1. A few years ago I spent some time in Falmouth, MA and there was an ongoing battle over newly installed wind turbines. The humming sound was getting to people, including to the point where they were getting headaches. Some people heard it and others didn't. The locals were going to war with the initiative. This article reminded me of that and I checked in on the ordeal. Looks like they shuttered the project and have started dismantling the turbines. It seems like a total failure: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-green-new-deal-in-profile-115...
2. I was on a solo canoe trip in a remote part of Maine a couple of weekends ago and I kept hearing the sound of a motor start up and then die down. I heard it multiple times along a 25 or so mile stretch of water with the only other sounds being birds, moose rumbling in the woods, and beavers slapping the water with their tails. I chalked the sound up to some wind turbines I had seen on my drive up there and felt justifiably annoyed at the encroachment of the industrial world into my backwoods trip. I did some research when I got home and it turned out that I was hearing ruffed grouse "drumming" to mark their territory. In retrospect, it's an amazing sound: https://youtu.be/q0obByQW23k?t=21
EDIT:
Cliche as it as, the fish bites at Landfall are pretty good! And it was always fun to swing by the aquarium after hours and listen to the seals bumping around in their pool. It's a beautiful place to visit if you ever get a chance.
You see... it's the Curse of Chappaquidick. The sound isn't just the breeze passing through turbines. It's the wailing of the immortal soul of Mary Jo Kopechne, her soul mercifully freed from the watery depths but bound to the wind.
Her soul, unable to find rest so long as the negligent and wealthy haunt her resting place, now eternally floats upon the wind... from Chappaquidick into the Vineyard Sound... across Penzance Point... into the Bay, and back out to sea.
But her spirit is not unkind or unfair. She has no discontent for teachers, scientists, artists, or sailors. They cannot hear her. They say... that only the truly wealthy can hear her cries.
https://www.quietpc.com/nf-a12x25-5v
https://cougargaming.com/us/products/cooling/cfd_red_led_fan...
From your links you can see that a 140mm computer fan at 1000RPM is noisier than a 120mm fan at 1200RPM. Even if the motor is quieter at the lower RPM, increasing the blade size is more than able to compensate and make it overall noisier, even with dimples and owl-wing tricks.
And it's not only the decibels that are the issue necessarily but also the frequencies which can propagate quite far and by all accounts are pretty disturbing. That low frequency hum that the blades produce by simply displacing air while they move is not a problem with a computer fan's tiny blades. And turbines come in farms.
https://theconversation.com/lyrebirds-mimicking-chainsaws-fa...
Don't fall for the parody though ...
I wonder what it's like to try to pull a signal up there.
Your comment brings up memories of Lighthouse Beach in Chatham, which has a ton of warnings about Great White Sharks due to the prevalence of seals in the waters. Beautiful place. If the sharks don't get you the radio frequencies will I guess.
Modern transmitters are tuned and filtered so they can coexist with everything else.
Mimicry is a powerful thing
This is purely speculation from my side of course, as I've never been there.
I found my trail journal entry about this: https://www.trailjournals.com/journal/entry/14113
Headed back up there in a couple days. Hope to hear the grouse pounding their wings, the moose walking through the water, and a wolf howling away.
Finally, at one point I asked a group of other thru hikers if they had experienced it, and they all excitedly nodded, but none of us knew the source. Finally, some local day hiker said “oh, it’s probably just a grouse”. And the mystery was solved. Many of us were very confused for months!
Now I never leave the dock without one of those portable car-starting batteries, completely disconnected from everything.
We had a very similar story, except we were the first to rent the boat at the start of the season and the battery bank hadn't been very well tested before they gave it to us -- a few had gone off over the winter. They drove out from HQ, replaced the bad ones with fresh stock from their van, and sent us on our way.
"I sailed from Deptford, April 9th, 1772, but got no farther than Woolwich, where I was detained by easterly winds till the 23d, when the ship fell down to Long Reach, and the next day was joined by the Adventure. Here both ships received on board their powder, guns, gunners' stores, and marines."
[http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00044.html]
So the "Resolution" managed about 8km on the day of departure from the London naval dockyard, then remained anchored in the river for 13 days waiting for the wind to change direction, finally managing 16km to the victualling dock.
Surely this was an issue with these specific turbines, right? Not a problem with all of them?
Giant stationary installations with very loud noises tend to cause weird noise issues. It's a lot of unfocused, or weirdly focused sonic energy that can't be heard from a little further away, but at exactly the right (well, wrong) place, it can get re-focused, leading to a droning noise that starts and stops unexpectedly. A good example that shows this phenomenon is real, despite being invisible is the Listening Vessels[0] exhibit at the Exploratorium or similar, with two giant parabolic sound reflectors.
