Of all our five senses I don’t think any of them are as intrinsically linked to emotion and memory quite as much as our hearing is. I’m your host, Leah…I’m Phil…and I’m Steve. today we’ll be delving into the world of mysterious and strange sounds.
Have you ever heard a song and immediately been transported back to a specific time on your life? I know that whenever I hear anything from the group Alabama it takes me back to when I was a kid and my sister and I would play our mom’s records and dance in the living room. That Alabama record was destroyed when one of us--I can’t remember which--danced right onto the record we had carelessly tossed onto the floor. My mom was not amused.
It’s said that patients in the advanced stages of dementia will sometimes respond to music when they won’t respond to anything else. I saw a video of an elderly Alzheimer patient who used to be a ballerina moving her arms so gracefully to the music of Swan Lake. Without the music her movements are shaky and clumsy at best and she has lost most all of her memories but the music brings something back. It’s a beautiful video.
Sound has effects on us that I think we often overlook. Did you know that infrared sound, tones below the range of human hearing, can still greatly affect us? According to an article at NBCNews.com, infrasound can produce a range of bizarre effects in people including anxiety, extreme sorrow and chills — supporting popular suggestions of a link between infrasound and strange sensations.
There have been studies trying to link the infrasound to cases involving paranormal activity suggesting that instead of being haunted by something paranormal that perhaps we are being manipulated by low frequency sounds.
Interesting, huh? Well let’s talk about some unsettling and mysterious sounds by diving right off into the deep.
UNDERWATER As you know, the Earth is more water than land and only about 5% of our oceans have been thoroughly explored and charted so it stands to reason that a lot of mysterious noises come from the deep waters of the ocean. I find this very unsettling. No one knows for sure what is down there.
SOFAR CHANNEL But before we delve into some of the mysterious sounds that emanate from the depths let me tell you about an acoustical phenomenon of the ocean called the SOFAR Channel. S-O-F-A-R stands for sound fixing and ranging channel. The deeper you dive down into the sea, the higher the water pressure, right? That means the water gets denser and denser and sound travels better through dense material than it does through thinner or less-dense material. So sound should travel better and better the deeper you go. But there’s more to it than that because the water also gets colder as you descend and sound travels better through warm water than it does cold.
That means there’s a sweet spot--the SOFAR channel--a depth at which that sound waves travel best through the ocean. There is a seasonal variance but the channel lies at approximately 1,000 meters (or 3,300 feet) below the surface. And let me clarify, it’s not just the area that sound travels best, it is an area in which sounds waves can travel over the entire ocean.
According to--and quoting from--an article for Flypaper.soundfly.com, “The aptly-named Heard Island experiment in 1991 tested this principle and pushed it to the limit, letting off an underwater noise near a remote Australian island which was picked up by hydrophones (underwater microphones) 1,000 meters below the surface on both coasts of the United States. That’s almost half the circumference of the entire Earth!”
It’s no surprise then that marine life, specifically whales make use of the SOFAR Channel to communicate with each other. But also our militaries--and presumably other countries’ militaries--do as well. I don’t remember it from the movie but according to Wikipedia the novel The Hunt for Red October describes the use of the SOFAR channel in submarine detection.
BLOOP Let’s talk about the BLOOP. Mental Floss describes it best when they call it “the big kahuna in unexplained sounds.”
Ever since the cold war there has been a network of underwater microphones throughout the world’s oceans. Originally they were to scan for enemy submarines but since that time they have also been used for scientific purposes.
One of the most famous and powerful underwater sound events, known as Bloop, was recorded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1997. The Bloop event lasted for about 1 minute and rose in frequency from a low rumble. It was one of the loudest underwater sounds ever recorded: hydrophones more than three thousand miles apart all captured the same noise. And researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which first recorded the bloop, were at a loss to figure out what exactly made the sound.
A manmade sound was immediately ruled out but if the sound came from an animal the animal would have to be much larger than any known marine species. That lead to several fanciful theories of a massive deep sea monster.
