Driving along city streets, I heard a sound I’d never heard before. Sort of like a twittering or warbling bird-call, high pitched. High for a second, low for a second. I had no idea what it could be. Absolutely new to me.
Then I go around a corner and am nearly face-to-face with an oncoming ambulance! (The bad news, he was across the center divider and in oncoming lanes! The good news, there were two oncoming lanes, so I didn’t block him. But he honked the hell out of me!)
YIKES! How is someone supposed to know? It didn’t sound like any siren I’d ever heard. It could have been a warning for a big truck backing up. It could have just been a car alarm, and we hear (and ignore) those all the damn time!
Maybe a Public Service Announcement on tv and radio? Fair warning? Damn!
(Would a judge be at all sympathetic to this defense if I’d gotten a ticket for obstructing the ambulance?)
Heh, sometime in the mid-'60s I was on a school trip to Washington, DC. Sometime just before the trip, I had seen the 1951 version of the The Day the Earth Stood Still on TV and it had left a pretty strong impression.
I was walking down the street with a classmate when we heard this unearthly “woop-woop” sound, getting louder and louder. We started looking around for the UFO we thought was landing, then saw that an approaching ambulance was making the noise. First time I ever heard one of those electronic sirens, rather than the old-school spinning kind, you see.
I’ve heard that people are incredibly good at simply tuning out the sound of any type of siren, but the one thing that’s actually known to help prevent that is to switch to different siren noises constantly. So they’ve ended up with a whole bunch of new noises these days.
Well, the last time this happened (around here) they fixed up sirens that alternated between the standard “Dragnet” siren of my childhood, and the see-sawing high-low “British” siren. Fire trucks would sound one, then the other, back and forth. And break it up with a harsh nasty “HONK” for good measure.
Maybe they should have broken in this new sound by alternating it with the old sounds.
(Intriguing that people would filter out the sounds of sirens. To me, they are a sound I can’t ignore! Like a baby crying next door: I wish I could tune it out!)
Yes! The first part of the sound, the twittering warbling bit. The video goes on to play a regular whiny Dick Tracy siren, but the first bit, the “car alarm” tweeting, was what threw me for a loss. Thank you!
