Obvious Diversion

Living in any city, you are bombarded by an array of sounds from cars and people and alarms, often bleeding into your usually thin apartment walls. My year in Spanish Harlem brought it’s fair share of noises, but one in particular was a curiosity for me as well as a regular irritation. My inability to find any information on the Internet about the sound leads to an interesting challenge.

What the Alarm Sounded Like

The alarm sounded like someone had taken a recording of a child yelling and processed it as if it had been compressed and re-compressed too many times. It begins at a low tone and pitches up quickly, roughly spanning a single octave. Once it reaches the higher pitch it can end within a few seconds or can continue at that pitch for roughly 30 minutes, perhaps longer. When it does end, it pitches up quickly to an even higher tone and then goes abruptly silent.

How do I Find this Sound?

There’s no reasonable way to search for this particular sound online. My description above will yield nothing useful from search engines and a more general search for “annoying sound new york city” will yield far too much. There is a real application here though outside of my goofy dilemma though. You hear a song on the radio, the tune is stuck in your head, and you have no idea what it is. You are capable of saying “It goes something like da da dee da dum dee.” but that’s the limit of it. Online audio can be marked up with metadata, but if you don’t know anything but the sound itself, there’s no way to make a match presently. At some point in the future, I’m sure analysis of the sound you make at your computer could be matched to the pattern of another analyzed sound, but that’s quite a ways off. Until then, you’ll have to submit your query to another human being.

How I Found My Answer

My landlord set up a barbecue with far too much food and more than enough beer (coolest landlord ever). Aside from having a good time and getting to know my neighbors, I got to have this conversation:

I’m looking forward to the day when I can ask the computer what this noise is, do my best impersonation, and receive the answer immediately. Until then, I’ll be happy to share a beer with my neighbors and make funny sounds.