Bloop is generally accepted today by scientists to be caused by a massive icequake, or the calving of an iceberg where a large chuck falls off. However the idea of the sound coming from something organic like an undiscovered sea creature hasn’t ben totally ruled out.
Before we listen to the Bloop let me tell you that I got my information from Wikipedia and Mental floss
[SOUND] https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/acoustics/sounds/bloop.wav
OBSOLETE SOUNDS We are constantly surrounded by sounds that form the backdrop of our lives. I can remember growing up just outside of a small town called Kerrville in the Texas Hill Country. It seems that we were in an area that was greatly populated by a wide variety birds. The sound of birdsong was an ever-present companion to my childhood memories. One of my favorites was the distinct song of the whippoorwill whose call mimics its name and also announces the arrival of spring. I’m happy to report that when I travel back to my old home that the birds are still there even though the town has grown to surround our property.
But as times change, some of the sounds that we become accustomed to in our surroundings tend to come and go. They are ever-present for a while, but then as circumstance or technology changes, the once-familiar sounds begin to fade away. Today we are going to explore some of these increasingly obsolete sounds. We will be playing some sound effects from various free-to-use youtube channels.
16 MM Projector
I graduated from college in 1980. My degree was a Bachelors of Arts in Teaching and my specialization was in social studies. The final year of my study was what was and is still known as teacher methods. One class that I found to be especially helpful was called A/V Tech. In this class we learned how to operate several pieces of equipment including this device. [SOUND] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ORUxWsMU8c
No, that’s not a machine gun, that’s a 16 mm projector. It was always an exciting day for the kids to come into my classroom and see the big projector on a cart perched at the back of the room. Every Thursday we would receive deliveries from the local educational service center, occasionally containing films that I had actually ordered. I became quite skilled at threading the film through the various sprockets and slots. I was also quite adept at mending a break in the film in a dark classroom full of jr. high students. Occasionally if there were a few extra minutes in class you could hit the reverse switch and show the movie backwards which enhanced the educational benefit of the video with some impromptu entertainment. Another now archaic device that I learned how to operate was the Dukane Filmstrip Projector. Educational filmstrips at the time had advanced to using a cassette tape to narrate the slides. A helpful “ding” of a bell notified you when to move to the next slide. A couple of years into my career our school obtained the Advanced Dukane which had a cassette player built right into the projector. Rather than a ding, there was a signal on the opposite side of the cassette that told the projector when to advance the slide. It was quite uptown and also demonstrates our point that the familiar ‘ding’ had become obsolete.
Rotary Dial Phone and Telephone Bell and other sounds
Earlier I mentioned my old hometown of Kerrville. Recently I was there browsing through an antique store and I spotted this lovely device.
(I will demonstrate my rotary dial phone)
I especially liked it because on the receiver there was a sticker from the 1960s with the numbers of the local police, fire, ambulance, and Pizza Hut. (This was before our town had the 911 system) I had it hanging in my classroom until I retired last year. My students were always curious and somewhat flummoxed by the device, though a few stated that their great grandparents still had one in their home. They were astounded that you actually had to know the number of the person you were calling. Yes, rotary dials were clumsy and could be frustrating if you were trying to dial in a hurry.
Now along with the sound of the rotary dial came some other unique sounds. ⦽
Yes, that’s the sound of an actual telephone with a bell inside. I remember the comedian George Carlin back in the 70s commenting that it was a good thing that the phone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell instead of Alexander Graham Siren or else we’d be summoned to phone calls by an ear-piercing siren.
⦽ Dial tone, You had to wait until you heard that before you could start dialing. But then sometimes you would hear a busy signal. That meant that the person you were trying to call was on the line talking to someone else. If the household contained teenage daughters, this was the sound most often heard when you tried to call them. By the late 80s something called call-waiting was developed which gave you a little signal to let you know that someone was trying to call you, but up until then you had no idea.
