I was watching the fireworks last night on Galveston Bay and noticed something I don’t understand. The rockets were being launched about a mile from us and I was timing the bang at about 4 seconds after the flash, which makes sense (they were probably being launched in our direction).
But I also noticed a faint audio perception, [sub]poof[/sub], near simultaneous with the flash. I pointed this out to others and they noticed it as well. If it was imagined, I guess I must’ve accidentally got some group hypnosis going on. That seems unlikely.
My best WAG at this point is that the little poof was the audio signal being transmitted to us via the water or the shoreline, which would help explain the amplitude being greatly attenuated. I’m not sure I’m ready to pound the table, but that’s all I’ve come up with. Any thoughts?
Is it possible that you were hearing the ‘foom’ from rockets that were launched about four seconds earlier? The sky is never that empty, and the rockets take different times to reach their various heights. If they were lighting the 'works every three to six seconds, then the sounds/ visuals might overlap.
Or maybe you were sitting way too close and they were firing away from you. Eyebrows still intact?
We were aware of the multitude of signals possibly being mispercieved, and still noted the phenomenon during lags when there were no possible inputs from previous rockets.
There was a similar topic to this one a short while back, but the experience was the other way around; the person was percieving a visual flash to accompany an unexpected sharp noise.
My (rather WA) guess would be that you’re ‘hearing’ part of your visual process at work (i.e. perhaps it’s not sound that you’re experiencing, but interference from the visual process to the auditory one)
‘Synaesthesia’ was the word I used in the other thread, but someone was quick to correct me with a definition of that word which was more strict and narrow than I had previously understood.
I think what you heard was the mortar blast that launched the shell. I was in downtown Boston for the fireworks last night and I could hear the launchers pretty clearly. It’s not a sharp explosion, more like the “poof” you described. And I’ve never timed it, but a four second delay from launch to explosion sounds about right. It’s just a coincidence that you were far enough away to hear that launch charge just as you saw the explosion.
There is a connection between perception of sight and sound. I recently saw an article in (I think) Science on some recent research on this: The subjects were shown a single flash of light, and at the same time, heard two rapid tones. When asked, they said they saw two flashes. It’s not inconceivable that your brain was filling in the sound to go with the light.
More likely, though, is that you were hearing the mortars or the rockets. I don’t think that you’d be hearing them through the water: The explosions can be as much as a mile or so high, so the sound would have to travel through at least that much air, and then the water/land, for some delay. Further, it would be travelling through many different thicknesses of air at various angles, which would smear the sound out in duration.
just another possibility, that seems too obvious to mention. Were you listening to the choreographed music on the radio while watching the fireworks? The radio broadcast originates at the site of the fireworks display and the sound of the explosion gets sent out to you at the speed of light, where you can hear it on the radio.
No music, or radio, involved. I’ll probably be watching them in the same place next year. Perhaps I can find out a little bit about how high they are when the blow (quite a bit of variance there) before then. I’m leaning towards the launchers being the source right now.
I think Robot Arm is correct. During the fireworks in my neighborhood the other night there were long lags and you could hear the launching sound-- in our case a couple of seconds before the visual lights as we were quite close, then a few seconds for the bang.