H HUM - leomarin.frleomarin.fr/pdf/the_hum_big.pdfThe hum tonight has been the most intense yet. I feel my muscles vibrating and aching all over, something I have yet to experience!

HUMCAPTATIONSSONORES

HUM

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9 The Legend of the Loneliest Whale in the World

17 “6EQUJ5» The Signal from Cosmic Depths That Might Have Changed Human Civilization

24 Quand la Lune servait à espionner les Soviétiques

35 Chris Hadfield’s new album was recorded in space

41 Le boitier anti-bruit : prouesse technologique ou gadget ?

48 Ces entrepreneurs qui veulent nous faire parler avec des objets ?

55 Sonar et pollution sonore de la mer : quel danger pour les cétacés ?

64 The Sound That Comes From Nowhere

77 Comment parler aux extraterrestres ?

83 The Sound of Earth

99 How Nasa's Voyager is bringing the sound of space down to Earth

102 Open your ears to the freaky ambisonic magic of the ocean

Révolution numér ique : la fin de la civilisation de l’écrit ?

Voice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent

« Barbie Stasi », la poupée qui espionne les enfants

I see U : DIY Surveillance for the Masses …and the Makers

Help Scientists Record One Day of Sound on Earth

The spooky world of the « numbers stations »

Des cartes pour mesurer la pollution sonore

Ce papillon qui se joue du sonar des chauves-souris

Cats use the laws of physics to hunt their prey

Sonic Notify : the inaudible QR codes only an app can hearCan some people hear the jet stream ?

The Bloop mystery has been solved : it was never a giant sea monster

A Maddening Sound

Pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas de son dans l'espace ?

The cause of the Earth's maddening humming noise

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The hum tonight has been the most intense yet.

I feel my muscles vibrating and aching all over, something I have yet to experience! In reading through «our» postings, the experience is somewhat universal. We have all shut off the circuit breakers. It is still there.

We have gone searching for it in our cars, only to discover when we go out-side it goes away!

THERE IS SOMETHING GOING ON HERE

and I want an answer… I have been to every webpage I can find. But i am going to make this my HOME PAGE til I figure this out…..

_________

Roddy Johnson, MD <[email protected]>

Kirtland , NM USA - Sunday, May 16, 1999 at 04:39:54 (PDT)

Hm,

I´m really puzzled by this hum.

I first heard it a couple of years ago, and I first thought it was a car engine running outside the house. It was no car there. So, I heard it a couple of times again, and then I lost it.

Last week I read a report « Strange hum » in a daily newspaper, can you imagine how surprised I was to learn that other people had heard something alike?

I tried to hear it, and yes it is still there. Not so loud, coming and going.

I think I will try to build a humreceiver to make this strange phenomenon visible.I´ll be back with further reports from the Swedish westcoast.

Level : 2 varying in level.

_____________

henrik nykvist <[email protected]>

Kungsbacka, Sweden - Wednesday, May 05, 1999 at 05:49:49 (PDT)

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7Révolution numérique : la fin de la civilisation de l’écrit ?

10 avr. 2017Jean-Dominique Séval usbeketrica.com

Révolution numérique : la fin de la civilisation

de l’écrit ?

Premier chapitre de notre série d’articles sur les « pa-renthèses refermées », ce concept qu’utilise Jean-Do-minique Séval pour décrire la manière dont la révolu-tion numérique nous ramène à des comportements et modes d’organisations ancestraux. Pour le directeur général adjoint de l’IDATE Digiworld, le retour de l’oralité est sur le point de clôturer une parenthèse de plusieurs siècles de culture écrite. Le règne de la vidéo sur les réseaux sociaux, l’avènement des intelli-gences articifielles et celui des chatbots ont déjà enta-mé cette transition. Cela risque de bouleverser jusqu’à nos façons de penser et nos capacités cognitives.

Une journée sans lire une ligne, c’est désormais pos-sible. Mieux, c’est maintenant la norme, le cours nor-mal des choses. Comme passer un mois ou une année sans avoir besoin de faire un détour par l’écrit pour les actes de la vie quotidienne. Ce scénario, qui annonce l’effacement de notre culture écrite au profit d’une nouvelle civilisation orale, c’est celui que je vous prédis pour un futur sans doute moins éloigné que ce que nous pourrions croire. Si je suis aussi affirmatif, c’est que les ferments d’un tel bouleverse-ment sont déjà à l’œuvre aujourd’hui. C’est même une avalanche de signaux qui, tous ensemble, sont susceptibles de provoquer un tel basculement.

L’irrésistible invasion de la vidéo

Le plus important, sans doute, tient à la place enva-hissante que prend dans nos vies, chaque jour un peu plus, la vidéo. C’est le contenu roi, celui qui s’impose comme le standard de fait en matière de communica-tion. Cette tendance n’est pas nouvelle. Il s’agit même d’une lame de fond qui trouve son origine à la fin du XIXe siècle avec l’invention du cinéma, puis de la télévision dès les années trente. Le XXe siècle aura été rythmé par le développement continu de ces médias de masse qui furent d’abord accusés de tous les maux, avant de se hisser au rang de 7e art pour l’un et de première source d’information et de divertisse-ment pour l’autre.

Jean-Dominique Séval

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« Nous sommes sans doute aujourd’hui arrivés au point de basculement longtemps annon-cé, correspondant à l’avènement de la vidéo comme moyen de com-munication prioritaire »

Révolution numérique : la fin de la civilisation de l’écrit ?

10 avr. 2017Jean-Dominique Séval usbeketrica.com slate.com27 août 2014 Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison

The Legend of the Loneliest Whale in the World

This article is excerpted from “52 Blue,” the newest single from the Atavist. You can purchase the full story from the Atavist’s website. It is also available on Amazon.

52blue


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Dec. 7, 1992 : Whidbey Island, Puget Sound. The World Wars were over. The other wars were over : Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf. The Cold War was finally over, too. The Whidbey Island Naval Air Station remained. So did the Pacific, its waters vast and fathomless beyond an airfield named for an airman whose body was never found : William Ault, who died in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

But at that naval air station, on that day in December, the infinite Pacific appeared as something finite : audio data gathered by a network of hydrophones spread along the ocean floor. These hydrophones had turned the formless it of the ocean and its noises into something measurable : pages of printed graphs rolling out of a spectro-graph machine. These hydrophones had been used to monitor Soviet subs until the Cold War ended; after their declassification, the Navy started listening for other noises — other kinds of it — instead.

On Dec. 7, the it was a strange sound. The acoustic technicians thought they knew what it was, but then they realized they didn’t. Petty Officer 2nd Class Velma Ronquille stretched it out on a different spectrogram so she could see it better. She couldn’t quite believe it. It was coming in at 52 hertz.

She beckoned one of the technicians. He needed to come back, she said. He needed to take another look.

The technician came back. He took another look. His name was Joe George.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Ronquille told him, “I think this is a whale.”

Joe thought, Holy cow. It hardly seemed possible. For a blue whale, which is what this one seemed to be, a frequency of 52 hertz was basically off the charts. Blue whales usually come in somewhere between 15 and 20 — on the periphery of what the human ear can hear, an almost impercep-tible rumble. But here it was, right in front of them, the audio signature of a creature moving through Pacific waters with a singu-larly high-pitched song.

Ce n’était pourtant qu’un début. La vidéo, devenue à la demande et en passe de s’affranchir définitive-ment de la télévision d’hier, est omniprésente. On n’en a jamais autant consommé. L’invasion des écrans de toute taille, couplés à des plateformes de diffusion aux catalogues pléthoriques, favorise une consommation sans frein, où les séries règnent en maître, plébiscitées par de jeunes générations qui en ont fait leur contenu de référence comme leurs ancêtres avaient le théâtre, l’opéra, le roman ou le cinéma avant eux.

Au roman-feuilleton du XIXe siècle a succédé la série télé au XXIe siècle. Netflix a remplacé Balzac et l’oral a rempla-cé l’écrit.

Internet a amplifié le phénomène jusqu’à l’excès. D’abord média de l’écrit, de par sa construction et par nécessité, il s’est rapidement ouvert aux images, puis aux vidéos dès que le débit des réseaux et la puissance des terminaux l’ont permis. Nous sommes sans doute aujourd’hui arrivés au point de basculement long-




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slate.com27 août 2014 Leslie Jamison


© Tim Jeffs

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Whales make calls for a number of reasons — to navigate, to find food, to com-municate with each other — and for certain whales, like humpbacks and blues, songs also seem to play a role in sexual selection. Blue males sing louder than females, and the volume of their singing — at more than 180 decibels — makes them the loudest animals in the world. They click and grunt and trill and hum and moan. They sound like foghorns. Their calls can travel thousands of miles through the ocean.

The whale that Joe George and Velma Ronquille heard was an anomaly : His sound patterns were recognizable as those of a blue whale, but his frequency was un-heard-of. It was absolutely unprecedented. So they paid attention. They kept tracking him for years, every migration season, as he made his way south from Alaska to Mexico. His path wasn’t unusual, only his song — and the fact that they never detected any other whales around him. He always seemed to be alone.

So this whale was calling out high, and he was calling out to no one — or at least, no one seemed to be answering. The acoustic technicians would come to call him 52 Blue. A scientific report, published 12 years later by researchers at Woods Hole, would des-cribe his case like this :

No other calls with similar characteristics have been identified in the acoustic data from any hydrophone system in the Nor-th Pacific basin. Only one series of these 52-Hz calls has been recorded at a time, with no call overlap, suggesting that a single whale produced the calls. … These tracks consistently appeared to be unrelated to the presence or movement of other whale species (blue, fin and humpback) monitored year-round with the same hydrophones.

Much remained unknown, the report confessed, and difficult to explain :

We do not know the species of this whale, whether it was a hybrid or an anomalous whale that we have been tracking. It is pe-rhaps difficult to accept that … there could have been only one of this kind in this large oceanic expanse.

temps annoncé, correspondant à l’avènement de la vidéo comme moyen de communication prioritaire.La plupart des sites Internet se doivent d’intégrer des contenus vidéo pour attirer et retenir l’attention des internautes. Les grandes plateformes univer-selles que sont devenues Google, Facebook ou encore Snapchat sont en train d’opérer cette transition, en passant de l’écrit et de l’image à la vidéo. À tel point que Mark Zuckerberg annonce que d’ici cinq ans seulement la vidéo aura remplacé les contenus textes sur Facebook. Ce que sa responsable pour l’Eu-rope, Nicola Mendelsohn, confirme en estimant que « Facebook sera définitivement mobile et probable-ment entièrement vidéo : chaque année, nous voyons une diminution du texte… Si je devais parier sur quelque chose, je dirais : la vidéo, la vidéo, la vidéo. »

« Une explication en vidéo est souvent perçue comme plus effi-cace qu’un texte traditionnel, et bien plus attractive pour capter l’attention volage d’internautes sur-sollicités »

Ce mouvement est clairement à l’œuvre chez les producteurs de pages Internet, professionnels ou amateurs, qui privilégient la vidéo, support de communication préféré des internautes. Ne plus lire, ou le moins possible, car les écrans des smartphones, désormais le moyen le plus courant pour surfer sur Internet, exigent des formats de texte de plus en plus courts. Mais surtout parce qu’une explication en vidéo paraît souvent plus efficace qu’un texte traditionnel et bien plus attractive pour capter l’attention volage d’internautes sur-sollicités : c’est la raison du suc-cès grandissant des tutos en tout genre, des recettes de cuisines, des éditos de presse, des cartographies animées, des publicités… Le tout en vidéo, le plus sou-vent courtes, impactantes et didactiques. Et comme il faut pouvoir les visionner en toutes circonstances, elles sont souvent sous-titrées (l’écrit se défend !) pour être regardées sans le son quand vous êtes dans un bus, un métro, en cours ou, distrait, lors d’une réunion de travail un peu trop longue.

Ne nous y trompons pas, il ne s’agit pas d’un phé-nomène marginal ou périphérique, mais bien d’une lame de fond dont les figures annonciatrices sont ces armées de youtubers qui donnent des rendez-vous réguliers à des milliers voire des millions de fans qui viennent rire, chanter avec eux, s’informer, se cultiver… Comme ailleurs, dans la littérature ou dans l’édition, on trouve le pire et le meilleur sur le plus d’un million de chaînes hébergées sur le site phare de Google : des stars comme PewDiePie, ce jeune suédois commentateur de jeux-vidéo aux 54




Soon after the report was published, the researchers started getting notes about the whale. They weren’t just typical pieces of professional correspondence. They came, as New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin wrote at the time, “from whale lovers lamen-ting the notion of a lonely heart of the ceta-cean world”; others were “from deaf people speculating that the whale might share their disability.”

After Revkin’s story ran that December, headlined “Song of the Sea, a Cappella and Unanswered,” more letters flooded Woods Hole. One marine-mammal resear-cher quoted in the story, Kate Stafford, may have inadvertently fanned the flames : “He’s saying, ‘Hey, I’m out here,’ ” she told Re-vkin. “Well, nobody is phoning home.” These letters came from the heartbroken and the deaf, from the lovelorn and the single; the once bitten, twice shy and the twice bitten, forever shy — people who identified with the whale or hurt for him, hurt for whatever set of feelings they’d projected onto him.

A legend was born : the loneliest whale in the world.

In the years since, 52 Blue — or 52 Hertz, as he is known to many of his devotees — has inspired numerous sob-story headlines : not just “The Loneliest Whale in the World” but “The Whale Whose Unique Call Has Stop-ped Him Finding Love,” “A Lonely Whale’s Unrequited Love Song,” “There Is One Whale That Zero Other Whales Can Hear and It’s Very Alone. It’s the Saddest Thing Ever, and Science Should Try to Talk to It.” There have been imaginative accounts of a solitary bachelor headed down to the Mexican Rivie-ra to troll haplessly for the biggest mammal babes alive, “his musical mating calls ringing for hours through the darkness of the dee-pest seas, broadcasting a wide repertory of heartfelt tunes.”

