The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World (41 page)

33 Raman, “On Whispering Galleries.”

34 S. Hedengren, “Audio Ease Releases Acoustics of Indian Monument Gol Gumbaz, One of the Richest Reverbs in the World,”
ProTooler
(blog), September 21, 2007, http://www.protoolerblog.com/2007/09/21/audio-ease-releases-acoustics-of-indian-monument-gol-gumbaz-one-of-the-richest-reverbs-in-the-world.

35 Ibid.

36 “The Missouri Capitol: The Exterior of the Jefferson City Structure Was Built Entirely of Missouri Marble,”
Through
the Ages Magazine
1 (1924): 26–32.

37
A Handbook for
Travellers in India, Burma, and Ceylon
, 8th ed. (London: John Murray, 1911).

1 M. L. Hunt and N. M. Vriend, “Booming Sand Dunes,”
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences
38 (2010): 281–301. There are probably more singing dunes to be found.

2 C. Darwin,
Voyage of the Beagle
(Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com, 2007), 224.

3 L. Giles, “Notes on the District of Tun-Huang,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
46 (1914): 703–28.

4 M. Polo,
The Travels of Marco Polo
(New York: Cosimo, 2007), 66.

5 S. Dagois-Bohy, S. Ngo, S. C. du Pont, and S. Douady, “Laboratory Singing Sand Avalanches,”
Ultrasonics
50 (2010): 127–32.

6 Data from “World's Largest Waterfalls by Average Volume,”
World Waterfall Database
, http://www.worldwaterfalldatabase.com/largest-waterfalls/volume, accessed December 27, 2012.

7 J. Knelman, “Did He or Didn't He? The Canadian Accused of Inventing CIA Torture,”
Globe and Mail
(Canada), November 17, 2007.

8 J. Muir,
John Muir: The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books
(Seattle, WA: Diadem, 1992), 623.

9 G. R. Watts, R. J. Pheasant, K. V. Horoshenkov, and L. Ragonesi, “Measurement and Subjective Assessment of Water Generated Sounds,”
Acta Acustica united with Acustica
95: 1032–39 (2009); L. Galbrun and T. T. Ali, “Perceptual Assessment of Water Sounds for Road Traffic Noise Masking,” in
Proceedings of the Acoustics 2012 Nantes Conference, 23–27 April 2012, Nantes, France
, 2153–2158.

10 Lee Patterson, personal communication, May 25, 2012.

11 The bubbles have quite a tight range of sizes, from 1 to 3 millimeters (about a twelfth of an inch) in radius, resulting in a narrow range of frequencies, from 1,000 to 3,000 hertz. It's possible that the bubbles come from a gas produced by insects, but given the fluctuations of the bubble production with light levels that Lee described to me, the source would seem more likely to be photosynthesis from very lively pondweed.

12 L. Rohter, “Far from the Ocean, Surfers Ride Brazil's Endless Wave,”
New York Times
, March 22, 2004.

13 For much more on tidal bores, see the excellent book by G. Pretor-Pinney
Wavewatcher's Companion
(London: Bloomsbury, 2010), from which some of the facts in this section are taken.

14 Z. Dai and C. Zhou, “The Qiantang Bore,”
International Journal of Sediment Research
1 (1987): 21–26.

15 W. U. Moore, “The Bore of the Tsien-Tang-Kiang,”
Proceedings of the
Institution of Civil Engineers
99 (1890): 297–304.

16 H. Chanson, “The Rumble Sound Generated by a Tidal Bore Event in the Baie du Mont Saint Michel,”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
125 (2009): 3561–68.

17 Terje Isungset, comment to the audience at a concert at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, England, November 7, 2011.

18 L. R. Taylor, M. G. Prasad, and R. B. Bhat, “Acoustical Characteristics of a Conch Shell Trumpet,”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
95 (1994): 2912.

19 P. Wyse, “The Iceman Bloweth,”
Guardian
(London), December 3, 2008.

20 This reminds me of a terrible hi-fi magazine article I once read claiming that the material of the shelf where a CD player rested significantly changed the sound—wooden shelves producing a warm sound, glass shelves producing a clearer sound!

21 B. L. Giordano and S. McAdams, “Material Identification of Real Impact Sounds: Effects of Size Variation in Steel, Glass, Wood, and Plexiglass Plates,”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
119 (2006): 1171–81.

22 O. Chernets and J. R. Fricke, “Estimation of Arctic Ice Thickness from Ambient Noise,”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
96 (1994): 3232–33.

