———-
*We need to be a little precise with the terms because "white noise" has a precise meaning to a scientist, namely, random noise whose power spectrum (the curve that shows how much of each frequency is present) is flat (on average) over all frequencies. It sounds like that fuzzy, hissing noise of a television tuned between stations, at least it did back when televisions received analog broadcast signals. In practice most noise is limited to some range, by our ears if nothing gets to it earlier, like equipment roll-off or bandwidth, so noise with a flat spectrum over some frequency range is usually called "white noise". "Pink noise" has a power spectrum that rolls off as the inverse of the frequency.

Posted on October 14, 2008 at 23.18 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Curious Stuff, Personal Notebook

3 Responses

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  1. Written by Melanie
    on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 at 21.11
    Permalink

    This is really fascinating — the part about you and noise, I mean. The other, well! I was intrigued by the difference you point out between white noise and "pink" noise. I don't quite understand this, though: "Pink noise" has a power spectrum that rolls off as the inverse of the frequency.
    Could you explain what that would look like, for really elementary level brains like mine?

  2. Written by S.W. Anderson
    on Thursday, 16 October 2008 at 03.47
    Permalink

    Re: the Texas woman who claims she's hearing spooky things from dolls at Wal-Mart. The only thing missing from the story is her saying she's going to every Wal-Mart in the state with her demand because "the voices" told her to.

    I sense a manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia at work here, if indeed the whole thing isn't a hoax.

  3. Written by S.W. Anderson
    on Thursday, 16 October 2008 at 03.52
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    Re: Jeff hearing music from a silent radio in a lab at night. Some years ago, I had two or three instances where I felt or sensed what sounded like radio inside my head (mouth?) when my jaw was set a certain way. It seemed like the low, muffled, sound of an announcer's voice, although I couldn't make out any distinct words. It only lasted for two or three seconds each time, but it was weird.

    I have no idea how it came about or if I somehow imagined it.

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