A singer in New Mexico, unhappy at his day job in tech, wrote an entire album dedicated to 52; another singer in Michigan wrote a children’s song about the whale’s plight; an artist in upstate New York made a sculp-ture out of old plastic bottles and called it 52 Hertz. A music producer in Los Angeles

millions d’abonnés ou German Garmendia, un jeune chilien, dont les vidéos humoristiques sont suivies par plus de 30 millions d’abonnés ; comme ces profes-seurs, étudiants ou amateurs qui, en France, se mettent en scène pour raconter et vulgariser la science (E-penser), la littérature (Booktubeuses), l’histoire (Nota Bene) ou la philosophie (Coup de phil).

Le gamer PewDiePie, symbole de la génération des youtubers à succès, avec plus de 58 millions d’abonnés.

Un phénomène tellement structurant que tous les médias s’y convertissent - les radios mettent des ca-méras dans leurs studios, les sites des titres de presse produisent des contenus vidéos - et les temples du savoir que sont les universités mettent leurs cours en ligne jusqu’à faire de certains de leurs professeurs de vraies stars du Web comme Walter Lewin pour la physique au MIT ou Michael Sandel pour la philo-sophie du droit à Harvard.

L’émergence des outils de l’oralité

Ceci ne serait encore rien sans d’autres tendances supplémentaires qui viennent enfoncer le clou. Un arsenal de technologies, arrivant à maturité par leur fiabilité grandissante et leurs coûts accessibles, ouvre la porte à la toute-puissance de la parole. Une parole qui, comme dans le fameux « sésame ouvre-toi » du conte, nous permet désormais de prendre le contrôle de notre environnement. Il faudra nous y habituer, nous allons de plus en plus souvent conver-ser avec nos machines. Alors que jusqu’à présent, nous avions pris l’habitude d’appuyer sur des boutons ou de leur écrire !

Les progrès de la reconnaissance vocale sont tels que nous serons de plus en plus tentés de nous passer d’un clavier pour écrire. Ce sera la seconde mort symbolique de la Remington de l’écrivain. Ce dernier pourra écrire ses œuvres comme un Michel de Mon-taigne dictait ses Essais en arpentant, les mains dans le dos, le plancher de sa tour. Ecrire un texte se fera sous la dictée. C’est déjà possible, avec un traitement




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started buying cassette tapes at garage sales and recording over them with 52’s song, the song that was quickly becoming a kind of sentimental seismograph suggesting multiple storylines : alienation and determi-nation, autonomy and longing; not only a failure to communicate but also a dogged persistence in the face of this failure.

People have set up Twitter accounts to speak for him, like @52_Hz_Whale, who gets right to the point :

52 hertz whale @52_Hz_Whale

Hellooooooo ? ! Yooohoooooo ! Is anyone out there ? #SadLife

3 :10 PM - Jul 24, 2013

52 hertz whale @52_Hz_Whale

I'm so lonely. :'( #lonely #ForeverAlone

2 :40 PM - Jul 20, 2013

I started seeking out some of the people who’ve become obsessed by this whale over the years : a 19-year-old English major at the University of Toronto who thinks 52 Blue is “the epitome of every person who’s ever felt too weird to love.” A 26-year-old photo editor at the biggest daily tabloid in Poland, who decided to get the outline of 52 Blue tattooed across his back after the end of a six-year relationship :

i was deeply in love. but as it came out she was treating me like a second category per-son in relationship…i was devastadem mainy becose i have given her everything i could, and i thought she would do the same for me. [Because] of her i lost connection with important friends. View of the wasted time made me sad….Story of 52 hz whale made me happy. For me he is symbol of being alone in a positive way…He is like a steate-ment, that despite being alone he lives on.

de texte du marché, quand votre ado se retrouve le bras dans le plâtre, et que cela ne le dispense même plus de préparer sa rédaction pour la semaine pro-chaine. Et pour moi, qui n’ai jamais appris à taper sur un clavier avec tous les doigts, c’est la perspective de bientôt pouvoir m’en passer…

« Certains annoncent un nouvel Internet, où la voix remplacera les clics, et où l’on navigue, consulte, réserve ou achète en dialoguant avec ces assistants intelligents »

Mais, la promesse ultime de cette évolution est bien l’extension du domaine de la reconnaissance vocale. Popularisée par Apple lors de l’introduction de Siri à l’occasion du lancement de son iPhone 4S dès 2011, la technologie encore imparfaite, est en train de faire les preuves de son efficacité. Au-delà des smartphones, elle s’introduit au cœur de nos voitures où le bénéfice est évident et est en passe d’être généralisée à tous les objets. C’est le sens de la toute nouvelle guerre que se livrent les géants du Net : mettre au cœur des foyers des assistants numériques universels capables de piloter via nos ordres vocaux les applications (recherche, agenda personnel, météo, info,…) et les objets connectés qui se multiplient à domicile (en-ceintes, lumières, fermetures, alarmes,…). Amazon a ouvert les hostilités en janvier 2017 à l’occasion du CES à Las Vegas (grande messe des équipements numériques) en dévoilant Alexa, face à Home de Google et Cortana de Microsoft. Tous ont en commun de miser sur la reconnaissance vocale, en permettant notamment l’identification vocale de chaque utilisa-teur. Une façon claire de miser sur ce qui, pour eux, est l’avenir des interfaces homme-machine : la voix.

Le lien entre toutes ses applications tient aux progrès attendus de l’intelligence artificielle (et du deep learning), qui trouve dans ce domaine, comme dans beaucoup d’autres, un champ d’innovations privilé-gié. En partant des applications de livres parlants et de vidéo-texte, ne serait-ce que pour les malvoyants pour qui l’écran est rédhibitoire, en passant par le vaste marché des centres d’appels et de relation client, avec la perspective d’automatiser une grande partie des tâches avec, à la clé, des gains de producti-vité considérables, jusqu’aux médias qui commencent à utiliser des speakers numériques qui lisent des bulletins météos et des informations ou encore les outils de génération automatique de résumés vidéo d’évènements en tout genre.

Plus fondamentalement, le Web vient d’entrer dans l’âge des chatbots, ces robots conversationnels, qui dotent les applications les plus variées du don de la parole, petits logiciels capables de tenir une conversa-tion en temps réel avec un internaute et de s’adapter à ses réponses. Certains annoncent un nouvel Internet,




I heard from Shorna, a 22-year-old in Kent, England, who relates to 52 Blue because he reminds her of how difficult it was for her to communicate with anyone after her brother was killed when she was 13 : “I felt I couldn’t talk to no one. That no one understood or cared enough.”

I spoke to Sakina, a 28-year-old medical actor living in Michigan, who associates 52 with a different kind of loss — a more spiri-tual struggle. She says 52 immediately made her think of the prophet Yunus, or Jonas, who was swallowed by a whale. “It makes sense that the loneliest whale feels lonely,” she says. “Because he had a prophet with him, inside of him, and now he doesn’t.”

_________

Hast thou seen the white whale ? The hunt for an elusive whale is — of course — the most famous narrative in the history of Ame-rican literature. The whiteness of Moby Dick is “a dumb blankness, full of meaning,” full of many meanings : divinity or its absence, primal power or its refusal, the possibility of revenge or the possibility of annihilation. “Of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol,” Ishmael explains. “Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt ?”

No one has ever conducted a physical search for 52 Blue. An entrepreneur named Dietmar Petutschnig is currently prowling the South Pacific in a small sailboat, but his hunt for the whale seems more metaphorical, a kind of personal branding. Dietmar calls himself skipper and whalefinder and is joined by a co-captain and a chef, along with a little spaniel named Vienna Linz who is billed as security, angler, and crew morale officer. When I spoke to him on the phone while his boat was docked in Vanuatu, Diet-mar was reluctant to do an interview but wanted to offer me a job working for him as a freelance editor. “We are still in the middle of our discovery,” he’d written earlier.

“We do hope the whale will go out of fashion.”

If anyone actually finds 52, it will probably be Josh Zeman, a filmmaker currently working on a documentary called 52 : The Search for the Loneliest Whale in the World. Zeman had been hoping to conduct

où la voix remplacera les clics, et où l’on navigue, consulte, réserve ou achète en dialoguant avec ces assistants intelligents.Les outils vocaux qui se déclinent en text-to-speech, speech-to-text et speech-to-speech, abordent grâce au progrès de la technologie NMT (pour Neural Machine Translation), la traduction simultanée. Comme c’est déjà le cas pour le projet de la startup Waverly Labs qui, en levant en 2016 quatre millions de dollars sur la plateforme de crowdfunding Indiegogo, s’apprête à commercialiser une oreillette traduisant les langues étrangères en temps réel. Finies les barrières entre les langues, quand il sera bientôt possible de travailler et de voyager en parlant et comprenant la langue de ses interlocuteurs au fil de simples conversations : effacer Babel ! Et une ouverture de plus, vers une civilisation de l’orale sans frontière.

Les premiers pas d’une nouvelle culture orale

À quoi doit-on s’attendre, quand la somme de ces ten-dances, qui convergent toutes vers l’avènement d’une nouvelle culture orale dominante, mais numérique, aura fait son œuvre ?

C’est bien sûr une mauvaise nouvelle de plus pour les amoureux du livre papier, dont la disparition est régulièrement annoncée sous les coups de boutoir de la dématérialisation de l’édition et de la distri-bution comme du changement des habitudes de lecture. Même si la transition sera longue (les ventes de livres numériques aux Etats-Unis, qui étaient en progression constante, ont fortement baissé en 2015 et en 2016), il est probable que nous n’aurons pas eu le temps de nous habituer longtemps à la lecture sur écran, car déjà une génération bascule dans l’oralité… L’écrit ne disparaitra pas pour autant bien sûr, mais il sera repoussé dans les marges : celles qu’occuperont toujours les amoureux de l’écrit ou ceux qui raisonne-ment mieux par écrit que mentalement…

« Verra-t-on se lever une nouvelle génération d’intellectuels aussi ou plus à l’aise dans la manipulation des concepts sans avoir à passer par le truchement de l’écriture ? »

Car il est vrai que de tels changements ont et auront d’énormes conséquences. Déjà la lecture sur écran modifie nos aptitudes. Avec des bénéfices avérés comme l’enrichissement de l’expérience que permet le lien hypertexte pour faire appel à un dictionnaire ou une page d’information. Mais aussi des inquié-




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tudes liées à la vitesse de lecture qui diminuerait de 25% en moyenne en raison des sollicitations extérieures qui nous freinent (email, notifications, recherches…), aux troubles de l’attention chez les plus jeunes ou à la capacité de conduire une lec-ture profonde sur un écran. Certains, comme l’auteur américain Nicholas Carr, allant même jusqu’à agiter la menace de la paresse intellectuelle qui nous guette à force d’utiliser prioritairement la lecture numérique.

Ces craintes qui nous habitent encore quant au passage de l’écrit papier au numérique ne seront rien à côté de celles qui vont se poser à l’occasion de la transition annoncée de l’écrit à l’oral. Qu’en sera-t-il de nos capacités cognitives dès lors que nous aurons abandonné l’écrit ? Comment raisonnerons-nous ? Raisonnerons-nous encore ? Comment une pratique orale dominante s’articulera avec les nombreuses prothèses numériques disponibles (mémoires, tra-duction, speech-to-text,…) ? Verra-t-on se lever une nouvelle génération d’intellectuels aussi ou plus à l’aise dans la manipulation des concepts sans avoir à passer par le truchement de l’écriture ? On peut ainsi entrevoir que cette culture orale numérique sera bien différente de celle qui a prévalu depuis l’aube de l’humanité, a minima en ce qu’elle englobera l’écrit en le mettant au service de l’oralité.

On pourra s’en désoler, comme un Platon s’insurgeait des méfaits de l’écriture en faisant dire à Socrate dans son Phèdre que l’écriture est inhumaine, en ce qu’elle prétend établir en dehors de l’esprit ce qui ne peut être en réalité que dans l’esprit. Mais d’un autre côté, c’est toute une partie de l’humanité qui n’a jamais eu accès à l’écrit – et ils sont nombreux comme ces indiens Quetchua qui ont traversé les quatre milles dernières années en se passant d’écriture - et qui, dès lors qu’elle sera dotée d’un smartphone, aura accès au savoir du reste de l’humanité par un Internet devenu vidéo et parlant. Une sorte de revanche des illettrés de tous les continents, de populations entières qui sauteront l’étape de l’écrit, comme ils ont sauté les étapes du téléphone et de l’internet fixe pour entrer directement dans l’ère de la mobilité.

« Notre pays renouera peut-être avec son glorieux passé qui faisait de nos ancêtres, tenants d’une civilisation de la transmission orale, des maîtres de la hétorique, reconnus dans tout le monde antique jusqu’au cœur du sénat romain »

his actual search this fall, planning to take a research vessel into the Pacific for 50 days, but his funding fell through two weeks after it was announced by his producer, actor Adrian Grenier, at the Cannes Film Festival in May.Zeman first heard the story of 52 at an artists colony in the summer of 2012, and it struck him immediately. He was in the aftermath of a breakup. He’s been wor-king on the project ever since; he described his relationship to the movie as “Ahabian.” But figuring out how to make the trip work “is fucking complicated,” he told me. The plan was to have a research vessel staffed with five scientists and three crew, using sonar and old migration routes to locate 52. The data was more than a decade old.

One of the themes of Zeman’s film is mo-dern loneliness, that people are particularly responsive to the story of 52 in the digital era — when the Internet promises connecti-vity but can actually deliver us even deeper into isolation. Ironically enough, the film’s Facebook page has become an effective epicenter for the 52 Hertz community : It’s where people post their responses to the story of the whale, register their sympathy, report their desires. “This sto-ry touched me so deeply,” wrote a woman named Pamela. “I wish we could all help and play whale songs for him.” She wanted to know why “we can build laptops and smart phones but we cannot figure out a way to get this whale some companionship ?”

Some posts struck a different chord. Catherine was actually a little sick of all the “mawkish sadness” at this “anthropomor-phized meme,” and wasn’t afraid to say so, though another user responded immedia-tely to her post. “52 Hertz isn’t a myth or a meme,” she shot back. “He’s real, and I think we’re all damn curious about him.”