For the wind farm, the issue isn't just turbines, but that specific turbine, down to the serial number and the serial number plate, at that exact location, temperature, humidity, causing a resonance in a specific resident's door, miles away. The resident may be able to replace, eg, the door, but often there are factors outside of the resident's control that contribute to the issue. Like the siding on the neighbor's house, or where their car is parked.
Ideally an acoustical consultant would be brought in during the design stage (just like SREs should be brought in during the design phase of a new service and not 5 minutes before it goes live), but that almost never happens, as we see (well hear) here.
At least in this case the noise can be heard by everybody. Imagine this noise coming off the bridge, but it's only audible from your bedroom Tuesdays when its cloudy. And none of your neighbors can hear it. You'd think you'd gone mad!
[0] https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/listening-vessels
Noise studies by qualified acoustical engineers are the rule not the exception in many jurisdictions.[1] But these only go so far, because the model of the predicted noise emissions from the as-yet-unbuilt turbine is only so detailed.
For what it's worth, no matter how much engineering you do there are always people who think they can hear something that can't be measured and won't be convinced otherwise.
On the other hand, a thing that really does reduce complaints is paying a community dividend to everyone who lives nearby (instead of just paying the owners of the actual land under the turbines).
It’s a horrible feeling, especially since people don’t believe you. It can hardly be measured, because people with the correct equipment don’t pay attention to you and other people think you’re crazy.
Actually, if anybody has more information on how would I go around fixing this issue or which party should I raise this with, I would welcome that. It’s been more than a decade but the turbine is still there even though affected people have moved out.
German researches recorded the sleep patterns of 397 residents in areas where there was previously no mobile reception. After erecting 10 towers, many people complained about a change in sleep patterns. 5 of the 10 towers were turned off though so had no actual effect. Just the believe was enough to cause problems. [0]
Sure, yes. The annoyance is justifiable. And I do not mean to come off as combative. I just wanted to say that our alternative forms of energy also encroach on the natural world in other ways (climate change, dirty mining, etc). So while turbines might more viscerally feel like an encroachment on nature, we must remember that they may displace some more destructive form of energy generation. I am not equipped to argue definitively that they are better, just that the visibility of wind turbines might influence our perception of them.
Every single time.
Kinda soothing, really. Just soft, deep thumps.
I was never able to identify it, and searching online gave me nothing.
It’s always the same length, about a second. It’ll come in pulses of 2 or 3 usually. Spread out a few minutes a part. It definitely sounds like an electronic sound. Almost like a sci fi satellite sound but deep in the water far away. Or maybe a far away whale mourning or something.
I just traveled for 3 months and heard it spread across 10 cities.
It’s very weird...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_management#Ripple_control
More details and maps here: https://www.facebook.com/williamp/posts/10106726609193073
Yup, the tone at 0:08 is pretty much the exact tone I heard. Mind-blowing. Never would have imagined that's what a fog horn sounded like. I expected them to all be much deeper tones like the ones that come a few seconds later. I guess there must be weird acoustic qualities that make only the higher toned ones carry into Nob Hill.
As of 8 years ago, they were using the FA-232 model fog horn, the circuitry was designed in the '70s and uses discrete BJTs on the boards to generate the tone and drive the "speaker".
1. The beep was very long - maybe a second or two - much longer than smoke alarms. 2. I could hear it blocks away from my apartment. No smoke alarm chirp would carry that far.
Any idea what you'd use to track down very low frequency noise sources(i.e. 15-60Hz)? I don't think a lot of sensors do well in that range.
The main drawback is that you may have to wait a while between updates.
I checked everything, but nothing. Asked my grandparents about it, but they couldn't hear any noises. Finally I got a friend over, and he could hear it clear as day.
One day I noticed my grandmothers hearing aids lying in a casing, and it turns out those were the source of noise. She'd forget to take out the batteries, and they would create a negative feedback-loop that came and went.
It's why kids could hear the whine of CRTs and their parents were completely oblivious, etc.
I feel like I wasted a bunch of perfectly good political capital at work in my fight with building management to get them to fix the lights. They finally replaced them with ballast-free LEDs after six months.
Could also be electronic noise. I wonder what the machine is.
I’d bet die grinder. They’re not used all the time, and they have VERY high rpm sounds which are always terrible.
(FWIW she's a very nice lady and has long since sold the house and moved away. I told her I had done that at one point and she just chuckled and didn't care)
The local council didn’t really care when I told them. It doesn’t bother me too much because I get up quite early anyhow, but I imagine this truck would manage to bother a rather large number of people every week. I wonder if the sound will go away next time it’s serviced.
It took me and my neighbours a month to find the source of a hum that was resonating with our windows. It was torture, with midnight walks and lurking around potential sources, mapping nearby industrial sites, and questioning our sanity, while our windows were vibrating without a stop. We were very lucky to track it down to a badly installed air conditioning vent 200 m away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum