3179 Weird noises

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Men get married so they don’t have to date anymore.

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A few people have blogged lately about hearing weird noises.

I'm always amazed at how far sound will travel under the right conditions.

When I was in college, the campus climbed a hill, and the gym/pool building was at the top of the hill. If you had metal fillings in your teeth, and only if you had fillings, you could hear the local radio station when you were submerged in the pool. If your teeth and ears were underwater, it was clear as a bell.

When I lived near St. Louis, our house was at the top of the highest hill in the county - you could see the arch, almost 25 miles away, from that hill. If the air was still at night, there was a steady thrumming sound in the house that about drove me crazy, the kind of sound you feel more than hear. You couldn't hear it outside, just in the house. I finally discovered that there was a Toyota truck factory a bit south of the city, a good 30 miles from my house, and they were testing motors at night. That was confirmed when they shut the factory down for a week, and the sound stopped for that week.

The house I'm moving out of is also at the top of a hill. The back of the house overlooking the valley is mostly glass, which picks up and amplifies or reflects sound. There was a bagpipe band (fire and police) that practiced at a fire house across the river and upriver a bit (probably at least 5 to 7 miles away), tucked invisibly into another valley, and I could hear them clearly on the deck, but not in the house. On the other hand, sometimes a train on the tracks running up the river would sit on a side track for hours, running, and I could hear it in the house but not on the deck. (For a long time I thought that sound was a refrigerated truck compressor at the beer store at the bottom of my hill, but a quick trip to check proved that idea wrong.)

In this house, I occasionally hear "moooOOOoop ... moooOOOoop ... moooOOOoop", about five to seven mooops in a row, coming from the southeast. I asked Daughter what it was, but she doesn't hear it, and theorized that it was a "noon whistle" kind of thing, from a fire station or something. But the times I hear it are random, and never on the hour. I think maybe it's boats. Big boats (ships) have foghorns, and that's what it sounds like. Maybe there's a drawbridge down there somewhere that they mooop at to ask that it be opened.

Sounds can travel for many miles, and sounds can be heard in one spot but not in another only feet away, so sometimes asking the neighbors just gets you a strange look. "Whachu talkin' 'bout, Willis?" I often hear sounds that no one else hears, which is strange because my right ear lost the high and low registers from too much time at the rifle range with no ear protection. I wonder what sounds neighbors hear that I don't, but I suspect asking will just get me an even weirder look.
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