Most of the posts converge on two themes : helping 52 and feeling bad for 52. A woman named Denise posted one message — “find 52 hertz” — over and over and over again one morning : at 8 :09, 8 :11, 8 :14, 8 :14 (a second time), and 8 :16. A woman named Jen wrote, only once : “Just want to give it a hug.”



slate.com27 août 2014 Leslie Jamison

The Legend of the Loneliest Whale in the World “6EQUJ5 »

dailygalaxy.com30 dec. 2014

De même peut-on imaginer que les écrivains du futur seront des conteurs que nous convoquerons a volonté pour nous seuls ou, lors de veillés numériques, pour un groupe d’amis, eux même dispersés aux quatre coins du monde. Assis à nos côtés ou au milieu de nous, le conteur sera présent par la puissance de la réalité virtuelle et nous fera voyager dans sa création grâce au pouvoir évocateur de la parole. Ce n’est pas tant la mort du livre papier, en passe d’être supplanté par le livre numérique, qui pose question, car c’est même un débat presque dépassé, mais bien la fin du livre tout court… Poussons encore plus loin, en affir-mant que le débat n’est déjà plus de savoir « si Internet va remplacer le livre papier » mais bien « si la vidéo va remplacer l’écrit ».

© Tim Jeffs



August 15, 1977 : the night before Elvis Presley died, at 11 :16 p.m. an Ohio radio telescope -a rectangular structure, larger than three football feilds- called the Big Ear recorded a single pulse of radiation that seemed to come from somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius at the 1420 MHz hydrogen line, the vibration frequency of hydrogen, the most common molecule in the universe -exactly the signal E.T.-hunters had been instructed to look out for. The signal was so strong that it pushed the Big Ear’s recording device off the chart.

“6EQUJ5 »The Signal from Cosmic Depths That Might Have Changed Human Civilization

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Three nights later, on August 18, astronomer Jerry Ehman sat at his kitchen table flip-ping through a thick computer-generated printout displaying the cryptic stream of blank spaces and black digits shown be-low. As Ehman looked carefully through this forest of information, he zoomed in on a an odd column that read, from top to bottom : “6EQUJ5.”

This small section of paper with its imper-fectly printed characters, together with Ehman’s emphatic note, « represent what some people think remains the best evi-dence of a signal from the cosmic depths that was of artificial, purposeful, and in-telligent origin » according to Caleb Scharf, director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University.

The image above shows a graphic which was produced by the SE.T.I from the data of the « Wow » signal. A signal (Gaussian, triplet or pulse) arises only in a single narrowband channel. All other channels contain noise. Up to now we do not know cosmic pheno-mena which would generate such signals. It would seem improbable that they have no artificial origin. The imageshows a com-puter generated example of a strong Gaussian signal.

The Big Ear team explored every possibility : military transmissions, reflections of Earth signals off asteroids or satellites, natural emissions from stars, but nothing fit. And most odd of all, the signal came from a blank patch of sky totally devoid of stars. The young engineer’s only thought was that it could have been beamed from a spaceship traveling through the universe in search of some sign of life.

Big Ear was catching radio signals in a set of fifty distinct frequency channels that in-cluded some that overlapped with a special natural frequency — the frequency at which atoms of hydrogen emit radiation when their proton and electron flip between quantum spin states.

This 1400 MHz or 21-centimeter line reveals the glow of interstellar and intergalactic hydrogen gas. It can also reveal the moisture content of our atmosphere and even the salinity of our oceans here on Earth when detected from space. This frequency also sits at an especially quiet spot within the ga-lactic hubbub of radio waves, an attractive place to gather to listen for interesting

Certes, nous n’avons jamais collectivement autant écrit qu’aujourd’hui, depuis l’avènement du Net et des nouveaux moyens de communication numé-riques, sur nos ordinateurs, par email ou par texto. Comme si les premiers âges de l’Internet faisaient un baroud d’honneur, comme pour mieux célébrer la fin d’une époque et annoncer l’entrée dans une nouvelle ère allégée du poids de l’écrit… Un peu comme notre consommation de papier blanc ne cessa d’augmen-ter à l’heure de la reprographie et de l’impression numérique, alors même que nous était promis le zéro papier… qui finira bien par arriver quand la chaîne complète de la dématérialisation, qui va de la création de contenu à son stockage, sera plus sure et achevée.

Va-t-on revenir à la culture orale que plébiscitaient les Grecs anciens ?

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“6EQUJ5 »


phenomena that’s called “the cosmic wate-ring hole” in the electromagnetic spectrum.

“6EQUJ5” signified a sudden pulse of radio energy when it appeared on Big Ear’s printout, wrote Scharf in his brilliant new book, The Copernicus Complex : Our Cos-mic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities. « Usually the faint signals of natural noise only rated blank spaces, or digits such as 1, 2, or 3. But if the signals got strong enough the computer would have to shift up to letters — and by the time it got to “U” it meant a signal about thirty times more powerful than the cosmic background. This pulse lasted for the duration of Big Ear’s attention span on any one spot on the sky : seventy-two seconds. It also came in at al-most exactly the atomic hydrogen frequen-cy, the cosmic watering hole. But then it was gone. And it didn’t come back — ever. »

The Ohio State University researchers wondered if it was man’s first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. They trained the massive scope on that part of the sky for the next month, and have returned periodi-cally since, with no repeat of the signal

And although many point to it as a possible extraterrestrial intelligence sighting, Eh man, says told the Cleveland Pain Dealer « We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times. Something suggests it was an Earth-bound signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris. »

À cette occasion, notre pays renouera peut être avec son glorieux passé, assez méconnu, qui faisaient de nos ancêtres tenant d’une civilisation de la trans-mission orale, non seulement des guerriers craints et respectés, mais aussi des maîtres de la rhétorique, reconnus dans tout le monde antique jusqu’au cœur du sénat romain. Ogmios, dieu de l’éloquence de la mythologie celtique gauloise, ne terrassait-il pas ses ennemis par la seule force de la parole ?

Au terme de cette transition numérique qui referme-ra la parenthèse des civilisations de l’écrit, qui aura durée, plusieurs millénaires si on la fait s’ouvrir dès ses débuts en Mésopotamie, ou à peine plus de cinq siècles si on préfère commencer avec Gutenberg qui démocratisa le livre, un auteur contemporain pourra un jour reprendre à son compte cette citation : « Je prends possession du monde par les vidéos », en écri-vant les vidéos là où Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Les carnets, 1953) avait écrit les mots !



“6EQUJ5 »


Laurent HrybykPhoto prise par : Laurent Hryk

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My mother waited two months for her Amazon Echo to arrive. Then, she waited again — leaving it in the box until I came to help her install it. Her forehead crinkled as I download the Alexa app on her phone. Any device that requires vocal instructions makes my mother skeptical. She has bad memories of Siri. “She could not understand me,” my mom told me.

« If those civilizations are out there – and we don’t know that they are – those that inhabit star systems that lie close to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the sun will be the most motivated to send communications signals toward Earth, because those civilizations will surely have detected our annual transit across the face of the sun, telling them that Earth lies in a habitable zone, where liquid water is stable, » says Richard Conn Henry, of Johns Hopkins University. « Through spec-troscopic analysis of our atmosphere, they will know that Earth likely bears life. Knowing where to look tremendously reduces the amount of radio telescope time we will need to conduct the search. »

Henry and colleagues think that we limit our search for extra-terrestrial intelligence to the ecliptic plane in which our solar system’s planets orbit. This ecliptic band comprises only about 3 percent of the sky, which could make it easier for scientists to effectively narrow their search for intelligent E.T..

The logic behind it postulates that if there is another, perhaps more advanced alien civilization in our galaxy out there; they may be trying to contact us, as well. If this is the case, Henry says a search focused on the ecliptic « should lead rapidly to the detection of other civilizations ».

Exoplanets in the ecliptic should be able to see Earth passing in front of the Sun. These transits are what Earth astronomers rely on to identify a variety of information about the transiting planets, such as radius, density and composition. Transits also reveal the secret’s of a planet’s atmosphere, therefore any potential alien astronomers studying the Earth’s spectrum would theoretically find the indicators of life in our atmospheric oxygen, letting them know — just as we long to know — that they are not alone.

Henry, along with his colleagues, searches the ecliptic for these advanced alien civiliza-tions with the Allen Telescope Array, a set of dozens of antennae in Hat Creek, California.

According to Greg Laughlin, an astronomer and extrasolar planet hunter at the Univer-sity of California, Santa Cruz, if there is a stargazing civilization trying to make contact with us within 50 light years, its inhabitants

Voi-ceIs the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have

anAc-cent


3 mars 2017Sonia PaulBlackchannel

By Devon Maloney, Lily Hay Newman, Sophia Chen, Sonia Paul, The Backchannel Team, Jason Fagone, Sara Wachter-boettcher, Erik Malinowski, Jean M. Twenge, and Brian Dear

“6EQUJ5 »




©Lars Tunbjörk

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My mother was born in the Philippines, my father in India. Both of them speak English as a third language. In the nearly 50 years they’ve lived in the United States, they’ve spoken English daily — fluently, but with distinct accents and sometimes different phra-sings than a native speaker. In their experience, that means Siri, Alexa, or basically any device that uses speech technology will struggle to recognize their commands.

My parents’ experience is hardly exclusive or unknown. (It’s even been chronicled in comedy, with this infamous trapped-in-a-voice-activated elevator sketch.) My sister-in-law told me she gave up on using Siri after it failed to recognize the “ethnic names” of her friends and family. I can vouch for the frustra-tion : The other day, my command of “Text Zahir” morphed into “Text Zara here.”

Right now, it’s not much of a problem — but it’s slated to become more serious, given that we are in the middle of a voice revolution. Voice-based wearables, audio, and video entertainment systems are already here. Due in part to distracted drivers, voice control systems will soon be the norm in vehicles. Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa are radicalizing the idea of a “smart home” across millions of households in the US. That’s why it took so long for my mother’s Echo to arrive — the Echo was among Amazon’s bestsellers this holiday season, with a 900 percent increase from 2016 sales. It was backordered for weeks.

Overall, researchers estimate 24.5 million voice-driven devices will be delivered to Americans’ daily routines this year — evidence that underscores ComScore’s prediction that by 2020, half of all our searches will be performed by voice.

But as technology shifts to respond to our vocal chords, what happens to the huge swath of people who can’t be understood ?

_____________

To train a machine to recognize speech, you need a lot of audio samples. First, researchers have to collect thousands of voices, speaking on a range of topics. They then manually transcribe the audio clips. This combination of data — audio clips and written trans-criptions — allows machines to make associations between sound and words. The phrases that occur most frequently become a pattern for an algorithm to learn how a human speaks.

would see the Earth as a bluish dot. All they would need is an 8-metre space-based te-lescope with a good coronagraph along with a set of space-based infrared telescopes, which would enable them to detect ozone and water vapor in our atmosphere.

Most of the 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy are located in the galactic plane, forming another great circle around the sky. The two great circles intersect near Taurus and Sagittarius, two constellations opposite each other in the Earth’s sky – areas where the search will initially concentrate.

« We have no idea how many – if any – other civilizations there are in our galaxy,” Henry noted. “One critical factor is how long a civi-lization – for example, our own – remains in existence. If, as we dearly hope, the answer is many millions of years, then even if civi-lizations are fairly rare, those in our ecliptic plane will have learned of our existence. They will know that life exists on Earth and they will have the patience to beam easily detectable radio (or optical) signals in our direction, if necessary, for millions of years

in the hope, now realized, that a technologi-cal civilization will appear on Earth. »

Research of the past two decades have shown that literally billions of planets in the Milky Way might have niches that would sup-port at least a level of life represented by Earth’s extreomophiles.

“6EQUJ5 »




Ohio State University Radio Observatory " Big Ear "

Yet, the long-debated Drake Equation is of still of seminal importance because it orders our thinking. This one equation formed the backbone of astrobiology as a science. Carl Sagan was inspired that the Drake Equation showed the chances of intelligent alien life were high but he also added that extraordi-nary claims require extraordinary evidence.

In 2010, the Italian astronomer Claudio Mac-cone published in the journal Acta Astronau-tica the Statistical Drake Equation (SDE). It is mathematically more complex and robust than the Classical Drake Equation (CDE).

The SDE is based on the Central Limit Theorem, which states that given the enough number of independent random variables with finite mean and variance, those variables will be normally distributed as represented by a Gaussian or bell curve in a plot. In this way, each of the seven fac-tors of the Drake Equation become inde-pendent positive random variables. In his paper, Maccone tested his SDE using values usually accepted by the SE.T.I community, and the results may be good news for the “alien hunters”.

Although the numerical results were not his objective, Maccone estimated with his SDE that our galaxy may harbor 4,590 extra-terrestrial civilizations. Assuming the same values for each term the Classical Drake Equation estimates only 3,500. So the SDE adds more than 1,000 civilizations to the previous estimate.

The image below is the Gaussian or bell curve showing the probability of finding the nearest extra terrestrial civilization from Earth.

Prob

abilt

y de

nsity

func

tion

(l/m

eter

s)

E.T._Distance from Earth (in light years)

DISTANCE OF NEAREST E.T. CIVILISATIONS5,63•10-20

4,5•10-20

3,38•10-20

2,25•10-20

1,13•10-20

005005 00 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 5000

But an AI can only recognize what it’s been trained to hear. Its flexibility depends on the diversity of the accents to which it’s been introduced. Governments, academics, and smaller startups rely on collections of audio and transcriptions, called speech corpora, to bypass doing labor-intensive transcriptions them-selves. The University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is a powerhouse of these data sets, making them available under licensed agree-ments for companies and researchers. One of its most famous corpora is Switchboard.

Texas Instruments launched Switchboard in the early 1990s to build up a repository of voice data, which was then distributed by the LDC for machine learning programs. It’s a collection of roughly 2,400 telephone conversations, amassed from 543 people from around the US — a total of about 250 hours. Researchers lured the callers by offering them long-distance calling cards. A participant would dial in and be connected with another study participant. The two strangers would then chat spontaneously about a given topic — say, childcare or sports.

