Annoying Bugs
Comments: 8
For a week or so I’ve been noticing a dry, high-frequency sound which seemed, intermittently, to be coming from behind my PowerBook. I notice it at night. It sounds a bit like RF interference or poorly-shielded cables, so I checked the speakers and moved the radio around but this had no effect. Then I thought it may be coming from one of the external hard drives located further back on the desk, but shutting these down did nothing to stop the noise.
With everything else tested, it looked like it was the PowerBook, but I still couldn’t pin down exactly where the sound was coming from (the sound changes in intensity when I move my head, becoming more audible as I turn my left ear to the machine).
Tonight I identified the sound — and was able to give my computer and all peripherals a clean bill of health.
I sit at my desk facing west, and my study has windows on three sides: in front of me (west), to my left (south) and behind me (east). The west window in front of me faces the street and is almost always closed. The panes that I routinely open are in the south-west and north-east corners of the room. In other words, as I look at my computer and turn my head to right, my left ear presents itself to an open window while my right ear also presents itself (although more distantly) to another open window.
The sound I’m hearing is insects outside the house. The first wave of summer bugs has hatched and one species or another is emitting a thin but constant strand of off-white noise.
The reason I couldn’t locate the sound as coming from outside was that as I turned my head, my right ear was still being fed enough noise from the insects at the back of the house to stereophonically position the sound on the desk in front of me.
Two new questions arise: why didn’t I notice the noise when I was outside, and why didn’t I notice it in previous years?
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Posted to Computers • 2003.05.04 (Sun) • 00:31
Comments
Posted by icb 2003.05.04, 10:09
Are you sure it’s insects? I’ve noticed a what seems like a similar HF sound that eminates intermittently from both my powerbook and desktop g4. What do these machines have in common? They’re both equipped Airport Cards. I believe that (some?) Airport cards store something (an electrical charge, built up RF?) that over time reaches a threshold. Once this threshold is reached, the card emits a whole lotta something which ends up sounding like the effects track from a bad 50’s Sci-Fi flick. I hope whatever is being emitted is safe (intermittent things being hard to test and such) because I’m usually in close vicinity to the machine when this occurs. The sound really used to ‘freak me out’ now, but I’m kinda used to it, is that a good thing?
Posted by jh 2003.05.04, 11:42
Are you sure it’s insects?
Positive. The strange question, as I mention, is why I didn’t notice it earlier.
I think what happened is that as I sat in front of my machine, I was hearing a ‘machine’ noise. When I put it to sleep for the night and went to close the windows, I heard ‘insect’ noise. My brain, having begun to think thoughts of ‘computer problem’ due to the almost electronic nature of the sound, didn’t connect the ‘separate’ sounds.
As for the Airport connection, I’m not using it yet so I can’t comment (but I haven’t heard or read any similar reports).
Posted by Jesper 2003.05.05, 03:31
icb: Noises like that are eventually being filtered out by the brain, but it’s still very annoying because your brain has to filter it out all the time. Monitors and stuff like that kind of build up a charge over the years. Old CRT monitors have this high-pitch noise they emit sometimes. I don’t know what can be done to either case.
Posted by Miguel Arboleda 2003.05.06, 00:40
Hi Jeremy, Maybe I can be of some help here, after your very helpful e-mail about your blog code the other night. My nickname in highschool was “Nature Boy” (hated it then, love it now) and insects are one thing I’ve always loved.
If that high frequency sound is steady and continuous, without break, and has a very slight “whirr” to it (you have to hold still and listen in as the sound is “played”), it could very well be oblong-winged katydids, which start their mating songs at this time of year. The males have rasps on the upper portion of their wings, just behind the “hump” where the wings attach to the thorax (the middle section of an insect’s body), and these rasps, just like cricket wings, are oscillated at a very high frequency to produce their sound.
The reason you probably couldn’t locate the insects outside is probably because of the way katydids and crickets “hide” themselves and the big sounds they are making from predators like you and me. If you find one singing, you will notice that they always position themselves between two objects with an opening between (leaves for the katydids, rocks for cricktes). This has two effects: one is that the objects act like amplifiers that project and amplify their sounds greatly, and. two, the sound is projected in a narrow “sound cone” that must directly contact the listening ear, or the sound will be muffled. As animals with two opposing ears, listening at two separate locations on either side of our heads, we cannot concentrate what we listen to with both ears (sort of like how horses and many birds have eyes on the sides of their heads and they must continually turn their heads side to side to see something). This makes it very hard for predators like us to pinpoint a sound, and also means that the katydid can “camouflage” itself in the bushes. Try it. Next time to you go out and hear crickets, try to find where the sound is coming from; inevitably you’ll hear the same cricket from many different locations.
If you want to locate the katydid making the sounds outside your house, approach slowly, turning your head this way and that, each time stepping forward with the fullest sound. Eventually you’ll pinpoint the culprit. If you use a flashlight, making sure to make no sudden movements, you’ll see a slender, very green insect with very long, fine antannae and a reddish section on its back, where the raspers are.
Hope that was of some help…
Posted by Miguel Arboleda 2003.05.06, 00:43
Then again, seeing as your new Airport looks so much like a UFO…
Posted by jh 2003.05.06, 22:09
Miguel —-
Hope that was of some help…
It’s fascinating! Acoustic camouflage; I love learning things like that.
Posted by Marilyn Johnson 2003.12.15, 01:28
I found these messages through Google because I have intermittent cricket sounds coming from my 4 year old HP Pavilion. My husband and I both thought it was a cricket until I discovered that with the sound turned up, the cricket was louder, but with it off, there was no more cricket.
Sure would like to know the cause even if there’s no cure.
Posted by anon 2004.12.25, 02:19
Hi! Just so you people know, the high frequency noise from your powerbooks is related to the CPU throttling setting. A friend of mine recently had his powerbook replaced by Apple, only to find out his new powerbook had the same problem, but mine didn’t.
After some googling, it turned out that the problem can be solved by choosing different power saving settings. In Panther, go to System Preferences -> Engergy Savings. Choose settings for Power Adapter and go to the Options tab. There, you can switch Processor Performance between Highest and Automatic. Highest will give you the high frequency noise (especially apparent when scrolling large windows!) and Automatic will make it go away. No idea why it works this way, but there you go.
P.s. if you don’t have Panther, download CHUD 4.0.1. from Apple and use that to adjust the power saving settings.
Cheers!
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