23 Peter Cusack, personal communication, January 7, 2012.

24 Chris Watson, personal communication, November 15, 2011.

25 R. van der Spuy,
AdvancED Game Design with Flash
(New York: friendsofED, 2010), 462.

26 G. Lundmark, “Skating on Thin Ice—and the Acoustics of Infinite Plates” (paper presented at Internoise 2001, the 2001 International Congress and Exhibition on Noise Control Engineering, The Hague, Netherlands, August 27–30, 2001).

27 S. Dagois-Bohy, S. Courrech du Pont, and S. Douady, “Singing-Sand Avalanches without Dunes,”
Geophysical Research Letters
39 (2012): L20310.

28 E. R. Yarham, “Mystery of Singing Sands,”
Natural History
56 (1947): 324–25.

29 C. Grant,
Rock Art of the American Indian
(Dillon, CO: VistaBooks, 1992).

30 “Sound Effects: Castle Thunder,”
Hollywood Lost and Found
, http://www.hollywoodlostandfound.net/sound/castlethunder.html, accessed December 31, 2012.

31 Tim Gedemer, personal communication, June 24, 2012.

32 Heat is the normal explanation for why the shock wave forms; for example, see F. Blanco, P. La Rocca, C. Petta, and F. Riggi, “Modelling Digital Thunder,”
Eur
opean Journal of Physics
30 (2009): 139–45. But another suggestion is that the energy for the sound waves comes from breaking chemical bonds; see P. Graneau, “The Cause of Thunder,”
Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics
22 (1989): 1083–94.

33 H. S. Ribner and D. Roy, “Acoustics of Thunder: A Quasilinear Model for Tortuous Lightning,”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
72 (1982): 1911–25.

34 D. P. Hill, “What Is That Mysterious Booming Sound?”
Seismology Research Letters
82 (2011): 619–22.

35 D. Ramde and C. Antlfinger, “Wis. Town Longs for Relief from Mysterious Booms,”
Associated Press
, March 21, 2012.

36 J. Van Berkel, “Data Point to Earthquakes Causing Mysterious Wis. Booms,”
USA Today
, March 22, 2012.

37 C. Davidson, “Earthquake Sounds,”
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
28 (1938): 147–61.

38 L. Bogustawski, “Jets Make Sonic Boom in False Alarm,”
Guardian
(London), April 12, 2012.

39 For more stories about Krakatoa, see S. Winchester,
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883
(New York: Harper-Collins, 2005). The various contemporary quotes are extracted from this book.

40 Although no instrument existed to give a precise value of loudness, eyewitness reports have led to a commonly quoted figure of 180 decibels at 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the volcano. But I have been unable to find the origin of this estimation.

41 D. Leffman,
The Rough Guide to Iceland
(London: Rough Guides, 2004), 277.

42 Tim Leighton, personal communication, March 1, 2012.

43 The speed of the water ejection can exceed the speed of sound, leading to small sonic booms that make thudding sounds; see T. S. Bryan,
The Geysers of Yellowstone
, 4th ed. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008), 5–6.

44 Darwin,
Voyage of the Beagle
.

45 T. Hardy,
Under the Greenwood Tree
(Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com, 2007), 7.

46 O. Fégeant, “Wind-Induced Vegetation Noise. Part I: A Prediction Model,”
Acustica united with Acta Acustica
85 (1999): 228–40.

47 I was told this by garden designer Paul Hervey Brookes during an interview for BBC Radio 4 conducted May 20, 2011.

48 C. M. Ward, “Papers of Mel (Charles Melbourne) Ward,” AMS 358, Box 3, Notebook 31 (Sydney: Australian Museum, 1939). The two quotes are from C. A. Pocock, “Romancing the Reef: History, Heritage and the Hyper-real” (PhD dissertation, James Cook University, Australia, 2003).

49 Y. Qureshi, “Tower Blows the Whistle on Corrie,”
Manchester Evening News
, May 24, 2006.

50 “Beetham Tower Howls Again after Another Windy Night in Manchester,”
Manchester Evening News
, January 5, 2012. Before, the tower used to make noise at about 50 kilometers (30 miles) per hour; now it sings only when the wind speed exceeds 110 kilometers (70 miles) per hour.

51 G. Sargent, “I'm Sorry about the Beetham Tower Howl, Says Architect Ian Simpson,”
Manchester Evening News
, January 6, 2012. For other ways that buildings make noise, see M. Hamer, “Buildings That Whistle in the Wind,”
New Scientist
, no. 2563 (August 4, 2006): 34–36.