For years linguists have assumed that because the LDC is located in Philadelphia, the conversations skewed towards a Northeastern accent. But when Marsal Gavaldà, the director of machine intelligence at the messaging app Yik Yak, crunched the numbers in Switchboard’s demographic history, he found that the accent pool skewed more midwestern. South and North Midland accents comprised more than 40 percent of the voice data.

Other corpora exist, but Switchboard remains a benchmark for the models used in voice recognition systems. Case in point : Both IBM and Microsoft use Switchboard to test the word error rates for their voice-based systems. “From this set of just over 500 speakers, pretty much all engines have been trained,” says Gavaldà.

But building voice technology on a 26-year-old corpus inevitably lays a foundation for misunderstanding. English is professional currency in the linguistic mar-ketplace, but numerous speakers learn it as a second, third, or fourth language. Gavaldà likens the process to drug trials. “It may have been tried in a hundred patients, [but] for a narrow demographic,” he tells me.



“6EQUJ5 »


“You try to extrapolate that to the general population, the dosage may be incorrect.”

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Another SDE advantage is to incorporate the standard variation concept, which shows how much variation exists from the average value. In this case the standard variation concept is pretty high : 11,195. In other words, besides human society, zero to 15,785 advanced technological societies could exist in the Milky Way.

If those galactic societies were equally spaced, they could be at an average dis-tance of 28,845 light-years apart. That’s too far to have a dialogue with them, even through electromagnetic radiation traveling in the speed of light. So, even with such a potentially high number of advanced civiliza-tions, interstellar communication would still be a major technological challenge.v

Still, according to SDE, the average distance we should expect to find any alien intelligent life form may be 2,670 light-years from Ear-th. There is a 75% chance we could find E.T. between 1,361 and 3,979 light-years away.

We should also be open to the distinct pos-sibility that advanced alien communications technology a billion years old may operate at the third, or perhaps even a fourth or fifth level -all of which are totally incomprehen-sible to the human mind at our current state of evolution in 2014.

_____________

Larger companies, of course, have to think globally to stay competitive — especially because most sales of smartphones happen outside the US Technology companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon have pri-vate, in-house methods of collecting this data for the languages and accents they’d like to accommodate. And the more consumers use their products, the more their feedback will improve the products, through programs like Voice Training on the Alexa app.

But even if larger tech companies are making headway in collecting more specific data, they’re motivated by the market to not share it with anyone — which is why it takes so long for the technology to trickle down. This secrecy also applied to my repor-ting of this piece. Amazon never replied to my request for comment, a spokesperson for Google directed me to a blog post outlining its deep learning techniques, and an Apple PR representative noted that Siri is now customized for 36 countries and supports 21 lan-guages, language variants, and accents.

Outside the US, companies are aware of the impor-tance of catering to accents. The Chinese search engine company Baidu, for one, says its deep learning approach to speech recognition achieves accuracy in English and Mandarin better than humans, and it’s developing a “deep speech” algorithm that will recognize a range of dialects and accents. “China has a fairly deep awareness of what’s happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true,” Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told The Atlantic.

Yet smaller companies and individuals who can’t invest in collecting data on their own are beholden to cheaper, more readily available databases that may not be as diverse as their target demographics. “[The data’s] not really becoming more diverse, at least from my perspective,” Arlo Faria, a speech researcher at the conference transcription startup Remeeting, tells me. Remeeting, for example, has used a corpus called Fisher that includes a group of non-native English speakers — but Fisher’s accents are largely left up to chance, depending on who happened to participate in the data collection. There are some Spanish and Indian accents, for instance, but very few British accents, Faria recalls.

That’s why, very often, voice recognition technology reacts to accents differently than humans, says Anne Wootton, co-founder and CEO of the Oakland-based audio search platform Pop Up Archive, “Oftentimes the software does a better job with like, Indian accents than deep Southern, like Shenandoah Valley accents,” she says. “I think that’s a reflection of what the trai-ning data includes or does not include.”

Rachael Tatman, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington’s Department of Linguistics who focuses on sociolinguistics, noted that the underrepresented



Les propriétés réflectives de notre sa-tellite ont permis à l'armée américaine d'intercepter des communications top secrètes au cours de la Guerre froide.

LUNEQUAND LA

LES SOVIÉTIQUES

SERVAIT À ESPIONNER

motherboard.vice.com12 juin 2017 Daniel Oberhaus

Quand la Lune servait à espionner les Soviétiques

DANIEL OBERHAUS

Le 24 juillet 1954, un fier ingénieur de la marine américaine, James Trexler, s'asseyait dans un coin du Centre de recherche navale du Maryland, seul. Absorbé dans une intense réflexion, il se parle à lui-même, grognant, esquissant de grands gestes avec les mains. Un observateur extérieur aurait pu se per-suader que le bonhomme était devenu fou et que ses plans de sous-marins lui étaient montés au cerveau. Pourtant, James Trexler allait très bien. Il venait juste d'inventer la guerre électronique.

En effet, quelques jours auparavant, Trexler avait entrepris de parler dans un micro-phone connecté à une formidable antenne de la Stump Neck Facility, l'installation radio de la base navale. Cette antenne était orientée vers la lune, ni plus ni moins. Aussi, quand Trexler a balbutié quelques mots dans son microphone, leur écho lui est revenu 2.5 secondes plus tard, après que les ondes sonores aient réalisé un trajet de 800 000 kilomètres jusqu'à la Lune et retour. Même si 30 ans auparavant, un autre ingénieur créa-tif avait déjà entrepris de faire rebondir un signal radio sur la surface de la Lune, il était le premier à avoir envoyé et reçu une trans-mission vocale via notre satellite.Cette expérience déterminante n'a pas été pensée du jour au lendemain. Durant ses jeunes années à l'université, Trexler avait réalisé que l'ionosphère de la Lune pouvait servir de réflecteur pour les ondes radio. Après avoir rejoint le Naval Research Center dans les années 40, il pousse son hypothèse encore plus loin : et si la lune pouvait être utilisée comme un « dispositif d'interception radar » capable d'espionner les communica-tions soviétiques ?

Au cours des deux années qui ont suivi, Trexler a employé toute son énergie à prou-ver qu'un programme de renseignement lunaire était parfaitement viable.En 1950, la marine américaine est convain-cue par l'idée de Drexler. Elle construit alors deux grandes antennes pour tenter d'inter-cepter les signaux de communication radio soviétiques : le projet Passive Moon Relay (PAMOR) était né.

Le projet PAMOR n'a rencontré qu'un succès mitigéé. En 1964, il est parvenu à capter un signal en provenance de l'antenne radio dite du « Poulailler » l'une des plus sophistiquées de l'Union soviétique. Cette antenne exerçait une fascination sans borne sur l'armée amé-ricaine depuis sa découverte, permise par la réflexion d'ondes radio sur le nuage dégagé

groups in these data sets tend to be groups that are marginalized in general. A typical database of Ameri-can voices, for example, would lack poor, uneducated, rural, non-white, non-native English voices.

“The more of those categories you fall into, the worse speech recogni-tion is for you,” she says.

_____________

Still, Jeffrey Kofman, the CEO and co-founder of Trint, another automated speech-to-text software based in the UK, is confident accent recognition is something speech science will be able to eventually solve. We video chatted on the Trint platform itself, where Australian English is now available alongside British and North American English as transcription accents. Trint also offers speech-to-text in a dozen European languages, and plans to add South Asian English sometime this year, he said.

Collecting data is expensive and cumbersome, which is why certain key demographics take priority. For Kofman, that’s South Asian accents, “because there are so many people from India, Pakistan, and those countries here in England, in the US and Canada, who speak very clearly but with a distinct accent,” he says. Next, he suspects, he’ll prioritize South Afri-can accents.

Obviously, it’s not just technology that discriminates against people with accents. It’s also other people. Mass media and globalization are having a huge effect on how people sound. Speech experts have documented the decline of certain regional American accents since as early as 1960, for example, in favor of a more homogenous accent fit for populations from mixed geographic areas.


3 mars 2017Sonia PaulBlackchannel motherboard.vice.com12 juin 2017 Daniel Oberhaus


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© US Navy Le miroir du transmetteur/récepteur radio à bord de l'USS Oxford. Il était utilisé pour les communications Terre-Lune et Lune-Terre.



This effect is exacerbated when humans deal with digital assistants or operators; they tend to use a voice devoid of colloquialisms and natural cadence.Or, in other words, a voice devoid of an identity and accent.

As voice recognition technology becomes better, using a robotic accent to communicate with a device stands to be challenged — if people feel less of a need to talk to their devices as if they are machines, they can start talking to them as naturally as they would a friend. And while some accent reduction coaches find their clients use voice assistants to practice neutralizing their thick foreign or regional accents, Lisa Wentz, a public speaking coach in San Francisco who works in accent reduction, says that she doesn’t recommend it.

That’s because, she tells me, most of her clients are ai-ming for other people to understand them. They don’t want to have to repeat themselves or feel like their accents prevent others from hearing them. Using de-vices that aren’t ready for different voices, then, only stands to make this feeling echo.

_____________

My mother and I set up her Alexa app together. She wasn’t very excited about it. I could already imagine her distrust and fear of a car purported to drive by the command of her voice. My mother would never ride in it; the risk of crashing would be too real. Still, she tried out a couple of questions on the Echo.

“Alexa, play ‘Que sera sera,’” my mother said.

“I can’t find the song ‘Kiss your ass era.’”My mom laughed, less out of frustration and more out of amusement. She tried again, this time speaking slower, as if she were talking to a child. “Alexa, play ‘Que sera sera.’” She sang out the syllables of sera in a slight melody, so that the device could clearly hear “se-rah.”

Alexa understood, and found what my mom was looking for. “Here’s a sample of ‘Que sera sera,’ by Doris Day,” she said, pronouncing the sera a bit harsher — “se-raw.”

The 1964 hit started to play, and my mother smiled at the pleasure of recognition.

par un essai nucléaire en URSS. Hélas, après cette petite victoire, les autres tentatives de transformer la lune en dispositif d'écoute clandestine passif ont été peu probantes.

Le Projet Diana, précurseur de l'Opération Moon Bounce.

Peu de temps après la création du projet PAMOR, Trexler et son superviseur Howard Lorenzen (le « père de la guerre électro-nique ») ont établi un contact radar avec la Lune. Nous sommes en octobre 1951. Ils se sont contentés de tester l'envoi et la récep-tion d'une série d'impulsions courtes afin de tester la fiabilité de la Lune lors qu'elle est utilisée comme relais de communications.

Le premier satellite artificiel ne serait pla-cé en orbite que six ans plus tard. Ainsi, à l'époque, l'armée américaine était toujours dépendante de la propagation ionosphé-rique, dont elle devait tenir compter pour envoyer ses signaux radio à ses unités à travers le monde. Ceci impliquait la réfrac-tion des ondes radio sur la ionosphère, la couche supérieure de l'atmosphère terrestre qui possède une concentration élevée d'atomes chargés électriquement. Même si cette technique fonctionnait assez bien, elle restait assez peu fiable puisqu'elles pouvait être compromise par les éruptions solaires et les tempêtes géomagnétiques.

Avec ces nouvelles expériences au nom de code charmant, "Opération Moon Bounce", l'armée américaine espérait transformer la lune en un satellite de communication naturel une bonne fois pour toute. Après une première série de tests réussis, l'Opération Moon Bounce a été intégrée au sein d'un système de communication pleinement opé-rationnel, qui a été utilisé pour relier Hawaï à Washington DC en 1959.


Quand la Lune servait à espionner les SoviétiquesVoice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent


28 29

En 1960, le système est officiellement inau-guré par une transmission entre deux offi-ciers de marine, qui se sont envoyé l'image d'un porte-avions sur lequel avait inscrit l'expression "RELAIS LUNAIRE".

Le système a été utilisé pendant des an-nées, mais il est devenu obsolète dès la fin des années 60. La Lune avait été rempla-cée par des satellites de communication de l'armée américaine, moins majestueux mais plus efficaces que notre satellite naturel. Ces derniers ont cependant été construits sur la base des expérience de l'Opération Moon Bounce, qui restera dans les mémoires comme l'une des opérations militaires les plus audacieuses de la Guerre Froide.

Première image transmise en utilisant la Lune comme un relais de transmission pour les communications mili-taires.

© NASA



"Moon Bounce est un exemple emblématique des techniques de collecte de renseigne-ment invraisemblables au premier abord, et qui ont pourtant révélé tout leur potentiel par la suite"

… peut-on lire dans les documents déclassifiés du programme. N'hésitez pas à les consulter si vous aimez bien l'idée que des signaux radio top secrets puissent re-bondir allègrement à la surface de la Lune.

« Barbie Stasi » : c’est ainsi que la presse allemande surnomme la nouvelle création de Mattel, qui porte en réalité le nom bien neutre de Hello Barbie. Cette poupée capable de dialoguer avec les enfants, grâce à un logiciel de reconnaissance vocale comparable à Siri, l’assistant vocal développé par Apple pour ses smartphones, devrait être commercialisée avant la fin de l’année, mais seulement aux Etats-Unis, d’après la version allemande du Huffington Post. La poupée aux proportions irréelles honnie par les féministes « ne menace cette fois-ci pas l’image de soi mais la sphère privée des enfants », écrit l’hebdomadaire Stern : « Pour que cela fonctionne, elle enregistre en per-manence l’ensemble des sons émis dans son envi-ronnement. S’il elle reconnaît que quelqu’un est en train de parler, la poupée enregistre ce qui est dit et le transmet à un serveur Mattel. La langue est analysée là-bas et une réponse adéquate est générée. »

Pire, les centres d’intérêts des enfants devraient égale-ment être analysés par la poupée, poursuit l’hebdo-madaire :

« Comme si l’idée d’une Barbie IM (abréviation de Inoffizieller Mitar-beiter, c’est-à-dire collaborateurs officieux, nom donné autrefois par la Stasi à ses indicateurs) n’était pas suffisamment inquiétante, Mattel veut également enregistrer les goûts des enfants. Cela sert soi-disant à donner des réponses adéquates.

