I got to thinking about this, and realized that perhaps folks here could help me with a long-standing enigma:
Back in high school I would often hear an odd sound when talking to friends on the phone- a sort of faint mechanical beep, just at the edge of hearing, like “bedeep bedeep bedeep,” very much a two-part beep. I would ask my friends if they heard it, and they always said no. Since my cordless phone often picked up odd static and crosstalk, I assumed that the sound was just an odd bit of electrical noise.
The weird part is that I began hearing it when I wasn’t on the phone. It was faint enough that it was never clear to me whether it was real or was just my imagination- I thought that perhaps its near-continual presence on the phone had gotten it stuck in my head. But now that I think about it, I realize that while I can clearly remember hearing the sound in my room, and am pretty sure I can remember hearing it elsewhere in the house, I don’t remember hearing it at school, at friends’ houses, or in the car (although those places might have been too noisy.) I think I can remember hearing the sound in my backyard. I don’t think I ever heard it at college.
Does anyone have any idea what this sound could have been? Although at the time I assumed it was in my head (except when I heard it on the phone) I’m now starting to wonder if it was real. After all, martial spats can erupt from malfunctioning TVs that produce sounds that women can hear but men can’t (because of their high pitch,) which makes me wonder if the sound was coming from an electrical transformer or something near my house. Any ideas?
Actually it’s probably just that your implant needs the uranium battery replaced (damn government contractors). You can usually do it yourself with a cordless drill and a plug making bit (just stop by the hardware store and ask for the Salinger bit, they’ll know what you need).
Could be you were hearing the “backup beepers” on garbage trucks and many other types of heavy, earth-moving type equipment? This incredibly pervasive noise (there is rarely a time here in Chicago when you can be outdoors during nice weather and not hear one of these voices speaking) can be heard for miles in every direction, and I’ve often thought it would be worth having several thousand construction and other workers crushed to death by idiots backing their vehicles over them to rid ourselves of this government-mandated noise.
When I was a kid, our main Power board where all the fuses were, whatchamacallit, used to regularly beep every night at about the same time. Maybe it’s something like that. And maybe it’s the neighbour’s one, not your own.
Funny as this may sound, the smoke detector may not be too far off the mark.
I’ve been hearing a sound like that for about 2 months straight- I’ve searched this house top to bottom to find the source to no avail. Finally, I went into a storage room we never use, and lo and behold- an old smoke detector we took out of a now unused apartment was buried in a box, making that sound. It was driving me nuts, but apparently it is the “the battery is dying” alert in the smoke detector. Go figure!
Zette
Love is like popsicles…you get too much you get too high.
Ben, I have heard what I think is the same sound. Indoors,outdoors, even way out in wilderness. Not very frequent,very faint,short, high pitched,not always two toned but often,some times it seems to be two seperate beeps. a quick “beep” is the best description. Very 'Electronic" as opposed to ElectriCAL. Not at all like the “GIT OUT THA WAY, I’M BACKIN UP!” sound. It doesn’t even sound like a loud noise from a distance. It is very faint on the fringes of audability,but doesn’t seem to be covered by stronger ambiant sounds, and usually seems to come from all around non directional ,though sometimes it seems to come from from very close directly above or behind the head which is why I always figured it was internal,… Especially since no one else seems to hear it when I do. It does not sound like the representations of tinitinitus i have heard. Nor to what my daughter named the E sound,a temporary whine in one ear, “EEEEEEEE”, about the same decibal level but higher pitched and longer. Usually goes away with some jaw stretching or even whapping oneself upside the head lightly. I read about that once and if memory serves it is due to a temporary physical irritaion to the auditory nerves. . I dunno what the BEEP is, daughter says its tiny aliens in tiny ufos honking their horns. So I don’t think you got much to worry about,Ben, it doesn’t seem to have affected me,Hmm well, consider the source, but I don’t think it is serious. It does sound a lot like the alarm of my son’s new electronic Baby Ben Clock, turned way down.
“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.”-Marx
The “two-part” of your two-part beep would seem to point at your own heart beat as a probable suspect. Next time you hear the beeping, count them for 15 seconds and see if the intervals are the same as your pulse. Why you would be hearing your pulse as “beeps”, I don’t know.
