My computer’s been talking to me lately. The speakers are making strange noises at random periods. The noise sounds somewhat like a police scanner - lots of static, unintelligable voices in the background, and the occasional fragmented sentence like ‘behnd the building’ or ‘as long as it’s possible’. Sometimes these phrases are repeated.
I’ve run a virus check and I’m clean. On at least one occasion, this has happened when my firewall was down (some applications I run just don’t play well with the firewall). I can’t recall if it always happens with the firewall down, or if the time I noticed it it was a coincidence that the firewall was down.
So what’s going on? My guesses are:
1 - somehow I am picking up a police or fire radio channel. Sometimes, though, it sounds as if I get the same sounds repeated over and over, ie, it’ll be something like static-hushed voices - half second pause - then a sentence fragment. Ten minutes later, I get the same sequence or something so close that it sounds the same.
2 - someone’s getting through my firewall and making my speakers go wacky
3 - I have a weird virus that Norton doesn’t know about yet.
What I can comment on though is that your computer could in fact be receiving radio signals. The amplifier in your sound card or speakers has a power supply, and power supplies usually have a diode in there somewhere for rectification and a capacitor for filtering. What’s an easy way to make an AM radio demodulator? Use a diode and a capacitor. So, what sometimes happens is that the little circuit traces act like small antennas, and the diodes and capacitors and such act like radio “decoders” (not sure how to explain “demodulate” to someone with no background in electronics), and voila, you have sound coming out of your speakers.
If the signal is very staticky and not so random then it may be some sort of automated equipment, or it may even be your computer itself. Computer electronics generate RF (radio frequency) noise due to the high speed of digital circuits turning on and off. The same basic thing happens. The RF noise gets coupled into the sound card amplifiers and you get staticky noise coming out of your speakers.
I have one computer that generates a lot of noise whenever the CD rom is active. I can almost tell what the CD drive is doing by simply putting on headphones and cranking up the volume (which is how I found the noise in the first place, got a quiet part in a song I was listening to and wondered where all of that annoying noise was coming from). Periodically, your computer will access your hard drive even if you aren’t doing anything. Windows still likes to do “maintenance” on its memory swap file, if nothing else.
Computer generated noise can mimick a very stacky voice type thing, but if you can actually make out words then I sincerely doubt that it is computer generated. It’s possible that someone is hacking, but that doesn’t seem at all likely (IMHO). My vote is on either something funky like office XP, or accidental radio reception.