© NASA

BARBIE STASI

la poupée qui espionne les enfants

(mais son vrai nom est « Hello Barbie »)

Repéré par Annabelle Georgen sur Stern et Huffington Post


Quand la Lune servait à espionner les Soviétiques« Barbie Stasi », la poupée qui espionne les enfants

23 fev. 2015Annabelle Georgenslate.fr

30 31« Barbie Stasi », la poupée qui espionne les enfants

23 fev. 2015slate.fr Annabelle Georgen

On imagine aisément la valeur que représente pour un fabricant de jouets une base de données uti-lisable qui recense les goûts des en-fants. Peut-être que ce n’est qu’une question de temps pour que Hello Barbie ne commence à demander un cheval ou une voiture. »

Avec cette poupée connectée, Mattel espère reconqué-rir les chambres d’enfants, car les ventes de poupées Barbie sont en baisse depuis plusieurs années, face à la concurrence d’autres poupées comme les Monster High et les Bratz, moins lisses, certes, avec leurs looks trash et leur dégaine street, mais tout aussi maigri-chones et hyperféminines que leur aïeule blonde au sourire figé. L’influence négative de ces poupées sur les petites filles est de plus en plus pointée du doigt, comme en témoigne le flot de critiques qui a accompagné la sortie de Barbie ingénieure informa-tique en 2014 ou le tumblr d’une Australienne qui « démaquille » et désexualise ainsi les poupées Bratz, dont l’action a suscité l’enthousiasme de nombreux parents.

Il existe même désormais des alternatives à ces poupées, qui sont souvent le fait d’initia-tives individuelles, telles la « Barbie nor-male » ou plus récemment les « Barbie acné » et « Barbie cellulite ».


Quand la Lune servait à espionner les Soviétiques« Barbie Stasi », la poupée qui espionne les enfants

23 fev. 2015slate.fr Annabelle Georgen

© NASA

32 33

I see U : DIY Sur-veillance for the Masses …and the Makers

Why Should The NSA Have All The Fun ?

Teshia Treuhaft

If you were wandering around the music, art and tech-nology festival Trailer Park I/O this past week you may find that your conversations are not as private as you think. Touching on one of the festival’s key themes of ‘Spying Society’ and adding a layer of playfulness to the all too relevant topic of surveillance- was Copen-hagen’s own digital agency Great Works CPH with their project ‘I see U.’


Quand la Lune servait à espionner les SoviétiquesI see U : DIY Surveillance for the Masses …and the Makers

5 août 2016core77.com Teshia Treuhaft

© NASA

From the NSA to Mark Zuckerberg’s low-budget laptop camera tapeover — surveillance is a perva-sive topic in our modern society. As Great Works CPH Partner, Pia Leichter puts it « The conversation around privacy is over — the illusion has long been shattered. » Hence why the agency decided to ap-proach surveillance as the theme of their first artistic project. I see U is a DIY surveillance kit cooked up Great Works as a response to the technological issues facing not only their clients, but society at large.

I see U combines open source electronics, rapid prototyping and a healthy dose of internet memes to create a kit that helps you eaves drop and match your findings with a representative animated gif. The kit comes equipped with a parabolic microphone, raspberry pi and touch screen, and manual for ease of assembly allowing anyone to spy on their immediate surroundings. The kit debuted at Trailer Park I/O last week with its first open workshop to build the devices and showcase them in action through their interactive installation. The workshop acted as a bit of a testing ground for the Great Works CPH team to see their kit in action for the first time and see the I/O through the eyes of a spy.

In addition to the kit, the interaction installation worked as a running log of the overheard around the festival. Though clever implementation of the giphy API, the floor to ceiling screens populate with gifs pulled based on keywords overheard with the I see U device. As Leichter mentioned in her talk on the main stage of I/O, 40% of people share what they overhear on social media or blogs. Examples ranging from « just throw some bacon at the problem » overheard at Whole Foods to overheard at Trailer Park I/O : « I could be catching Pokemon right now. »Attendees of Trailer Park I/O enjoy the gifs generated from overheard conversations around the event.

This is the first time the Great Works CPH team has toed the line between their digital work for the agency and artistic passion project. The decision to not only tackle such a heavy topic but infuse it with unmista-kable maker vernacular of laser cutting and Raspberry Pi gives the entire project a lightness leaning more toward LOLcat than Wikileak.

In the playful world of memes, gifs, cats, snaps, emojis, wows and likes, it’s easy to forget what we do and share is being collected and distributed by




© is

eeu

Om

er Fast, 500

0 Feet is the Best, 2011.

34 35

governments and corporations. Companies provide ‘free’ services in exchange for our data – what we eat, how we feel, where we go, what we say, our photos, faces, families and friends, which are all monetized, profiled and shared. We have the right to know how, why, where and by whom. » - Christian Langballe, Partner at Great Works CPH

Still, I see U makes a very relevant point about demo-cratized surveillance. As Leichter puts it « surveillance is the business model of the internet » - an concept particularly chilling when you consider the World Economic Forum’s projection that by 2025 over 50% of internet traffic will come from home appliance and devices.The Great Works CPH team is taking pre-order requests and will look toward open sourcing the plans for the device as well as going into small batch production in the next months.

To learn more about their project and vision for the future of democratized and DIY surveillance check out their website.




© is

eeu

© NASA

Bryan Pijanowski wants to capture the sounds of the world on a single day, and he needs your help.

On Earth Day, April 22, Pijanowski hopes to enlist thousands of people in recording a few minutes of their everyday surroundings with his Soundscape Recorder smartphone app. All those sonic snippets could create an unprecedented soundtrack to life on Earth — and as they accumulate, year after year, scientists could use them to measure patterns and changes in our sonic environments. Pijanowski’s work typically takes him to places like the Sonoran desert or old-growth rain forests in Borneo, where he analy-zes recordings to learn more about ecosystem health and dynamics : relationships between biodiversity and forest canopy structure, or how natural commu-nities recover from wildfire.

“I’ve been on a campaign to record as many ecosystems as possible,” said Pijanowski, a soundscape ecologist at Purdue University. “But there’s only so many places in the world I can be. I thought about how I could get more recordings into a database, and it occurred to me : We have a couple billion people on this planet with smart-phones !”

Help Scientists Record One Day of Sound

on Earth

Chris Hadfield is getting ready to launch the first al-bum recorded (partially) in space.

Space Sessions : Songs from a Tin Can, will be released on 9 October, with some of the tracks on the 11-song col-lection recorded aboard the Internatio-nal Space Station. Ahead of the album's release Hadfield has uploaded the official lyric video to one of the tracks, Feet Up.

And recording music in space isn't wit-hout its difficulties. Hadfield, who shot to internet fame with his cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity, said that zero gravity played havoc with everything from holding a guitar stable to singing properly.

Chris Hadfield's new album was

recorded in space

Chris Hadfield’s new album was recorded in space

wired.ukJames Temperton10 août 2015


21 avr. 2014wired.com Brandon Keim

Brandon Keim© NASA

36

"The producer who was helping me, Paul Mills, said : 'Your guitar playing is a little messy.' I said, yeah, you come up here and play guitar," Hadfield told The Globe and Mail. He also explained that zero-gravity caused a build-up of fluid in the head, leading to a swelling of the tongue and vocal cords.

Recording for many of the album's tracks was done in Hadfield's tiny slee-ping pod. Using a microphone plugged into his iPad, the Canadian astronaut used a slim Larrivee Parlor acoustic guitar to allow him to play in such tight confines.

With the Global Soundscape project and its Sounds-cape Recorder app, now available for iOS and Android devices, the emphasis is on cities and towns and su-burbs, and our relationships to their sonic character.

After making a recordings with the app, people are as-ked a short series of questions about what they heard and how they feel. The recording is then uploaded to the Global Soundscape database. “If we make this part of the Earth Day culture, something everyone goes out and does, we can begin to characterize those sounds and compare them from year to year,” said Pijanowski.

“We should get a sense of whether and how we’re making this a noisier planet, which I think we’re doing,” Pijanowski continued. “And it should increase awareness of sounds. Hopefully it will make people stop and listen.”

The Soundscape Recorder app in action.

Chris Hadfield’s new album was recorded in space

wired.ukJames Temperton10 août 2015


21 avr. 2014wired.com Brandon Keim

Now back on Earth, Hadfield has been working with producer Robbie Lackritz and a team of professional musicians to add polish to his space recordings. Tracks on the album include Big Smoke, Space Lullaby and his now famous ren-dition of Space Oddity.

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Just recently over the past few months, I have been noticing in the early am hours (1-2am and 5-7am) the hum sound that you are talking about.

I wasn’t sure what it was until I found your website information and map. I had heard of the hum..and was suspicious of govern-ment mind control. Your map helped me to recognize that our area is involved also.

If you use foam ear plugs, will you still be affected by the hum..and should we unplug everything when not in use??

I read something about microwaves being very conducive to short waves and creating the hum sound.

The hum was a form of waves that affected a person during their alpha states of sleep..the mind was more subject to suggestions.

_____________

S&K <[email protected]>

Charleston, SC USA - Sunday, May 23, 1999 at 14:22:56 (PDT)

My wife and I both have hears a high pitched buzzing sound for three years.It’s annoying, sometimes even painful. I have discovered a possible source. It’s a device being sold from a Police/military catalog and is designed specifi-cally to bring pain and nausia to people you don’t like. Any serious inquiry will be answered along with the add out of the catalog.

__________

Marty Gibson <[email protected]>

Willits, calif USA - Friday, September 17, 1999 at 16:02:15 (PDT)

It’s back. Much fainter than last year. The 8 month respite was nice but oddly enought I think I missed it during that time. What used to sound like the engine sputte-ring now sounds more like a pulse.

I picture an inboard-engine on a boat accompanied with the dull slapping of waves against its hull.

_____________

Dave S <[email protected]>

Greece, NY USA - Tuesday, September 05, 2000 at 09:40:20 (PDT)

Listen Up :

I read something about THE HUM in a book of mysteries that I have which says the hum was first heard as far back as 1725 (the diesel engine noise) also the hum has also been heard in places such as the North Pole and the Desert where there is no or not much civilisation !

I too have heard the hum and members of my family have also heard it, a strange huming like a car engine in the early hours of the morning.

Also it appears to be getting louder, Reports of the hum in the UK appear to go back as early as the 1970’s, however no expanation. In the book I mentioned someone who was said to hear the hum all the time was put in a sound proof room and they could still hear it, this person had NO ear problems. So what can it be ???

I’d like to hear anyones views on this! Sometimes when I hear the hum it sounds really spooky like I’m living right by a highway, but all the roads in my area are 98% quiet at night. Is the hum man made I just wonder if it is if it has been heard in the North pole and in the deserts, In fact I think it’s a world wide phenonema, will it ever be explained !!! well thought I’d share that with you all. Good night and HUM HUM HUM HUM! Sorry about that!

_________

Phillip Smith <[email protected]>

Near Liverpool, UK - Thursday, May 18, 2000 at 14:07:14 (PDT)

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I live close to the recently closed El Toro Ma-rine Base in California.

I use to think that what I was hearing was some kinda of communication of low fre-quency.

The base is now closed and the sounds are still happening.

No one else in my family can hear them. They usually occur in the morning hours around 5AM. Very low in tone, the only way I could explain them is that they sound like a blimp in the distance and its engines opera-ting at a very low rpm.

I want to find out what this is im hearing.

The latest was this morning 9/18/99 5:00 am and I went to the balcony to listen a little clo-ser it does sound louder in doors vs outdoors. I will continue to investigate with my com-mon sence approach.

I will also be looking at water lines connected to the house. I figure that this sound maybe transmitted through the pipes from the city pumping facility. I will also be out in the neighboorhood walking next time it hap-pens.

I always though it was the Marine Base, yet now no one is there.

Its not painful in any way.

Just strange and my wife and son hear nothing. Yet to me its quite loud.

_____________

Rick <[email protected]>

irvine, ca USA - Sunday, September 19, 1999 at 00:21:27 (PDT)

Camping on the middle fork of the Gila River, hum was steadily increasing on 17th, 18th, and 19th of September. Three of us camping could hear it loudest at night, but continuing all day. Met a party of four hikers who asked what the funny noise was. Their description was the low level pulsating hum with occai-sional pitch shifts. Rich Loose

Rich Loose <[email protected]>

Organ, NM USA - Thursday, September 21, 2000 at 22:21:25 (PDT)

Whole family heard it 3 days in a row starting exactly at 5am and going for 15 mins.

It stopped for a week and this morning I heard it starting at 3:52, I looked around the house and outside the windows and could feel the windows vibrate with it. It stopped 15 minutes later.

_________

Sandy <[email protected]>

Tacoma, WA USA - Wednesday, February 21, 2001 at 16:20:44 (PST)

41 Le boitier anti-bruit : prouesse technologique ou gadget ?

sciencesetavenir.frSarah Sermondadaz

Sarah Sermondadaz

27 oct. 2016

Une start-up américaine promet la commercialisation d’un boîtier capable de sup-primer le bruit ambiant. Un engagement technolo-gique sans doute un peu trop ambitieux.

SILENCIO. Mettre ses voisins bruyants sur mute, ou isoler une conversation privée des passants indiscrets en un coup de télécom-mande, grâce à un boîtier connecté : c’est la promesse de Muzo. Le projet, porté par une start-up californienne, a lancé en juin 2016 une campagne de financement participatif sur le web, rapidement devenue virale : les internautes ayant mis la main au porte-mon-naie devraient recevoir les premiers mo-dèles d’ici avril 2017. Mais l’acoustique est une science complexe, surtout lorsqu’on ne connaît a priori pas la localisation précise des sources de bruit. Un tel appareil peut-il tenir ses promesses, et si oui, comment ?