I second (or third or fourth?) the smoke detector thing. It happened to me when I was a kid, I thought I was going nuts.
Can women hear higher pitches than men? I have never heard of that. I ask because there was a weird beeping coming from my car that only I could hear, my husband and male friends couldn’t. Eventually, the sound changed, and then Mr. Gretchen could hear it. Weird.
OK, then, on the subject of mysterious sounds, explain this one to me:
In an apartment that Mr. Gretchen and I used to live in, we heard the weirdest stuff. One night, as we were going to sleep, this really loud raspy breathing noise just started. “It” took about three big breaths, then just stopped. We were both awake, and just bolted straight up in bed when we heard it. The apartment did not have any kind of forced air heating or air conditioning, and the sound was definitely not coming in from the window. In fact, I would describe it as coming from the closet area on the opposite side of the window. What the hell was it??? It was quite loud, about as loud as a voice in conversation. Since everything else was silent in the apartment, it was very noticeable. It was like the sound of a heavy smoker breathing in and out. Even now, I get a little freaked out relaying the story.
Any ideas or similar experiences?
the beeping may be the electrical wiring in the house or something like that. here at my university, every building (at least the academic ones, and the dorms too, i think) have a pulse that goes through the wires about 3 till the hour, every hour. it keeps all the clocks at the same time (theoretically). this produces an audible hum, click, and another hum (sometimes) for about 5 seconds. it goes through everything. you don’t need a speaker anywhere to hear it, either. it’s a bitch at the student radio station. the student tv station had to have at least 4 huge buffers that everything was plugged into so that the tone didn’t go across the broadcast signal. it’s so freakin’ annoying.
Miss Gretchen, the kind of thing that most sounds like raspy breathing is two papery or tree-like things rubbing together. It could easily have been something like a wall panel or something loose outside rubbing against a pipe or something.
Guano-
Yeah, I thought it might be something like that, but I’m still confused as to why that particular sound occurred only once, starting and stopping suddenly.
This was out in the middle of nowhere, oftentimes late at night with no trucks around. Plus, the area was pretty much localized to the house, if not to my room.
-Ben
You mean the sound occurs infrequently, or that the beeps are spaced far apart?
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Exactly- it’s like the sound is very intimate, like it’s right in your ear rather than far away.
I’m not worried- it just bugs me. Especially because I can’t figure out whether it was real or not, and thus it makes me feel like a character from a Philip K. Dick novel or something.
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Actually, I’m leaning towards the “it’s connected to my heartbeat” theory, but I can’t test it because it doesn’t happen anymore. Then again, the fact that it only happened near the house indicates that maybe it’s not physiological. On the third hand, I think I could hear it in the backyard, and also smoke detectors tend to beep every few hours, rather than a constant stream of little beeps.
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My high school science teacher said that she complained about a strange whine from the TV that her husband couldn’t hear. When the TV finally broke down, the TV repairman asked, “Did you hear a whine that your husband couldn’t hear?”
One night I heard a rather loud snorty breathing right in my ear, but I couldn’t get my glasses on fast enough to investigate. When I saw “Mystery Men” I realized that it was probably a skunk right outside my window (the window is right next to my head.)
gretch, there used to be a little boutique i couldn’t stand shopping in because of the burglar alarm, a very high-pitched whistle. there was only maybe one woman who worked there who could hear it or had heard customers complain about the sound, but i found it maddening.
ben, could your sound be the soft tic-toc of a battery clock? some of them make a very soft sound as they advance the hands half a step back & a double step forward. i have pretty good hearing & can sometimes hear from upstairs the clock in the downstairs bath, even w/ the door closed.
or is there something else in the house that might pulse, an electronic calendar, palm pilot, cell phone, or maybe a battery station for one of those?
This was back in about 1988, so a lot of that stuff didn’t exist back then. As I think about it, I think that I once took the cordless phone outside and heard the sound over the phone louder than it was when I used the phone inside. This would indicate that maybe it’s an electrical signal that was picked up by the phone. I’m not sure why I would hear it when I wasn’t on the phone- perhaps that was my imagination, or my fillings were picking up radio waves? Can that really happen, or is that just something that crazy people believe in?