Soon after the story broke that people were using those frequencies to annoy away teen punks, ringtones and other phone sounds began to be crafted at high frequencies, so kids could now get away with prohibited cell phone usage. But that’s not really produced music for mass consumption.
I’m betting real mainstream stars aren’t going to do this – how would they bill it? Music your parents can’t hear? What contemporary musician would be so passive aggressive? Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez are marketed as too sweet to cheat. Cardi B brags on her tough persona --“eff 'em if they can’t handle it” but she’s not gonna hide.
Then of course, eventually, such music will be classic, 30 years from now, and their old fans will still want to hear it. And of course, people like all music no matter what their age.
Note that an octave is a doubling of frequency. There’s not a lot of notes to play with* in the range 15kHz to 25kHz and that’s being optimistic on the range. Plus there’s a lot of harmonics in music. Harmonics of the high notes that are below 15kHz will be audible and those above 25kHz won’t. So they could sound strange to either group. (But note that a lot of sound processing is done in the brain. It can get complicated.)
Furthermore, the human ear is most sensitive in the 2kHz-5kHz range. A lot of subtlety of sound is going to be lost at high frequencies.
So, you could throw in some notes but you’ll have to keep it simple.
That very high range tends (I think - please correct me) to be where some high harmonics happen, rather than notes. For example, the “bright-ness” and “pingy-ness” in the sound of a cymbal, or the “character” of one guitar compared to another guitar. You can still hear the cymbal or the guitars without these harmonics; you’re just hearing less than the complete range of what’s happening.
And because they’re already so high, notes in that range wouldn’t have much in the way of audible harmonics themselves - meaning they’d nearly always sound like a bland featureless tone, not like one instrument or another.
Not a song, but there is the famous 15 kHz dog whistle at the end of Side 2 of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I’ve never heard it (it was left off the US vinyl version) and by the time it was released on CD in 1987 I was probably too old to hear it. My son heard it when he was about 10.
Quick test shows that Apple Earpods are -18 dB at 15K.
A 18 dB boost seems like is just asking for trouble. If someone finds a song I would like to hear how harsh it sounds on speakers without much fall off. I would assume trying to mix for the least common denominator while still having good sound on larger systems would take some ingenuous mixing work.
I’ve heard some opera music where a soprano is singing extremely high, and while it’s technically impressive that a human is capable of producing those notes, the net effect is that it sounds like a sine-wave generator, not like a pleasing voice.
To be fair, that’s probably due to the limits of the recording, not to the limits of hearing itself (I can hear Mosquito tones, even past age 40), and so maybe it’d sound better live, but the limits of the recording are still relevant, because that’s how most people listen to music nowadays, and digital compressed audio (i.e., pretty much all of it) cuts off high frequencies at some point.
Crazy enough “soprano” typically tops out at C6 (1,047 Hz) and the insane “coloratura soprano” hits a G6 (1568 Hz). This is really close to the typical 1khz test tone they use at the start of tapes.
I am cursed with a basso profondo like range of G#1 (52 Hz) to B3 (247 Hz) which means that most microphones, mixing boards and speakers cut off most of my useful range because it is also the range of handling noises.
In my limited in-person experience (dated a soprano good enough to get national leads) it seems to be that stressed high notes at ungodly volumes tend to be more centered on the fundamental frequency. Pro opera singers can maintain notes much louder than the typical jackhammer and thus is very different from most singing.
Almost 30 years, I dated a man who owned a used record store, and as closing time approached, or if he had customers about whom he had some reason to believe might be troublesome, he would put on classical music. It never failed to amaze him who knew what it was, as in who wrote it, performed it, what piece it was, etc. and other potential teenage non-hangouts have done comparable things.
You can’t make any assumptions at all, any more, about what music “kids these days” will be into. Yeah, some of them will be into whoever is the current manufactured plastic pop-star-of-the-moment, but you’ll find teenagers into Gregorian chant, or Tuvalan throat-singing, or baroque, or medieval French folk, or whatever else you can think of.
As an audiophile I could hear it well into my 40’s. I couldn’t pinpoint the actual pitch/frequency, but could hear it as a faint steady sound. I don’t know how unusual I may or may not have been in that regard; by the time I was 50 Martha’s whistle was long gone for my ears.
Any music exclusively produced up there would sound quite anemic. Even in the more usual range, leaving out bass creates a very delicate sound that is used primarily as an effect, not an entire piece.
I could see, however, putting something up there in the mix for those who can hear it. Put an extra bit of melody up there.
Though I will note that the whole point of those special sounds only teens can here is that they are extremely annoying when they hear them. So it might not be aesthetically pleasing to them, anyways.
I recall Olivia Newton-John’s 1970’s cover of Lovin’ You kept hitting a pretty spectacular high note at the end of each chorus. I also remember it was played endlessly on pop radio and me & my brother’s dog really hated that note.
Then, some time earlier this decade, I heard a cover of ON-J’s cover and the singer was replicating that high note – except she seemed to be pushing even higher and (for lack of a better term) thinner*.
I remember hearing it two or three times at different shopping malls and thinking, “Of all the songs on the planet that shouldn’t have been remade, this one sounds worse now than when it was Pop in my day!”
So how high was that note, anyway?
–G!
*Seriously! The song seems to have been written to showcase that high note and it was annoying when Olivia was able to hit it. The person doing the recent cover seemed to be cracking or off-key when pushing for her higher-than-Olivia’s high note.
Minnie Riperton, Olivia Newton-John - and more recently, Sandi Patti, Mariah Carey, and don’t forget Bradley Delp, who by the time I saw Boston in the mid 1990s had an understudy to hit those extreme high notes. The next boyfriend I had after the aforementioned business owner had perfect pitch, and he said that note was the E two octaves above middle C. I’ve never forgotten that.
The ex-boyfriend, BTW, used opera for REAL potential troublemakers.
I also recall working in a computer room shortly after graduating from high school, and one day, the magnetic tape machine (remember those?) made a very high-pitched sound that not everyone in the department could hear. I could, and it was PAINFUL. Hearing aids of the era also often did this (and sometimes still do); as a teenager, I attended a church where there was an elderly man who would sit up front and often fell asleep during the sermon. One morning, it did this, and the pastor said, “Would someone please wake up Mr. (his name) and tell him that his hearing aid is malfunctioning?”
That’s sort of the definition of teen pop.