Le boitier Muzo

This is the era of hyper-tech espionage, encrypted emails and mindboggling cryptography. But you can hear a very old-fashioned form of espionage on shortwave radio.

It is 13 :03 on a Tuesday in a cramped room with some fairly advanced radio equipment. What is suddenly heard on a shortwave receiving station is a 10-minute message in Morse code.There is a small community of aficionados who believe messages like this are a throwback to the era of Cold War espionage. They are the mysterious "numbers stations".

At the apex of the Cold War, radio lovers across the globe started to notice bizarre broadcasts on the airwaves. Starting with a weird melody or the sound of several beeps, these transmissions might be fol-lowed by the unnerving sound of a strange woman's voice counting in German or the creepy voice of a child reciting letters in English.

Encountering these shortwave radio messages, many radio hams concluded that they were being used to send coded messages across extremely long distances. Coming across one of them was a curious experience.


6 avr. 2014Olivia Sorrel-Dejerine

Olivia Sorrel-Dejerine

BBC News Magazine

THE SPOOKY WORLD OF THE

NUMBERS STATIONS

Le boitier anti-bruit : pro

uess

e te

chnologique ou gadget ?

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Loud since yesterday early am. Continues today, increasing in loudness.

_________

Jerry Deming <[email protected]>

Norman, OK USA - Monday, October 16, 2000 at 08:05:58 (PDT)

42 43

Principe de la réduction de bruit active

Le principe de l’appareil est celui de la réduc-tion active du bruit. Le son étant une onde, il en effet possible de l’annuler en lui oppo-sant une seconde source sonore produisant une forme d’onde exactement inverse, qui va ainsi annuler la première. En bref : grâce à un haut-parleur, on réémet (après traitement électronique permettant de « renverser » la forme d’onde) le son perçu par un micro-phone, le tout en temps réel.

Onde sonore incidente perçue par le microphone (S1)

Le boitier anti-bruit : prouesse technologique ou gadget ?


Speech/Morse generator


6 avr. 2014Olivia Sorrel-DejerineBBC News Magazine

Gon

gs or Ch

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27 oct. 2016

En rouge, l’onde sonore réémise par le haut parleur, visant à annuler l’onde précédente (S2)

Un risque cependant : le moindre décalage entre la source initiale S1 et la source réémi-se S2 n’aboutira pas pas au silence, mais à des interférences très désagréables. D’au-tant plus que le bruit est multidirectionnel, et ne connaît que rarement une seule origine ! L a qualité du (ou des) proces-seur(s) de traitement sonore, ainsi que le nombre de microphone et leur répartition spatiale est alors primordiale. C’est pour cela qu’aujourd’hui, l’anti-bruit se retrouve surtout dans des casques audio actifs ou dans des applications industrielles où les données du problème sont précisément connue. Le premier brevet déposé quant au contrôle actif du son, remontant à 1934, expliquait ainsi comment limiter le bruit des écoulement de tuyauterie.


sciencesetavenir.frSarah Sermondadaz27 oct. 2016

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Radio enthusiasts gave them colourful names like the "Nancy Adam Susan", "The Lincolnshire Poacher," "The Swedish Rhapsody" or "The Gong Station." The Lincolnshire Poacher was so named because of two bars from an English folk song of that name being used as an "interval signal".

Times have changed and technology has evolved, but there's evidence that this old-fashioned see-ming method of communication might still be used. Shortwave numbers stations might seem low-tech but they probably remain the best option for transmitting information to agents in the field, some espionage experts suggest.

"Nobody has found a more convenient and expedient way of communicating with an agent," says Rupert Allason, an author specialising in espionage issues and writing under the pen name Nigel West. "Their sole purpose is for intelligence agencies to commu-nicate with their agents in denied areas - a territory where it is difficult to use a consensual form of com-munications," Allason says.

A former GCHQ officer, who does not wish to be na-med, whose duty was to intercept signals towards the UK and search for these numbers stations in the 1980s is also adamant that these were broadcasts to agents in the field or in residencies or directed to embassies.

It was "one-way traffic" — the transmitters broadcast num-bers to the recipient. The recipient did not reply.

Le boîtier connecté Muzo se baserait donc sur ce principe pour faire la chasse aux bruits. Mais selon quelles technologies ? Dur de le savoir sans avoir pu expérimenter avec l’objet. »Vu la faible taille de l’appareil, il est probable que la mise en oeuvre du principe anti-bruit souffre d’imprécision, même si on doit bien pouvoir réaliser une analyse statistique des bruits de fond », extrapole un acousticien du bâtiment interrogé par Sciences et Avenir. Sur un fil Reddit dédié aux arnaques du financement participatif, les internautes, eux-aussi, spéculent avec scepticisme.

Beaucoup de bruit pour rien ?

Autre écueil : pour être totalement efficace, la technologie devrait embarquer plusieurs unités dotées de microphones à répartir sur chaque mur de la pièce au lieu d’un boîtier unique. les vibrations sonores peuvent en effet se transmettre par toutes les surfaces fermant une pièce. Whisper, autre projet (néo-zélandais cette fois-ci) du même type, également issu du financement participatif, se montre plus honnête en explicitant plus clairement sa technologie (qui ne fonctionne qu’en environnement fermé) sur sa page de présentation, et en annonçant qu’il faudra multiplier les boîtiers pour plus d’efficacité.

Efficacité des boîtiers Whisper selon la position de la source sonore (crédits : Noxcel Limited)

Efficacité des boîtiers Whisper selon la position des sources sonores et l’architecture de la pièce (crédits : Noxcel Limited)




6 avr. 2014Olivia Sorrel-DejerineBBC News Magazine 27 oct. 2016

Ce projet-ci, plus précautionneux, annonce un prototype pour 2017 (et non pas un pro-duit fini entièrement standardisé comme l’a fait Muzo). On est bien loin de l’effet d’an-nonce de Muzo sur les réseaux … Victime de son succès, Celestial Tribe, start-up à l’origine du produit, a d’ailleurs été amenée à préciser en juillet qu’il « leur était impos-sible de fournir un silence absolu dans un environnement ouvert », et de préciser que « la bulle de silence montrée dans la vidéo n’est qu’une illustration de la fonction de masquage du son »

En septembre 2016, le projet avait déjà recueilli plus de 1,5 millions de dollars de financement. À quoi peuvent s’attendre les internautes ayant mis la main au porte-mon-naie ? Certainement à une atténuation de bruit légère, les autres fonctions de l’ap-pareil comme la génération de sonorités continues (vent, écoulement, crépitement d’un feu…) pouvant aussi contribuer à at-ténuer les perceptions désagréables. Mais pour la petite histoire, on rappellera qu’Amar Bose, créateur de l’entreprise d’électronique éponyme, a mis près de 15 ans et dépen-sé près de 50 millions de dollars avant de finaliser le développement du casque audio à réduction de bruit active emblématique de sa marque. Et on rappellera aux internautes qu’en pré-commandant ce type de produit sur Kickstarter, c’est surtout au financement de la R&D d’un produit qu’ils contribuent, sans garanties que ce dernier corresponde vraiment à leurs attentes au final.

Why might the numbers stations have been used ?

"This system is completely secure because the messages can't be tracked, the recipient could be anywhere," says Akin Fernandez, the creator of the Conet Project - a comprehensive archive of the pheno-menon of numbers stations. "It is easy. You just send the spies to a country and get them to buy a radio. They know where to tune and when," he says.

Fernandez was fascinated by the mystery of numbers stations.

"It was so weird I wanted to know more about them," he says. He put three years of his life aside in order to put together a coherent archive of these stations. "Once you hear them, it has an effect on you," he says. Unlike other aspects of the Cold War era, the numbers stations didn't leave a lasting impression on popular culture. "It is a dry subject until you listen to them," Fernandez says.

"It is a way of communicating securely between the Secret Intelligent Service and agents, and it is incom-prehensible," says Philip Davies, a politics and history professor at the Brunel University in London.

"I never expected to be talking about it 17 years after hearing it for the first time - when the Conet Project first started."

© A

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46 47The spooky world of the « numbers stations »


The Magazine on spies

Revelations about the US National Security Agency's spying have provoked global outrage. But government snooping is nothing new, says Anthony Zurcher.People and nations spy, even on friends. But in the realm of international electronic espionage, the US wields a nuclear arsenal while the rest of the globe fights with guns, says Tara McKelvey.

© Léo de Fouan



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Most people have watched a spy film, but few have ever met someone from the intelligence community. So how close are real spies to the Bournes and the Bonds ? Peter Taylor looks at the world of the modern day secret agent.

48 49

But espionage was not the only explanation posited. Some people have even argued that the phenomenon was an elaborate prank. But the scale of the stations — multiple frequencies in different languages — makes that explanation seem far-fetched. Fernandez notes that any prankster would need to buy millions of pounds of radio transmitters.

Despite the general veil of secrecy around espionage, the odd bit of corroborative evidence for the purpose of numbers stations has leaked out. "The purpose of numbers stations has been guessed at first by ano-nymous leaks, stories of people being arrested with radios and 'one-time pads' and other scattered pieces of evidence, as well as some privately published books and magazines" says Fernandez. The one-time pads enabled a form of code that would have been uncrac-kable to anyone listening in.

In 1989, a Czech spy was arrested in the UK because his equipment was faulty and it radiated into other people's flats. He was unlucky. "When the Ceausescu regime collapsed, there was a cessation of broadcasts from Romania," the former GCHQ officer says.Experts are confident that numbers stations do still exist, even if there are fewer of them. Computers almost always leave traces, whereas a paper and a pen are easy to destroy.

"In the same way spy tricks such as pretending to feed ducks around a pond might still exist, numbers stations still exist too," says Al Bolton, a radio amateur. "It is an old-fashioned means of communication but you have to think of security."

Smartly.ai développe une solution pour créer rapidement des applications vocales à destination d’objets connectés. Convain-cue que le conversationnel est l’interface homme-machine de demain, la start-up a cependant dû élargir son commerce au chatbot, en attendant la maturité d’un mar-ché encore très américain…

« On est vraiment bien ici au WAI* mais tu verras, on est un peu au milieu du chemin, entre deux étages… »

Massif et aussi large d’épaules que sa voix est douce, Hicham Tahiri, CEO de la start-up spécialisée dans les applis vocales Smart-ly.ai, n’est pas de ces entrepreneurs qui s’écoutent parler. Alors, quand on lui fait remarquer l’ironie de cette géographie, il sourit franchement et s’amuse du sens caché de ses mots. Il faut dire que depuis sa création il y a bientôt cinq ans, Smartly.ai fait partie de ces start-ups entre deux eaux. Pile la mer monte et submerge tout sous son écume ; face la lune attire les vagues à elle et laisse l’entreprise croître sous les étoiles. Équilibre précaire pour entreprise (un peu trop) pionnière.

Qui sont ces

entrepreneurs

qui veulent nous

faire parler avec

des objets

?



Ces entrepreneurs qui veulent nous faire parler avec des objets ?

usbeketrica.comClémence Lesacq24 mai 2017

"The danger with a computer is that if you get caught, the data on it is still retrievable. Whereas with a one-time pad, you can eat it or flush it down the toilet," he says.

In the 2010 raids on a Russian spy ring in the US, court papers alleged that they had used "coded radio transmissions and encrypted data", a hint that they might have received their orders via shortwave nu-mbers stations. Despite all the clues, no government has ever officially admitted or denied using numbers stations, nor have intelligence agencies.

"Once The Conet Project was released, some spy agencies ad-mitted that they were, 'not for pu-blic consumption'. This is as near to an admission that we have been able to obtain," Fernandez says.

Enthusiasts might be fighting sceptics about the stations' real purpose, but what is certain is that they aren't a pure product of imagination. If you don't believe so "you could always get yourself a short wave radio, wait till the night time and then start scanning for them", Fernandez says.

And then listen and wonder.

Car le marché du vocal, en plein essor de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique avec des acteurs comme Apple, Google, Microsoft ou encore Amazon, n’est qu’à ses premiers pas par-tout ailleurs. En France, l’arrivée d’Alexa, l’assistant vocal d’Amazon enfin traduite en langue de Molière, n’est prévue qu’en fin d’année, en même temps que le premier assistant virtuel européen : Djingo de Orange et Deutsche Telekom. Deux cadeaux sous le sapin qu’attendent Hicham et son équipe avec fébrilité. « Aujourd’hui, nous sommes encore en avance sur notre marché. Depuis cinq ans, alors que le vocal est notre cœur de métier, nous réalisons l’essentiel de notre chiffre d’affaires grâce à d’autres activités, comme le chatbot - sur Messenger, Twitter, boîtes mail - depuis début 2016. » Ultime bouée en attendant la marée (et signe qu’ils ne sont pas les seuls à croire en leur mar-ché) : la boîte a réussi une levée de fonds de 400 000 euros à l’été 2016**.

Sérendipité

Les balbutiements de Smartly.ai, on les doit au 4 octobre 2011. Ce jour-là, Apple peut se rengorger : l’entreprise dévoile à la presse le premier assistant vocal de masse, Siri, et l’iPhone associé, le 4S. Le sang de Hicham, ingénieur en application vocale chez Parrot pendant cinq ans, ne fait qu’un tour : l’heure est venue, enfin, de démocratiser cette technologie. « Jusqu’ici le vocal était un domaine d’experts et c’était extrêmement frustrant de ne pas pouvoir apporter plus de vocal dans la vie des gens. Car au fond, la parole est le moyen le plus naturel que nous avons de communiquer.





** Levée de fonds auprès de Fa Dièse, BNP Paribas Développement et JMYX Holding.

50 51

Tout enfant parle avant d’écrire. » Dans sa roue, Hicham entraînera Karim Lourci, consultant en transformation digitale, avec qui il a usé les poches arrière de ses jeans sur les bancs de la prépa scientifique de Cergy.