52 A. R. Gold, “Ear-Piercing Skyscraper Whistles Up a Gag Order,”
New York Times
, April 13, 1991.

53 Simon Jackson, of the acoustic-consulting firm Arup, tweeted, “Quick sound level measurement at Beetham Tower - 78dBLaeq,1s main freq in 250Hz 3rd/oct band” (@stjackson, January 3, 2012).

54 Nathalie Vriend, personal communication, February 17, 2012.

55 Curzon of Kedleston, Marquess,
Tales of Travel
(New York: George H. Doran, 1923), 261–339.

1 C. J. Plack,
The Sense of Hearing
(New York: Psychology Press, 2014), 53.

2 J. J. Eggermont and L. E. Roberts, “The Neuroscience of Tinnitus,”
Trends in Neurosciences
27 (2004): 676–82.

3 R. Schaette and D. McAlpine, “Tinnitus with a Normal Audiogram: Physiological Evidence for Hidden Hearing Loss and Computational Model,”
Journal of Neuroscience
31 (2011): 13452–57.

4 C. Watson, “No Silence Please,”
Inside Music
(BBC blog), December 2006, http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/insidemusic/nosilenceplease, accessed June 1, 2009.

5 To be precise, it is –9.4 dBA. The
A
means this is an A-weighted decibel, where corrections are applied to allow for the fact that the ear is less sensitive at low frequencies.

6 It is still useful to make the halls very quiet, because audience noise is reduced in quieter auditoriums. C.-H. Jeong, M. Pierre, J. Brunskog, and C. M. Petersen, “Audience Noise in Concert Halls during Musical Performances,”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
131 (2012): 2753–61.

7 M. Botha, “Several Futures of Silence: A Conversation with Stuart Sim on Noise and Silence,”
Kaleidoscope
1, no. 1 (2007), https://www.dur.ac.uk/kaleidoscope/issues/i1v1/sim_1_1. Stuart Sim authored
A Manifesto for Silence
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

8 J. A. Grahn, “Neural Mechanisms of Rhythm Perception: Current Findings and Future Perspectives,”
Topics in Cognitive Science
4 (2012): 585–606.

9 D. Levitin,
This Is Your Brain on
Music
(London: Atlantic, 2006).

10 Charles Deenen, personal communication, June 24, 2012.

11 See either K. Young, “Noisy ISS May Have Damaged Astronauts,”
New Scientist
, June 2006; or C. A. Roller and J. B. Clark, “Short-Duration Space Flight and Hearing Loss,”
Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery
129 (2003): 98–106.

12 Young, “Noisy ISS.”

13 T. G. Leighton and A. Petculescu, “The Sound of Music and Voices in Space Part 2: Modeling and Simulation,”
Acoustics Today
5 (2009): 17–26.

14 A. Moorhouse,
Environmental Noise and Health in the UK
(Oxfordshire, UK: Health Protection Agency, 2010).

15 J. Voisin, A. Bidet-Caulet, O. Bertrand, and P. Fonlupt, “Listening in Silence Activates Auditory Areas: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study,”
Journal of Neuroscience
26 (2006): 273–78.

16 D. Van Dierendonck and J. T. Nijenhuis, “Flotation Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) as a Stress-Management Tool: A Meta-analysis,”
Psychology and Health
20 (2005): 405–12.

17 H. Samuel, “French Told Not to Complain about Rural Noise,”
Daily Telegraph
(London), August 22, 2007.

18 C. Ray, “Soundscapes and the Rural: A Conceptual Review from a British Perspective,” Centre for Rural Economy Discussion Paper no. 5, February 2006, http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cre/publish/discussionpapers/pdfs/dp5.pdf.

19 Publisher's note from G. Hempton and J. Grossmann,
One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World
(New York: Free Press, 2009).

20 “What Is One Square Inch?”
One Square Inch: A Sanctuary for Silence at Olympic National Park
, http://onesquareinch.org/about, accessed July 5, 2013.

21 R. M. Schafer,
The Tuning of the World
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977).

22 US National Park Service,
Management Policies
(Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, 2006), 56.

23 The research underpinning the campaign is given in great detail in S. Jackson, D. Fuller, H. Dunsford, R. Mowbray, S. Hext, R. MacFarlane, and C. Haggett,
Tranquillity Mapping: Developing a Robust Methodology for Planning Support
(Centre for Environmental and Spatial Analysis, Northumbria University, 2008).