DIAL UP MODEM Speaking of phone lines, this one is not as old as the rotary dial so you might be familiar with it.
[SOUND] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDS4B0mM-ew
In the late 1990s and early 2000s home internet access came through your landlines. The dial-up modem made this bizarre sound while connecting. The connections were slow, but hey, at least you were out there on the information super highway!
52 BLUE Continuing with oceanic sounds, scientists have been listening to one particular whale for decades. Called the 52 Hertz whale, or 52 BLUE, this poor creature is also known as the loneliest whale in the world as its call (at 52 Hertz) is much higher than the call of any other whale. The species of the whale is speculated to be wither a blue whale or a fin whale but is ultimately unknown since it’s only been heard and never seen but scientists believe its unusual voice is due to a genetic malformation from it possibly being a hybrid species or just having an unfortunate defect. Either way no other whale is likely to be able to hear 52 Blue’s lonely call.
Scientists can hear it though and has tracked 52 Blue’s migration since 1989 and according to Wikipedia potential recordings of a second 52-hertz whale, heard elsewhere at the same time, have been sporadically found since 2010.
According to Mental Floss there has been recent attempts to raise $400,000 on Kickstarter to seek the mammal out. And quoting MF, “It should be noted that the fundraiser reached its goal through the help of Leonardo DiCaprio, another mysterious beast.”
Info from the aforementioned Menatl Floss and Wikipedia.
[SOUND]
THE PING Then there’s “The Ping.” Quoting from Wikipedia: “Fury and Hecla Strait in Canada is the site of an unexplained phenomenon called "The Ping", also described as a "hum" or "beep" heard throughout summer of 2016. It was heard by various residents of the town of Igloolik, and local hunters blamed it for a comparative scarcity of marine game animals that year. Canadian military authorities performed an airborne survey of the area but reported nothing unusual, nor did they have any knowledge of allied or foreign submarine activity in the area.” All they know is a mysterious noise scared off the fish.
OTHER DEEP SEA NOISES There are so many other unexplained sounds coming from the ocean such as The Julia, The Upsweep, The Whistle and others. These are sounds you’ll have to Google because we don’t have time to explore them all but scientists think most of these are either volcanic in nature or created by the movement, crashing or calving of icebergs. Now let’s move from the terrifying depths of the ocean to the unsettling sounds on land.
INTRO TO LAND NOISES Some interesting sounds we have talked about before in Remnant Stew is the Aztec Death Whistle and the nursery rhyme that played sporadically in the English town of Ispswitch, remember those? The Aztec Death Whistle was incredibly creepy. I didn’t expect much from the desciption but listening to it quickly changed my mind. If you want to hear it for yourself go back to our S1E07 called Spooky. Lots of other unsettling stories there as well.
We talked about the Nursery Rhyme “The Old Man is Snoring” and how it haunted Ipswitch in the ODJ of our S1E8 Four Legged Soldiers.
FOREST GROVE SOUND That leads into my next story of a similar situation in which a town has a mysterious and vey annoying sound. Unlike Ipswitch where spider activity was setting off an alarm, there is no known source for the sound haunting the residents of Forest Grove, Oregon.
Forest Grove is a town near Portland known to be a quaint little college town because it contains Pacific University. In January and February of 2016 a high-pitched squealing sound rocked the quiet existence of the residents. Happening several times in both the daytime and the nighttime, a noise described by various people as a mechanical scream, a giant flute played off pitch, mystery whistle, or my favorite, Satan’s teakettle rocked the citizens of the town.
Resident Paula Lynch was the first to report the disturbance. She said that she had heard is a few times during random daylight hours but the middle of the night occurrences were the most unsettling. She managed to record the sound and posted it to Facebook where many other residents were quick to reply that they had experienced it as well and the mystery went viral. Here is her recording:
[SOUND} It doesn’t sound quite as creepy as if you heard it at your house in the middle of the night but everyone agrees that its the epitome of annoying. Placing pins on a map for each complaint, officials worked to rule out faulty water valves, a gas leak, fire alarms, or any wildlife. I wonder how you rule out wildlife except of course it sounds nothing like an animal. The noise remained a mystery as did the area of origin. Even though the complaints were mapped, it was impossible to pinpoint where the noise was coming from.
