Hmm

[lindaj]

Strangely, the last one I could hear sounded lower to me than the next-to-last one.

You are a dog

Or maybe you are a mosquito, you certainly can't be human. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 21.1kHz

Find out which ringtones you can hear!

Comments

[geekosaur]

Not a valid test, then — you're hearing artifacting in the playback that has lower frequency components. :)

[lindalee.livejournal.com]

Well...whatever I heard, it was loud, not subtle. The next frequency up I couldn't hear at all.

I've been known in the past to have trouble distinquishing whether one sound is higher or lower in pitch, compared to another.

[geekosaur]

By and large, sound cards suck at accurate sound reproduction (some EE types at CMU have mentioned that all commodity sound cards are not only not sufficiently shielded from electronic "noise" generated by the computer, but also produce quite a bit of "noise" themselves); audio artifacts or "noise" at other frequencies are common, and may well be louder than the real sound. Poor drivers (which I've encountered on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows (and, yes, OS X)) can exacerbate the problem by doing a poor job of audio mixing or resampling (to match the audio rate of the original sound to the rate your sound card expects) that itself produces unexpected frequencies.

In short, don't rely on computers to produce accurate sound unless you're willing to pay for really high end hardware of the kind Pixar etc. use and the special drivers and software needed for them to work.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

I found that on my linux machine the frequencies were all over the map like the lowest one being higher than all the rest. On the windows box, they were alittle more consistantly going up. But you also need to make sure you are hearing the primary tone and not the undertones.

If it doens't sound like cathode ray tube noise, then it's not right.

So I agree, I don't think you got the proper test.

Not all computer speakers can even produce those noises.

[lindalee.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'll try it again at home, if I remember.

Or maybe I'll just not bother, and go on believing that I have superhuman powers...because you know, superhuman powers can be cool.

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I noticed that I was hearing overtones or something, so I downloaded the mp3s and played them in xmms rather than using the play buttons on the webpage. The results were much more consistent (and I could only hear the lowest two... I wonder if all that fife-playing has killed my upper frequency hearing faster than expected.)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Man, some of those hurt.