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New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

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Re: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

#151
post #14

I'm just glad they identified the source of the hum, many people are impacted for years by unexplainable sounds, and it is maddening. It took me and my neighbours a month to find the source of a hum that was resonating with our windows. It was torture, with midnight walks and lurking around potential sources, mapping nearby industrial sites, and questioning our sanity, while our windows were vibrating without a stop.…

I was going insane at my old house because of 'the hum'. It started when I installed double pane windows. I think they dropped the ambient noise to the point where the hum was obvious. Any idea what you'd use to track down very low frequency noise sources(i.e. 15-60Hz)? I don't think a lot of sensors do well in that range.

Get an audio spectrum analyzer app for your phone, and enable its log-X scale. Very useful for this sort of thing. The FFT will reveal sounds you don't hear yourself.

Re: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

#152

This sounds so beautiful and desolate, reminding me of a combination of the first two tracks from Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol 2, disc 2, in particular "Blue Calx" and "Parallel Stripes" starting from 40 seconds. [0] Thank you for sharing. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXBAU8HsAqk

I saw a video on Twitter from what looked about half a mile from the bridge - sounded like Lustmord to me. All it needed was some ethereal demon howl and it would have been perfect.

Re: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it’s just going to be ignored. Like the bart “screeching” they never fixed.

It's gotten quieter since 2017 - https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-noise-levels-dec...

"BART says", but as of 6 months ago I was compelled to buy ear plugs for my commute. There's a stretch just before West Oakland (Westbound) that I'm near certain has given me ear damage.

Re: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

#154

I hope somebody has a chance to make high-quality samples/recordings before it's fixed. I doubt we'll get the chance to hear an instrument like this again, accidental or not.

It reminded me of this installation in Croatia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_organ

Re: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

#155

this is fascinating! i wonder how long it will take them to do something about it? seeing the video, i almost wish they'd keep it, but i don't live nearby, so... i found a couple more video examples of accidental acoustic wind effects in architecture -- but it looks like these aren't as ever-present and loud as the Golden Gate Bridge is right now. Beetham Tower - Manchester, UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8-MrU…

Was in Manchester to see Metallica last year, Beetham Tower is spectacularly ugly in person though I suspect it'll be around long enough it'll become a much loved icon.

Re: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

#157
post #29

"In the future the most valuable thing will be silence" --Voltaire

Pretty much the only good thing about the lockdown was the massive reduction in sound levels in London. Just off Old Kent Road which means traffic noise dropped, plane noise disappeared[1], general hubbub of the feral children vanished, no late night parties at the community centre, etc. It was as close to blissful as I've encountered in London.

[1] Normally one every 5-10 minutes from 0500 to 23000 since we're on Heathrow approach and not far off City's path.

Re: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

#158
post #150

There should be an app for this. To get direction and location, you need acoustic samples from multiple widely-spaced locations, all synchronized. Human ears are not wide enough apart to directionalize low frequencies, but with a baseline of tens or hundreds of meters from separate cell phones, it's not hard. Run a correlator, line up the samples, compute the hyperbolas of constant time offset, (like GPS and LORAN) a…

Sound travels, what, 30 centimeters a ms? Bluetooth/wifi is good for at least a few meters, and should have latency of around a ms. Should be pretty easy to synchronize via that.

You need to maintain millisecond sync while the devices are widely separated, possibly for hours. Cell phone clocks are not millisecond-accurate over hours. The idea is that a group of people all download the app and walk or drive around the area of interest collecting time-stamped audio and sending it to a server.

Amusingly, data collection would be easier with analog technology. Get some VHS walkie-talkies, and, at the base station, feed all the channels into a multitrack tape recorder like musicians use. No sync problems.

Re: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

#160

Check out The Singing Ringing Tree art exhibit: https://youtu.be/4B0hGyKV9qs?t=12

Went up there a while back but it seemed to be too windy for it to make any notes. But it is a beautiful sculpture in and of itself anyway.
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