The sound will have to remain a mystery as it stopped in February of that year (2016) having lasted only a month or so and while people are still curious about it, they are glad the noise is gone. Info from TheGhostInMyMachine.com and Wikipedia
ODJ: Forbidden DC Places Recently Atlas Obscura ran an article called 9 Places in Washington DC that you’re probably never allowed to go. We aren’t going to hit all nine of them, but here are two or three of the most interesting.
The first is the Washington Monument access hatch! If you remember we talked a bit about the Washington monument back in our Weird Monuments episode last year. What we failed to mention was that up near the very tippy top of the monument there is a small hatch cover. It is painted white so that it blends in with the marble of the monument, but if you look carefully, you can see it.
The access hatch was installed so that minor repairs can be made fito the monument without the need for massive scaffolding. Instead, daredevil National Park Service employees can worm their way out the access hatch, loop ropes over the apex and rappel down the tower. This capability came in handy after the 2011 earthquake when NPS used it to check for structural damage.
If you are interested, there is a creepy time-lapse video showing Park Service employees in a rappelling exercise.
Another place that you are not likely to get to see is the Capitol Tile Room. Sounds exotic, doesn’t it!
Deep in the belly of the Capitol Building there’s one unusual room stacked full of ornate floor tiles, leftover from the 1850s expansion. The tiles are a part of a set imported from Italy during the Civil War to decorate the beautiful corridors on the first floor of the Senate and House wings.
The tile room is at the end of a winding labyrinth of century-old passageways which gives the place major National Treasure vibes. Members of the public won’t have a chance getting in, but Capitol Hill interns and staffers who sweet talk facilities employees might get a special off-the-record tour. These tiles are not forgotten. They are kept as replacements, in the event that some of the tiles in the corridors are damaged.
And finally, there is one place that very few people ever get to see, it’s the Highest Court in the Land! “Now wait a minute”, you might be thinking, “I though the public was able to view the Supreme Court sessions!” That is correct, the public can sit in and observe the Supreme Court justices as they hear cases. But did you know that there is an even higher court?
The U.S. Supreme Court always been known as the “Highest Court of the Land,” but there’s one more court that sits even above the Supreme Court, literally—a basketball court Up on the 5th floor of the Supreme Court building is a small gymnasium with a basketball court. This court sits right above the Supreme Court chamber and is jokingly referred to as, “The Highest Court in the Land!”
The court was once a spare room to house journals, but sometime in the 1940s, it was converted into a workout area for courthouse workers. Wooden backboards and baskets were installed later, which led to the court’s current use as a basketball court used by clerks, off-duty police officers, and other Supreme Court employees.
While not all employees are spry enough for basketball, many of them do use the full service gym and weight room, adjacent to the basketball court on the fourth floor. A few of the current justices themselves are known to lift weights during the day, as well. A sign at the court’s entrance tells would-be players to make sure that they aren’t playing during a court day, and not to assume court is not in session. If there is a disturbance during court, a court justice would send a Marshal’s Aide upstairs to kindly remind players of the rules on court days. No one wants to be on the record for disrupting court functions.
