Silent sound capture, can someone help me?

I am trying to capture some odd acoustics that I’m finding in a particular location.

I can hear these acoustics, but others around me can not. However, when I record on audacity, the frequency 's getting picked up even spread from 0-5,000 hz to 0-10,000 hz depending.

When I push play - obviously I can hear nothing, but I see that a frequency spectrum is being captured.

I’ve played with vocoder, as well as any nyquist prompts I’ve found online, and played w/ low pass filter/high pass filter settings, however nothing is able to produce an audible sound. When I do produce a sound its just a strange noise, that isn’t what I’m hearing in real life.


Can someone point me in the right direction? The sooner the better.

If others cannot hear it and it cannot be recorded, then perhaps it isn’t actually “sound” in the normal sense. There are many claims of people hearing radio through tooth fillings. don’t think that has been proven either for or against, though theoretically it is possible that a person could hear something if the radio signal is strong enough and their fillings just happen to be tuned into the right frequency. Another possibility could be synaesthesia (a phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia).

Receiving radio on tooth-fillings is an urban myth … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2003_season)#Radio_Tooth_Fillings

Tinnitus is more common than synaesthesia.

If it’s occasional random words and phrases which are faintly heard, (not normal-length coherent-sentences),
then it could be background-noise misinterpreted as words via pareidolia.

They proved that they were unable to reproduce the alleged behaviour, but absence of proof is not proof of absence. It is certainly not a common phenomenon, but personally I would not rule it out as impossible, and I think it’s not the most improbable explanation (I wonder what is :open_mouth: :smiley: )

The Bouba/kiki effect shows that mapping between senses is extremely common with over 90% of people doing it.

I agree that Tinnitus could be a reasonable explanation, but if so I’d expect that jeanacm would experience it at other times rather than only “in a particular location”.

I see that a frequency spectrum is being captured.

Correct. If you have a gentle amount of evenly distributed noise in the frequency spectrum, that is most likely the natural noise generated by the microphone or the microphone system. If you amplify it enough, it will sound like ffffffffffffff.

I call it “rain in the trees.”

When your job is to record a performance, the object is to make the voice or instrument much louder than that background hiss without getting so loud that the system overloads. That’s what the recordist does. That’s what I do.

If all you get is that even, featureless spectrum display, that just means the sound you’re hearing is lower in volume than the natural noise in the microphone.

One of the important differences between a home and a studio recording system is the loudness of that noise. Home microphones tend to be noisier than the studio, and all-in-one and laptop microphones tend to be the worst.

There was a posting from someone who couldn’t sleep because of house noises. The noises were so low in volume that Audacity couldn’t record them with any accuracy. Fast-forward many forum postings, the noise was most likely a neighbor’s refrigerator backed up against the common wall.

Is this why we need to hurry up?

Koz

I can most noticeably hear my tinnitus in the quietest room in my home, which is a “a particular location”.
[ perhaps an auditory equivalent of prisoner’s cinema ? ]