New Ring Tone Can't Be Heard By Adults

Some enterprising students have taken a sound that was meant to keep kids from loitering around stores and turned it into a ring tone that the teacher can't hear in class.

Students are using a new ring tone to receive messages in class — and many teachers can't even hear the ring.

Some students are downloading a ring tone off the Internet that is too high-pitched to be heard by most adults. With it, high schoolers can receive text message alerts on their cell phones without the teacher knowing.

As people age, many develop what's known as aging ear — a loss of the ability to hear higher-frequency sounds.
abcnews.go.com...

It seems the idea came from a security consultant that tested different sounds on his children until he found one that was very annoying to young people, but most adults can't hear the sound at all.

The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in south Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside.
www.iht.com...

Kind of interesting that they have turned something that was intended to annoy kids into something that they can use.

Personally, after being hit with this thing an uncountable number of times, I am very happy to see that it is being used by kids. It's very disconcerting to be driving down the street and all of a sudden have that piercing noise in your ears. I wonder how they are going to go about stopping this? I know revenge is childish, but I think that this is very very fitting. It's what we get for turning that technology on a bunch of kids.

Any technology that can be developed for security can be adapted by those it was meant to be used against.

I love it nice find anxiety.

Side note: I can't be the only person who finds Niteboys avatar both hillarious and disturbing has to be the best avatar I've seen in a while. Everytime I see it I laugh and feel revolted.

Uh why are people taking phone calls in the classroom?? I mean if you are sitting there following the lessons and your buds are doing the same thing somewhere else then who has time for phone calls?

Otherwise a neat idea..

ringtones.aol.com...

The link has a sample of the tone that you can open with your media player.
I turned it up on my stereo and it has to be one of the most annoying sounds I've heard.

Thats pretty silly. Why not just turn it on 'vibrate'.

Besides, before long, schools and other public places will just have cell phone jamming devices installed in them. I am just waiting for the portable kind, so I can carry it around.

I see one problem with it...
they are wrong... it isn't just teens that hear it... many adults do also...

I had no problem hearing it, and i am in my mid 30's....

thanks Mom and Dad, for not letting me go to concerts when i was young...

You're right AD that is incredibly annoying

If kids are going to use this they better pick the right teacher because it was certainly audible to me. I had the speakers turned down pretty low and if I was teaching a class I'd hear that thing.

As mentioned before kids shouldn't be taking calls or getting text messages in class...pay attention ya slackers.

Wouldn't it be better to download something that sounds like a classroom or school type of sound?

Or again, just turn your dang phone off when class starts.

Spiderj

I think that some of the problem is the recording itself... it's probably the whirling noise in the backgound, while the foreground is just static.

In any case, I can't see how this would be annoying, unless it's turned up REALLY high, since misquitoes make a TON more noise... or at least they do where I live (and where I live, the joke is "The best misquitoe repelant is a shotgun")

Originally posted by Nygdan
Thats pretty silly. Why not just turn it on 'vibrate'.

Besides, before long, schools and other public places will just have cell phone jamming devices installed in them. I am just waiting for the portable kind, so I can carry it around.

My thoughts exactly. If I owned a cellphone (God forbid!) I would just leave it on vibrate all the time. I've had too many people let their cellphones ring in movies, in classrooms, in final exams... Just yesterday, somebody's cellphone went off in church, and to make it even worse, it was a backstreet boys ringtone...

I was thinking of trying to design a portable cellphone jammer, but the main problem with it is that it is illegal. Imagine walking down the street with a portable cellphone jammer, and someone is trying to call 911 and can't get through... It is legal, at least in some places (maybe everywhere?) for some businesses to jam cellphones; I know this is done in some movie theaters and places like that, and at some big event (I think it was one of the G8 summits) the security had the ability to jam cellphones if they needed to, in case of terrorist threat or that kind of thing.

Originally posted by LazarusTheLong
thanks Mom and Dad, for not letting me go to concerts when i was young...

I don't even know if that's it... I've been to maybe 30 concerts, and when I was younger and used headphones all the time, they were always on all the way.

I can hear it just fine...

LazarusTheLong wrote
I see one problem with it...
they are wrong... it isn't just teens that hear it... many adults do also...

I had no problem hearing it, and i am in my mid 30's....

thanks Mom and Dad, for not letting me go to concerts when i was young...

I think its more to do with the natural rolloff of higher freqs. due to age rather than the exposure to loud music Eg children can often hear up to the limit of human hearing (20khz), and this declines with old age to about 12khz (I think... I can't quite remember )

certain UK sites do jam cellphones - for obvious reasons - however a cellphone jamming device not sanctioned under law is illegal - our Big Brother programme came across this issue a number of years ago and had to explain that they had a "cell phone detector" - catergorically not a jammer. Living where i do however it is interesting when cell reception drops to zero mysteriously (7/7) for example.

A good example of how this "potentially" might be done is in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

This is BS, most people don't loose that much high end hearing due to age.

I am 42 and I had no trouble hearing that tone, and I have lost hearing from my military days (loud jets everyday), and playing guitar in loud bands...

Age-related hearing loss tends to occur in families. The disorder occurs in about 25% of people aged 65 to 75 and in 70% to 80% of those over age 75.

www.nlm.nih.gov...

Just another capitalist scam, that will last about 5 minutes until the novelty wears off....


[edit on 12/6/2006 by ANOK]

Im asthmatic - and apparently can hear frequencies much higher because of it (according the the Guiness Book of Records) - but ive been around music so long that I reckon I have at least degraded my hearing by 25-20% from hanging out too close to the speakers - oh and Im 39 for the record

Forgot to add i can hear it quite clearly

[edit on 12-6-2006 by Silk]

Originally posted by LazarusTheLong
I see one problem with it...
they are wrong... it isn't just teens that hear it... many adults do also...

I had no problem hearing it, and i am in my mid 30's....

I'm like 20 years older than you and can still hear it - AND I did go to concerts.

Can we say urban legend?????

Originally posted by ANOK
This is BS, most people don't loose that much high end hearing due to age.

I am 42 and I had no trouble hearing that tone, and I have lost hearing from my military days (loud jets everyday), and playing guitar in loud bands...

I think ur missing the point somewhat... this isn't abut hearing loss as in 'hard of hearing', but the natural tendancy to loose hearing in the upper frequency spectrum as time goes by. 20khz down to 16khz or 12khz sounds like a lot, but it isn't. 10khz is around d#9... thats pretty high! The next octave up (d#10) is 20khz, and that VERy high

Here is the octave of d#9 to d#10... as I said, this is from around 10khz tp 20khz, and fair play if u can hear every not in the octave, but I'm in my early 20s and already the last few notes are beyond my hearing threshold heh

www.yousendit.com...

Children have little problem hearing all the way up to 20khz... but it isn't a pleasant sensation, its very annpying and borderline painful, so I can see it as being quote an effective deterrent :p

ok i want to be able to send all of these KIDS a virus that turns there SECRET sound into brown noise..then lets see em answer the phone...

PS i can hear it and i am 37

Well, I'd say that the developer of the Mosquito will be a very wealthy person.

Unless they're free.

I've seen sonic rodent control devices installed at loading docks behind Toronto shopping centers. I don't know how effective they are, but they emit a very high and almost inaudible tone.
And what about those silent dog whistles ? I've never had a dog, but they do have them, and dogs can hear them.

Sound has been used in many different forms for a long time, and I can see this working if the cell phone volume is turned low. I don't think students will have the ring tone coming out of 4 large house speakers with the amp turned up like I did.

edit: spelling

[edit on 12/6/2006 by anxietydisorder]