Gas Station Bell and Cash Register OK, back to my old hometown again, there is a local mechanic named Lee Roy Mosty who is somewhat of a legend. Mosty’s Garage has been in operation since I was a little kid, and it hasn’t changed much over the years. I happened to be in there a few years ago when my brother was getting an old pick-up repaired when I heard this sound that I haven’t heard in many years. ⦽
Even though Lee Roy doesn’t sell gas anymore, he still has the bell that is activated by people driving over a rubber hose. Up until the early 70s when you pulled up to a gas station you would run over this little hose which rang the bell and let the attendant know that he or she had a customer. They would then come out to your car, pump you gas, air your tires, clean your windshield, check under your hood, empty your litter bag, and even sweep out your floorboards for you. It was what was known as full service. But when the energy crunch hit in 1973, gas stations offered customers an opportunity to save a few pennies per gallon by pumping their own gas. Over time, self-service has replaced full service and thus there is no longer a need for the gas station bell. However, if you are nostalgic about this long gone sound, you can order your own. A company called Milton’s Bells will sell you a driveway bell kit beginning at $95. You can find them at miltonsbells.com
But that wasn’t the only unusual sound I heard at Mosty’s. I had seen this antique item sitting on a counter. I thought it was just there as a display, but then Mr. Mosty went over to it, punched a few buttons and pulled a large crank that was attached to the side. ⦽
That’s right, he was still using this antique cash register that was operated by a hand crank! I hear a lot of folks today mouthing a ka-ching sound indicating that they have come into some money. But many may not know that they are mimicking the sound of this old cash register. Let’s hear it again ⦽
Ka-ching! I think we should just keep that sound effect on stand by!
OK, then when another customer whipped out a credit card, I was expecting to hear an old credit card imprinter ⦽ but he actually had a modern credit card reader. It was a little disappointing.
Manuel Typewriter ⦽ Remember the sound of an old manual typewriter? Ah yes, that takes me back to my sophomore year at Tivy High School in Coach Ward’s typing class. We learned typing on manual Underwood typewriters. I can still smell them! You had to roll the paper through the cylinder, making sure that it was in level or else your page would be typed crooked. We were taught to sit straight up with our feet flat on the floor and to keep our eyes on the book from which we were copying. Yes, when we heard the bell we were to use our left hand and with one swift motion return the carriage all the way to the right without taking our eyes off of the copy page. If we had done everything correctly, our typed page should mimic the copy page exactly. Well, that’s what we were supposed to do anyhow. I got to where I was a pretty decent typist, but certainly not perfect. OK, so we don’t listen for bells anymore or have to return the carriage when we reach the end of the line, but knowledge of the qwerty keyboard has definitely come in handy for me over the many years since then, so Thank you, Coach Ward!
When I was a kid, my mother worked in the County Clerks Office which was located in the Kerr County Courthouse. This was and still is an old masonry building with tiled walls and floors. I clearly remember the sounds of manual typewriters continually echoing loudly off those hard surfaces.
By the way, have you ever heard the Typewriter Song? Back in 1953 a fellow named Leroy Anderson decided that the typewriter would be a great musical instrument. His song simply called The Typewriter became something of hit. You can find it on YouTube, but let’s listen to just a bit of it, it’s pretty hilarious!
[SOUND] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akwfqjtBn7Y
School Bell Speaking of schools, an old administrator friend of mine once opined that if aliens ever landed on a school playground, they would think that we are a society that worships bells. Think about it, a bell rings and kids go to class. Another bell rings and they go to recess, lunch, PE, and then home. Everything is controlled by the bell. But the truth is, unless you attend school in an old building, you probably won’t hear this. ⦽
Even though school personnel still refer to it as a Bell Schedule, the old school bell has been replaced by an electronic sound more like a high pitched beep. The last school where I taught even had a series of different beeps which meant different things and which I often found to be confusing.
Another bell that we don’t hear much anymore came from the old timey alarm clock. You know the kind that had the two bells on top and a little clapper that let you know it was time to wake up. Now most of us use our phone alarms to wake us up. What’s your alarm song?
YELLOWSTONE LAKE MUSIC In our last episode on National Parks and we talked a bit about Yellowstone, specifically the Death Zone. That’s not the only weird thing about the park though. Campers today as well as travelers of the past have all wondered at the strange sounds inside the park referred to as “Lake Music.” A park historian says the sounds have been documented as far back as the 1890s.