L’idée d’alors est simple : le duo d’entre-preneurs veut faciliter la création d’applis vocales sur Siri, et ainsi enrichir l’assistant vocal d’Apple. « Notre solution aurait permis, par exemple, de créer en quelques minutes une appli vocale pour un journal sportif, qui donnerait des résultats, des pronostics et des commentaires pertinents à travers Siri. » Dans l’attente - qui sera vaine - de l’ouverture de Siri aux développeurs, Hi-cham et Karim déposent les statuts de leur entreprise à l’été 2012 et travaillent sur des projets avec le salon Futur en Seine 2013, Seb ou encore l’équipe innovation de Peu-geot, pour qui ils conçoivent l’interface vocale d’un concept-car. « C’est lors de cette mission que nous avons créé notre outil pour développer facilement des appli-cations vocales. Comme Peugeot souhaitait pouvoir faire évoluer par eux-mêmes les « use cases » de leur appli, on a été obligé de créer cet outil facilitateur. À la fin, Peugeot nous a demandé s’il pouvait l’acheter ! » Parfaite sérendipité.

En s’abonnant à la plateforme Smartly.ai, des développeurs ou des entreprises peuvent donc créer eux-mêmes leurs solu-tions vocales

Hicham et Karim comprennent qu’ils tiennent là leur futur produit phare. Plus qu’à l’améliorer et à le rendre accessible à tous. “Finalement, nous n’avons pas pu le com-mercialiser pour Siri, mais nous sommes devenus compatibles avec Alexa d’Ama-zon et Google Assistant.” En s’abonnant à la plateforme Smartly.ai, des développeurs ou des entreprises - quasi-uniquement aux USA - peuvent donc créer eux-mêmes, sans difficulté et très rapidement, leurs solutions vocales. Une version gratuite, avec 5 000 conversations offertes et à la portée du pre-mier internaute venu, est même disponible.



Le bruit est une question sérieuse. Il serait même identifié par les Européens comme l’un des « pro-blèmes environnementaux majeurs », explique l’agence européenne en charge de l’environne-ment, qui compte dans ses rangs un organisme, le bien-nommé NOISE, précisément chargé de relever les données sur la pollution sonore sur le continent.Ce dernier les présente sous la forme d’une carte, mais il est loin d’être le seul. Comme l’indique le blog Google maps mania, de nombreux services tentent de mesurer et de représenter la pollution sonore dans le monde. À l’aide d’outils de cartographie tels que Goo-gle Maps, ces plateformes s’appuient le plus souvent sur des données récoltées collectivement. Pour en faciliter la collecte, ils existent également parfois sous forme d’application mobile : c’est par exemple le cas de WideNoise Map ou de AirCasting.

Chacune de ces apps représentent l’intensité de la pollution sonore selon une progression de couleurs (le plus souvent du vert au rouge), et AirCasting permet notamment d’enregistrer directement le son, pour l’annoter sur une carte, à partir de son téléphone.

DES CARTES

POUR MESURER

LA POLLUTION

SONORE


19 nov. 2014Andréa Fradinslate.fr

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L’interface homme-machine de demain

Pris à part, les deux cofondateurs ont un même motto : le vocal est la prochaine interface entre l’homme et la machine. Hicham : « ça va donner accès au numé-rique à des gens qui n’y avaient pas accès : les personnes âgées, ceux qui ne savent pas lire ou écrire, les malvoyants… Le vocal c’est très facile : il suffit de savoir parler. » Et la croyance, inébranlable, anime la petite équipe de désormais huit convaincus qui se serrent sur des tables blanches au milieu des autres colocataires du WAI*.

*WAI : We Are Innovation, l’incubateur de BNP Paribas à Paris.



WideN

oise Map



WideNoise Map compte parfois plusieurs milliers de contributions par ville : Paris en totalise près de 2.000, pour un volume de décibels moyen de 60 (quelque part entre le bruit d’une voiture en ville et le ronron-nement d’un ordinateur).

À noter que rares sont celles qui dépasse ce volume sonore.

Une autre plateforme, NoiseWatch, croise « des sources scientifiques officielles et des observations crowdsourcées », indique Google maps mania. Cette dernière semble avoir une certaine popularité, puisque des sites tels que El Correo ou ABC de Sevilla, mentionnent des initiatives citoyennes visant à mesurer les bruits des villes espagnoles en s’appuyant précisément sur ce site, qui, là encore, dispose d’une version mobile.

Moins anxiogènes, d’autres initiatives cherchent également à cartographier le monde via le prisme de nos cinq sens, mais dans une optique plus poétique que pratique.

52 53

L’équipe de la start-up Smartly.ai

« Ne pas aller vers le vocal, c’est passer à côté de quelque chose d’énorme : le fait d’humaniser la technologie en la rendant conversationnelle. » Mais aux conseils avisés et à l’humour de K2000, cité dans les pa-roles enthousiastes de Hicham, on oppose les voix de CARL500 et de Samantha de Her. « C’est vrai que le conversationnel a aussi des côtés flippants » nous concède Hicham et Karim, un brin taquins. « Mais on peut toujours éteindre l’objet ou désactiver l’assistant personnel ! » tente de rassurer l’ingénieur. Et le sujet de la vie privée et des micros intégrés ? Le duo y oppose des constructeurs respectueux de la protection des données et une réflexion sur des com-portements déjà acquis.

« Aujourd’hui sur Facebook, on est content de retrouver ses amis et d’être au courant des dernières actualités, tout en sachant qu’on lâche des informations privées sur soi, des photos… Si on veut profiter des apports de la technologie, c’est déjà un compromis accepté. » Karim abonde : « en France, on est assez tatillon sur le sujet et les affaires comme celle des écoutes de la NSA n’ont pas arrangé les choses. Mais pour moi c’est clair : les bénéfices sont supérieurs aux doutes. » « Bientôt, toutes les applis auront leur pendant vocal »





Wid

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Pari

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Ainsi, nous vous parlions il y a quelques semaines de ces scientifiques qui dressent la carte sonore de la Terre, entre ses bruits de forêts, de vagues, mais aussi ses varia-tions urbaines.



Réussir à faire passer le vocal dans les usages de tout un chacun, c’est le défi que les deux trentenaires veulent relever. Pour le reste, prêts depuis cinq ans pour l’ouverture du marché, Hicham et Karim voient la fin de l’année 2017 et l’arrivée en France d’Ale-xa et Djingo comme la fin d’un long tunnel. « On ne peut que croire à notre marché : le nombre d’applis vocales sur Alexa ex-plose, on a allègrement dépassé les 10 000, avec des courbes comparables à celles du mobile. Bientôt, toutes les applis auront leur pendant vocal. Y avoir cru avant l’heure va se transformer en chance : notre solution est aujourd’hui la plus aboutie. » En plein recrutement, pour atteindre 15 à 20 salariés d’ici la fin de l’année, Smartly.ai a déjà fait le pari que la pièce lancée en l’air tombera face vers le haut.

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54 55Sonar et pollution sonore de la mer : quel danger pour les cétacés ?

Low Frequency Active Sonar 14 fev. 2010

Bourse antérieureCrâne

Lèvres phoniquesBourse postérieure

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Aperçu des cartes d’AirCasting. Plus la zone est rouge, plus le volume sonore est élevé.

D’autres encore s’amusent à représenter les odeurs des grandes villes du monde : c’est le cas de Kate McLean, une Britannique qui se définit comme « artiste et designer multisensorielle », écrivions-nous fin septembre, et qui a déjà cartographié Amsterdam, ou Edimbourg.

Sonar et pollution sonore de la mer : quel danger pour les cétacés ?




© S

enso

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Pour les cétacés, le milieu marin est un monde de sons, principal moyen de percep-tion et de communication, faute de lumière. Depuis la conquête du milieu marin, le bruit n’a cessé d’y augmenter.

Le son se propage particulièrement bien sous l’eau, l’atténuation due à l’absorption et à la diffusion est beaucoup plus faible que pour les ondes électromagnétiques. Les ondes acoustiques constituent le meilleur

56 57

moyen de transmission sous l’eau. Les longueurs d’onde couramment rencontrées dans l’océan s’étendent du millimètre à environ 50 mètres. La vitesse du son dans l’eau étant approximativement égale à 1500 m.s-1, cela correspond à des fréquences de 30 Hz à 1,5 Mhz (la limite audible pour l’Homme est de 20 Khz). Ce sonar envoie des sons de 235 dB à 100-500 hertz qui se propagent à des centaines de kilomètres. Par comparaison, une baleine émet des sons de 185 dB et l’oreille humaine supporte un son de 160 dB maximum.

Le trafic maritime a engendré une pollution sonore pour les espèces marines.

Il n’y a pas que l’US Navy, l’Otan fait des essais en Méditerranée, mais les États-Unis veulent déployer le système LFAS sur 80 % des océans : 4 bateaux suffiraient… Une polémique est ouverte sur le LFAS (Low Frequency Active Sonar) construit par l’US Navy. Associations et scientifiques militent en défaveur de cet outil qui provoque des échouages de cétacés : cette fois-ci c’est certain !

L’écholocation des cétacés

Les mammifères marins utilisent l’écholo-cation pour le contact, la surveillance des jeunes, le déplacement et la nourriture. Le cachalot chasse le calmar à 1.000 mètres de profondeur. Le spectre audible du dau-phin s’étend de 100 Hz à 150 kHz (Homme 20Hz à 20kHz). L’écholocation implique l’émission de sons de forte puissance et la réception d’échos très affaiblis. Ce qui nécessite un appareil auditif sensible pro-tégé lors de l’émission, comme avec les chauves-souris. Les cétacés ont des sinus aériens et des tissus mous autour de leur tympan fixé par des ligaments amortisseurs.

© Herm

inio Nieves





Le problème des sonars

Quelques exemples d’échouages constatés suite à des essais de LFAS :

• Otan, Méditerranée 1996, 150 dB, 12 ba-leines à bec de Cuvier ;

• US Navy, côtes californiennes, 1997, 3 baleines et 1 cachalot dans la zone ;

• US Navy, Bahamas, 2000, 2,8 à 3,5 kHz, 235 dB, 17 cétacés.

Cette dernière fois, un scientifique, Ken Balcomb, de l’Observatoire marin des Bahamas, récupère la tête de deux indivi-dus et constate une altération du système d’écholocation. Il a montré que la mort des baleines était due à ce phénomène qui a déchiré les tissus situés à proximité des oreilles et du cerveau.

Différents tests effectués par l’US Navy, au large d’Hawaï, montrent une concentration de requins marteaux, une désertion des baleines et la séparation de plusieurs jeunes de leur mère. Mais la Navy est juge et par-tie dans cette histoire et finance (presque) toute la recherche sur les cétacés aux États-Unis, et ne se gêne pas pour imposer le silence à ses chercheurs en cas de be-soin (devoir de réserve !)

Les travaux de Johnson semblent indi-quer que les variations de fréquence et de niveaux ne sont pas suffisantes pour provo-quer des lésions, certaines baleines bleues ou à bosse émettent des sons équivalents à ceux du sonar à basse fréquence mais un son constant qui engendre un effet de réso-nance… et cela dépend aussi des espèces sans doute…

Patrick Miller, de l’Institut océanographique de Woods Hole dans le Massachussets, et son équipe ont coopéré avec l’US Navy (matériel) pour mener leurs recherches. Ils ont suivi seize mâles, sans sonar, puis avec. Pendant la saison de reproduction, seuls les mâles « chantent ». Le comportement des baleines a été transformé quand ils étaient exposés au sonar LFA (basse fré-quence). Ces sonars utilisés pour repérer des sous-marins peuvent produire un son semblable à celui d’une explosion quand ils touchent les fonds marins. Or l’altération du « chant » peut altérer la démographie.

CE

PAPILLON QUI

SE JOUE DU

SONAR

DES

CHAUVES-SOURIS




22 fev. 2015Pierre Barthélémy

Pierre Barthélémy

Passeur de sciences

58 59

Cela dure depuis plus de 60 millions d’années. Depuis tout ce temps, chauves-souris d’un côté, papillons de nuit de l’autre, sont engagés dans une course aux ar-mements, les premières pour perfectionner les outils acoustiques de détection de leurs proies volantes, les seconds pour se soustraire aux attaques de leurs pré-dateurs. La majorité des chiroptères se servent ainsi d’un sonar à ultrasons pour localiser les insectes dans l’obscurité. Côté papillons de nuit, près de la moitié des quelque 140 000 espèces connues ont dévelop-pé un système auditif leur permettant de détecter l’usage dudit sonar. On a également découvert en 2013 que plusieurs lépidoptères produisaient eux-mêmes des ultrasons pour « brouiller » les ondes exploitées par les chauves-souris. Il n’en reste pas moins qu’un grand nombre d’espèces de papillons semblent ne pas avoir de défense contre les mammifères volants.

Parmi elles on trouve notamment certains membres de la famille des saturnidés, qui intriguent les biologistes en raison des très grands appendices qui prolongent leurs ailes inférieures, un peu comme des queues. Dès 1903, l’entomologiste américain Archibald Weeks s’interrogeait sur la fonction des « extensions » du papillon lune (en photo ci-dessus) et supputait qu’elles pouvaient sauver la vie de son porteur : en étant prises pour cibles, ces parties de l’ai-le pouvaient être aisément sacrifiées sans que la vie de l’insecte soit compromise, un peu comme certains lézards arborent un bout de queue vivement coloré pour dévier les attaques de leur prédateurs vers un morceau non crucial et détachable de leur anatomie. Dans une étude publiée le 17 février dans les Procee-dings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), une équipe américaine est allée plus loin encore en émettant l’hypothèse que les appendices flexibles et ondulants du papillon lune modifient la signature acoustique de ce dernier et, en lui donnant un aspect allongé sur le sonar des chauves-souris, détournent les attaques de celles-ci vers… le vide.

