When I was invited to post articles here, I was told that the general theme would be "how you experience Rochester." Well, experience comes partly from perception, and perception is largely based on our senses. So what happens when people sense the same world differently?
It's Saturday evening, March 11th. I and two coworkers are at work, trying to debug a problem on a project. It's late, I'm tired and cranky, and the two guys I'm with aren't doing much better. The problem we're trying to fix could be hardware, could be software, could be some amusing combination of the two. That's the nature of the work we do. We design digital audio systems, and that involves a lot of critical listening.
You could say we had our senses working overtime. Well, at least one sense. Hearing.
So we're pushing buttons, turning knobs, and typing cryptic commands on keyboards. And then I hear it.
"Stop! What did you just do?," I yelled.
"Nothing, just turned off a channel," one coworker replied.
"You don't hear that?!," I asked.
"Hear what?," he replied.
So I turned to the other guy, who looked at me like I was on something. He didn't hear it either. But I certainly did. It was high-pitched, loud, and shouldn't be there. So we go back and forth a few more times. Channels were flipped on and off, and I would report when I would hear the tone. But they just couldn't hear it. I finally prove that there is a tone there by putting an oscilloscope on the channel and actually measuring it. They both couldn't hear it, but now, they could see it.
And there it was. It's 12 kHz. That's pretty high, but still in the range of what most people can hear. But one of my coworkers used to play in a band (the last being the local "D.O.H.") and the other is in his mid 50's. Sensitivity to high frequencies usually tends to diminish as you get older, which is why your grandparents love their treble knobs.
All this reminded me of an experience I had with someone who was color blind. I wrote to him on colored paper using a different color of ink that he perceived as being the same hue as the paper. So to him, I sent him a blank sheet of paper.
The lesson here is that your senses can lie to you. Reality can be a 12 kHz tone, but you could hear silence. Reality can be writing on a piece of paper, and you might not see anything there. And reality might be what people write about Rochester here, but you might not sense the same things they write about.
Comments (2)
Thanks for verifying that I'm not insane. Something in my living room (I think it's the DVR) emits an high-frequency squeal that apparently I can only hear. My wife and her son think I'm nuts when I continually ask, "WHAT is that NOISE?!?" the irony of this situation, though, is that I'm the old one who played in bands for years.
Also, thanks for getting this XTC song stuck in my head. It's much better than its predecessor, which, inexplicably, was Ugly Kid Joe's awful version of "Cats in the Cradle."
Posted by Ben Frazier | March 15, 2006 1:04 PM
Posted on March 15, 2006 13:04
Your sanity is independent of if you can hear high frequencies!
It's mostly television sets (at least CRT television sets) that generate high-pitched squeals. The noise is usually related to the sweeeping of the electron beam back and forth across the screen. The period of that is roughly 64 microseconds, for a frequency of roughly 15.625 kHz (at least for standard NTSC video). I can hear up into that range too, and it drives me nuts when I'm near a television set emitting that noise.
Posted by Anonymous | March 15, 2006 6:47 PM
Posted on March 15, 2006 18:47