Lake music is usually experienced near the shores of both Lake Shoshone and Yellowstone Lake has been described in many ways from “metal cables crashing against each other,” “ethereal organ music,” and “the sound of ducks in flight.” Once heard, it grows louder and more intense until it seems to be right overhead and rapidly fades away.
Experts have tried to find the source of the mysterious sounds and have postulated that maybe mild earthquakes have been to blame with a temperature inversion above the lake affecting how the sound is conducted. But that’s just an unverifiable hypothesis and the phenomena remains officially unexplained.
Legend has it that the sound is associated with the many drowning victims that have never been recovered. Yellowstone Lake remains at year round temperature of about 43 degrees F and so will kill you with coldness before drowning you. And because the water is so cold it interupts the decomposition process that usually makes bodies rise to the surface. Instead if a dorwning victim isn’t recovered quickly it instead sinks to the bottom of the lake to rest there eternally. There are an estimated 11 to 17 bodies at the bottom of Yellowstone Lake. The lake music is said to be the whisperings of those lost souls.
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/
Before playing a recording of the Lake Music let me just say that hearing a recording through a podcast doesn’t do it justice. You have to try to imagine you are camping in the wilderness on the shores of the lake and hear something approaching then passing you by in the air overhead.
[SOUND}
Percolator Now going back to nostalgic sounds that are fading away, I remember as a kid waking up each and every morning to the sound and smell of a coffee percolator. ⦽
You didn’t want to talk to my parents until they had their first cup of coffee in the morning! The first drip-coffee maker, Mr. Coffee came along in the 70s (with Joltin Joe Dimagio as their spokesperson). But before that, coffee was brewed in a percolator. The sound of a percolator was so popular that Maxwell House Coffee incorporated it into their advertising jingle. ⦽
Record Changer & Broken Record We’ve talked before about how language changes over time. Today if we hear the phrase ‘broken record’ we are more apt to think of an athlete or performer who has broken a previously established record for some act of speed or endurance. But in the not too distant past the phrase had an additional meaning.
In 1877 Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first device that could reproduce recorded sound. Edison’s original devices used tin wrapped around a cylinder to reproduce the sound, but by the 1920s the cylinders were replaced with flat vinyl discs. These flat discs were easily stored by consumers who continued to buy vinyl records in large quantities even during the Great Depression years. By the 1970s the LP or long-playing album allowed for multiple songs to be stored on both sides of a vinyl album. The large album covers were often just as interesting as the music on the discs.
Vinyl records were great, but there was one problem, they weren’t especially durable. Even with the most careful handling, the vinyl could develop scratches across the grooves. When that happened, this could occur.
[SOUND] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqtb6XBBBRc
Yes, my friends, that is the sound of a Broken Record! Curiously enough, this phrase was also applied to people who just wouldn’t stop talking. “You sound like a broken record!” was a phrase uttered by many a flustered mother toward her child who continually blabbed on and on. Offshoots of this phrase include, “Your needle is stuck,” and “You must’ve been vaccinated with a phonograph needle”.
Now speaking of the phonograph or record player, the original versions would only hold one record at a time. But by the late 60s people didn’t want to be bothered with continually having to change their records. High Fidel ity or HiFi stereo systems came on the market which could hold a stack of records. After one record had finished playing you would hear the clunky mechanical sound of the player switching out records. ⦽
The needle arm would lift off the record and swing out of the way, then a metal clip would briefly collapse allowing the next record to drop from the stack and fall onto the turntable. Of course, dropping one vinyl record onto another one which was in the process of spinning around was a good way to damage the vinyl and wind up with scratches on your record. Oddly enough, many folks today like these scratchy sounds and appreciate the imperfect quality of vinyl records. It’s soothingly nostalgic.
