Can You Hear this?

[houselikealotus]

A NY Times article I read the other day talks about how teenagers are using super high-pitched ring tones to use their cell phones to text message during classes. Most people lose their ability to hear such high frequencies with age, making this the perfect cheat-the-teacher tactic du jour.

Here's a clip of the sound courtesy of npr: squeal meI

Comments

[dracis]

That's painful.

[shard83]

That is pretty wicked.

[monrovianvogue]

I can hear it, but it's so barely there that I certainly wouldn't be able to catch it while teaching a class. That's with volume all the way up. Maybe if I trained myself...

I had another version of this played for me in a room of 2500 people at our conference (some sort of speech illustration), and I couldn't hear jack.

[wondershot]

Ow, that sound makes me want to bite something and chew on it. We used to have a deer repeller box in our front yard that made a similar sound. It was a lot more efective at preserving the pansies than, say, feeding the deer rat poison, which was my dad's strategy.

Televisions also make a sound like this, if you mute the volume.

[liberalnun]

If someone with that ring tone were using their cellphone in my class, I'd want to kill them. I'm sure I'm not alone, either.