[SOUND] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5Mz9Tqs9CE
Camera Sounds Now a sound that you likely have heard, but you might not be aware that it is a digital imitation of the original sound is the sound of a camera shutter. ⦽
You may hear this when using the digital camera on your phone. However, your phone doesn't really need to make that sound in order to shoot a photo. The sound is added in digitally just to sound cool. The original sound was that of a mechanized camera shutter likely from a 35 mm camera. I love photography and for my 18th birthday back in 1975 my parents bought me a Yashika 35 mm camera. I especially loved the timer feature which allowed me to set the camera up, push the timer, and then run around and get in the picture. The timer and the shutter operated mechanically off of batteries and made those cool sounds that my phone now mimics.
Photography is terrific, but in the era of film cameras the time gap between taking the photo and actually seeing your picture could be days, weeks, months, who knows? You had to finish your roll of 24 or 36 exposures, then take the roll of film down to the local drug store or mail them off to be developed. It might take another week for your prints to come in.
A Harvard educated scientist named Edward Land began working on this problem when his daughter asked him why their camera couldn’t just make pictures instantly. In the 1960s Land developed the Polaroid Swinger, a simple camera that costs less than $20 and could produce black and white pictures in one minute. Best of all, the Polaroid Swinger was promoted by, in my opinion, the greatest TV commercial ever. It featured attractive young people frolicking on the beach enjoying their Polaroid Swingers and backed by a terrific soundtrack. Oh man, I wanted a Swinger so bad! Check out their commercial on You Tube sometime.
Anyway, I digress. Polaroid continued making advancements in their instant cameras and by the mid 70s they had developed ⦽ the Polaroid One-Step, a camera that instantly spits out a piece of photographic paper that develops into a full color photo in one minute right before your eyes. The quality wasn’t quite up to traditional photography, but it was instant gratification, the first time that you could see your pictures instantly!
SPACE SOUNDS We have covered mysterious sounds from the depths of the oceans and strange noises across the land so of course we have to head out into the final frontier and talk about unexplained audio from space. As always there is so much more to talk about than we can include in a single episode so we have to pick and choose what stories we bring you but for your Googling pleasure here is a list of sound anomalies to keep you up at night.
From under the sea we mentioned The Julia, The Upsweep, The Whistle, The Ocean Quack and the Slowdown.
The sounds on land that are notable but that we did not cover are skyquakes, the Taos Hum, The UVB-76 or mysterious short wave radio numbers stations (a holdout from the Cold War perhaps?), The Center of the Universe (which is in Tulsa, Oklahoma strangely enough), the Lake George Mystery Spot, and Singing Sand.
From space there is the Space Roar, Earth Hum, Aurora Sounds, Moon Music, and Musical Black Hole. But the one sound from space we’ll talk about--and our last story--is the NASA recordings of radio and plasma waves from the Cassini spacecraft when it made its flyby of Saturn.
SATURN The Cassini spacecraft was sent to Saturn to send information back to earth about the wonders of the planet, its rings and icy moons. A recording made by the spacecraft has caused wild speculation as it contains eerie audio that sounds very similar to speech. The YouTube video the recording we are about to play for you says that NASA is quoted as saying about the audio, “An intriguing file. We do not know what to make of it.” I’m not sure whether that’s an actual quote coming from NASA or one just made up to get more clicks on the video but here’s the audio and it’s pretty unsettling.
[SOUND] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGeWBiLVn8g&t=164s
LEFTOVER STEW We’re doing something a little differently. After the TC and our outro theme music we will have a little bit more on Strange Sounds for our patrons. If you would like to become a patron and have ad free episodes with a little extra information at the end--what we are calling LEftover Stew--then head over to https://www.patreon.com/remnantstew and sign up.
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Remnant Stew is part of Rook & Raven Ventures and is created by me, Leah Lamp. Dr. Steven Meeker and I research, write and host each episode along with cringey commentary by our audio producer, Phillip Sinquefield. Theme music is by Kevin MacLeod with voiceover by Morgan Hughes. Special thanks goes out to Judy Meeker and Harbin Gould.
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