Pour mettre cette hypothèse du leurre à l’épreuve, ces chercheurs ont monté une expérience de préda-tion relativement basique, que d’aucuns pourront trouver cruelle : ils ont opposé plusieurs dizaines de ces papillons aux ailes émeraude à huit grandes chauves-souris brunes (Eptesicus fuscus). La moitié des lépidoptères avaient leurs appendices coupés — ce qui ne les handicape pas et modifie peu les caracté-ristiques de leur vol — tandis que les autres individus étaient intacts. Des pyrales, papillons sans appen-dices, étaient utilisées comme groupe de contrôle. L’idée des chercheurs était de filmer sous des angles différents, grâce à trois caméras infra-rouge, les tenta-tives de prédation, de déterminer où les chiroptères portaient leurs attaques et de calculer leur pourcen-tage de réussite suivant la silhouette de leurs proies. Pour que les papillons ne se sauvent pas et restent dans le champ des caméras, ils étaient reliés au pla-fond par un filin.

Il faut donc s’inquiéter du bruit que fait l’Homme dans les eaux sous-marines. Sé-curité nationale et respect de l’environne-ment : est-ce conciliable ? Mais à quel prix ? La Navy a reconnu les faits, mais après le 11 septembre, difficile de remettre en cause la sécurité nationale !

On recense de nombreux problèmes concernant les cétacés, même si on ne peut pas encore prouver que les sonars en sont totalement responsables : dégâts physiques, stress, sensibilité aux maladies, perte ou at-teinte, temporaire ou permanente, de l’ouïe (Balcomb), mort par atteinte des tissus et des organes, avec hémorragies internes (poumons, oreilles internes), mort directe à proximité immédiate de la source, pertur-bations du comportement, problèmes de communication, changements de la route de migration (US Navy), changement des vocali-sations chez les baleines bleues et les rorquals communs (US Navy).

Les bancs de poissons sont aussi concer-nés, voir à ce sujet un site (en allemand et en anglais, mais bien fait) http ://www.sounds-of-seas.com

Il y a aussi le transport maritime, les indus-tries minières, la thermométrie acoustique et les pêcheries. Une coopération internatio-nale et des normes devraient être dévelop-pées pour lutter contre la pollution sonore dans les océans. Notre développement doit se réaliser avec la nature.


Low Frequency Active Sonar 14 fev. 201022 fev. 2015Pierre BarthélémyPasseur de sciences


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Palm

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Les résultats sont plutôt éloquents. Lorsque les papillons lunes avaient conservé leurs appendices, seulement 34,5 % d’entre eux étaient mangés. Dans un certain nombre de cas, les chauves-souris parvenaient à leur arracher ces extrémités d’ailes mais les insectes restaient en vie sans être trop abî-més. En revanche, lorsque les lépidoptères avaient été privés de leurs « queues », le taux de réussite de leurs prédateurs grimpait en flèche et passait à 81,2 % (et il montait à 97,5 % avec les pyrales du groupe témoin). Les prises de vue montrent que, dans le premier cas, les chiroptères ont tendance à passer sous le papillon (voir la vidéo ci-dessous, extraite de l’étude) tandis que dans le second cas, ils visent davantage le milieu du corps de l’insecte.

Les appendices du papillon lune semblent donc réel-lement servir de parade anti-sonar même si les cher-cheurs ne sont pas parvenus à déterminer exactement la manière dont ils agissent sur l’outil de détection des chauves-souris : ne font-ils que déporter la cible vers le bas ou bien créent-ils l’illusion de cibles multi-ples à la manière des leurres employés contre les mis-siles anti-aériens ? L’étude n’a pas permis de trancher. Ses auteurs ont en revanche réussi à déterminer que l’apparition de ces extensions s’est produite de manière indépendante chez plusieurs espèces de papillons de nuit, comme par exemplel’africain Eudaemonia troglophylla. Les chercheurs ont égale-ment la certitude que l’évolution de la forme de l’aile du papillon lune s’est faite sous la pression de la pré-dation. En effet, ces appendices ne jouent aucun rôle dans la reproduction car il n’y a pas de parade nup-tiale chez cet insecte, la femelle s’accouplant littérale-ment avec le premier venu. De même, les appendices ne procurent aucun avantage pour le vol. Il se pourrait même qu’en raison de leur inertie, ils réduisent la fréquence des battements d’ailes. Un handicap qui serait plus que compensé par la protection contre les chauves-souris qu’ils apportent.

22 fev. 2015Pierre BarthélémyPasseur de sciences


Its like only I can hear it.

Sometimes it turns into a small pinging sound, sometimes like a the hum of a truck in the distance.

Its annoying like heck and it makes me mad when I try and listen to my music… it changes tones and volume when different music is played.

Its not reoccuring it comes and goes, sometimes I can trigger it myself.

By saying a jumble of words it will trigger it. Only I can trigger it.

I now think of that word jumble as a spell.

_____________

FaiaSutoomu

Omaha , NE USA - Wednesday, May 23, 2001 at 07:34:08 (PDT)

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-------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------- ------------------------ -------------------- --------------------------------

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7 II L Very heavy vibration!

Sound not real loud, but composed of lower frequencies than usual. Lots of pressure in ears. Incredible!

Still in awe of this thing.

_________

Janice Wright <[email protected]>

Carbondale, IL USA - Friday, March 29, 2002 at 20:31:52 (PST)

!!!

Am to be a grandmother any day, and worry about the hum upon our newborns, and faith or not I find the HUM totally unacceptable.

Babies folks .. little tiny babies..

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janicejoplin <wildbob@codywy>

USA - Monday, April 08, 2002 at 14:31:25 (PDT)

I’m ready to move, if I knew where I could move away from the « Hum ».

_____________

Jerry Deming <[email protected]>

Norman, OK USA - Friday, May 24, 2002 at 07:58:02 (PDT)

The hum is awful here tonight.

It has been strong yesterday and today. I called my power company today.

If no let up, I will call the military and others who need to know about this.

The energy with it is strong enough to stall certain electrical powered things.

_________

Anne

OK USA - Monday, May 20, 2002 at 19:28:20 (PDT)

Can anyone tell me some sort of antidote that will allow some peace at all ?

Please!

_____________

Jerry Cummings <[email protected]>

Milton, FL USA - Saturday, July 17, 2004 at 19:40:32 (PDT)

Over here it seems to get louder round about a full moon has any one else observed that ?

_____________

DR BARNES <[email protected]>

BANGOR , WALES uk - Thursday, August 18, 2005 at 11:30:51 (PDT)

Heard it for first time last week.

But it went away. But last night, it woke me up around 3:45am. This constant humming noise. Like a big truck parked outside my house.

I turned off every electrical device in my home. And still heard the noise. Couldn’t go back to sleep. Kept me up for 40 minutes. I work in a call centre and wear a head-set all day.. Maybe that’s the cause.

Anyways.. I hope I don’t hear it tonight. And yeah..

Everybody I tell this too think I’m crazy.

_________

Erik <erik>

Gatineau, PQ Canada - Friday, March 17, 2006 at 13:39:34 (PST)

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64 65

Millions of people have a rin-ging in their ears — a condi-tion called tinnitus — often with no discernible cause.

Melanie West, 63, has had a ringing in her ears as long as she can remember. When she was a kid in the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was a high-pitched sound in both ears that her doctors did not believe existed. “I would go from doctor to doctor explaining, ‘I hear this sound inside of my head, and it won’t let me sleep.’ I was having a hard time concentra-ting, and they would tell me that I don’t have it,” she says. When West was stressed, or hadn’t had enough sleep, it would get worse and her grades would plummet. Once, the noise made her so tense that she broke a hairbrush she was holding.

By using causal logic with a keen sense of hearing, cats can predict where prey hides

When hunting for prey, cats have been found to not only understand the principle of cause and effect, they also use certain elements of physics.

By combining these abilities with their keen sense of hearing, felines can predict where possible prey hides, and how to hunt it down.

Previous work, conducted by researchers from Kyoto University in Japan, found cats predict the presence of invisible objects based on what they hear. In the present study, the researchers wanted to find out if cats use a causal rule to infer if a box contains an object, based on whether it is shaken along with a sound or not. The team also wanted to establish if cats expect an object to fall out or not, once the container is turned over.

A total of 30 domestic cats were recorded while a researcher shook a container. In some cases this action was accompanied by a rattling sound. In others it wasn’t, to simulate the box was empty. After the shaking phase, the container was turned over and an object either dropped out, or it didn’t.

Two experimental conditions were in line with phy-sical laws - the shaking was accompanied by a sound and an object fell out of the container. The other two conditions were incongruent to the laws of physics. Either a rattling sound was followed by no object dropping out of the container or the shaking pro-duced no sound but an object still fell out.

The

Sound

That

Comes

From

Nowhere

Victoria Woollaston

Cats use the laws

of physics to hunt

their prey


15 juin 2016Victoria Woollastonwired.com

The Sound That Comes From Nowhere

theatlantic.comJulie Beck21 jan. 2016

Julie Beck



66 67The Sound That Comes From Nowhere

© Léo de Fouan


The trouble with tinnitus — the medical term for ear-ringing — is there’s really no good way to measure a sound that only the patient can hear. Interest in and recognition of the condition has improved in the past couple decades, partly thanks to advances in brain science. But when West, now the CEO and chair of the board of directors of the American Tinnitus Association (ATA), was young, it was less understood.

Over time, she adapted. She read a lot of psychology books and says those helped. She started to manage a pretty good quality of life, until she got in a car accident in 2008. Another vehicle rear-ended hers at about 55 miles per hour, and something about this event changed the sound considerably.

It got louder — about twice as loud, she says — and fuller, and made more of a “shh” sound. The noise is now louder in her right ear than her left, “so they’re not the same, and even that becomes a little irritating,” she says. After the accident, “I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t want to eat. It just affects eve-ry single part of your life.”

Talking with doctors, once again, was frus-trating. She describes visiting otolaryngolo-gists — ear, nose, and throat doctors — and “literally, I sat in the parking lot, crying, because they would simply look at you and say ‘There’s nothing we can do for you,’” she says. “‘Go home and learn to live with it’ — I have heard that so many times in my life.”

_________

Tinnitus is often described as ringing in the ears, but that’s not the only sound that qua-lifies. It can also present as buzzing, roaring, clicking, hissing, or a noise like crickets, among other things. A type known as pulsa-tile tinnitus is rhythmic, often keeping time with the person’s heartbeat.

Most people will probably experience tem-porary tinnitus at some point in their lives after exposure to loud noises — after a concert, say. But it will likely go away. Estimating how many people have tinnitus, and the severity of each case, is difficult, because different studies have defined it in different ways. According to one measure, 50 million Americans — or 25 percent of the population — experienced any tinnitus in the past year, while 16 million, or 8 percent, experienced it “frequently.” The ATA reports

The cats looked longer at the containers which were shaken together with a noise. This suggests they used a physical law to infer the existence, or absence, of objects based on whether they heard a rattle or not. This helped them predict whether an object would appear once the container was overturned.

The animals also stared longer at containers in incon-gruent conditions as if they « realised that such condi-tions did not fit into their grasp of causal logic, » said the researchers. « Cats use a causal-logical understan-ding of noise or sounds to predict the appearance of invisible objects,” explained lead author Saho Takagi.

Researchers suggest a cats’ surroundings influence their ability to find out information based on what they hear and their natural hunting style may favour the ability to listen for sounds. Takagi added that hunting cats often need to infer the location or the distance of their prey from sounds alone because they stake out places of poor visibility.

Further research is needed to find out exactly what cats see in their mind’s eye when they pick up noises, and if they can extract information such as quantity and size from what they hear. The findings are publi-shed in Springer’s journal Animal Cognition.





68 69

that 20 million people have “burdensome” tinnitus and 2 million have “extreme and debilitating” cases. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) asks people if they’ve had tinnitus that lasted for more than five minutes in the past year — 10 percent (25 million) have. “We’re interested in so-mething that pushes the threshold so that they noticed it for a while,” says Howard Hoffman, the director of epidemiology and statistics at the NIDCD.

Suffice it to say it’s a com-mon experience — and, for a significant number of people, an exhausting one.

Tinnitus is not a disease in and of itself, but it can be a symptom of other under-lying problems. It can also be a symptom of nothing in particular. Pulsatile tinnitus, which accounts for less than 10 percent of tinnitus cases, is unique in that it can typically be heard by the doctor as well as the patient, and it tends to be a sign of something wrong with the vascular system. With idiopathic tinnitus — the kind only the sufferer can hear — the story is more complex. It is often associated with hearing loss, but not always, and the chances of getting it increase with age. It can indicate a tumor (in which case the tinnitus will usually be one-sided) or appear as part of Ménière’s disease, otos-clerosis (a disorder that causes progressive deafness), or disorders of the temperoman-dibular joint that connects the jaw to the skull. Exposure to loud noises, especially over long periods of time, puts a person at risk, so construction workers and musicians have higher rates of tinnitus than the general population. Tinnitus is also the number-one disability among veterans.

But “in a majority of cases, there is no known cause,” says Deborah Hall, a profes-sor of hearing sciences at the University of Nottingham. She estimates that about 80 percent of the time, doctors would not be able to pinpoint where a patient’s tinnitus came from.

_________

A startup called Sonic Notify is working on a product that embeds inaudibly high-pitched signals into music and audio, which can be detected by your smartphone.

When a compatible app hears the signal, it could be triggered to take an action — linking you to a website, displaying text or an image, or bringing up a location on a map. That yields all sorts of possibilities — you could vote on your favourite song of a performance, or be directed to a secret aftershow party, for example.

The app is funded by the band MGMT’s record label, Cantora Records, which recently opened a technology division. It’s offering between £17,000 and £63,000 to startups with interesting ideas.

Sonic Notify is one of the first. « [Sonic Notify] trans-mits a high-frequency sound wave through speakers — we can’t hear the frequency but smartphones can hear it, so we’re able to unlock content at live events, TV shows, and through the web », Jesse Israel, co-founder of Cantora Records.

Sonic Notify : the inaudible QR codes only an app can hear

8 fev. 2012Duncan Geere

Sonic Notify : the inaudible QR codes only an app can hearDuncan Geere

wired.com

Th

e Sonic N

otify app



Descriptions of tinnitus date all the way back to ancient civilizations. An Egyptian sheet of papyrus from the 16th century B.C. des-cribes “bewitched ear,” and the Assyrians wrote on clay tablets around 700 B.C. about three different kinds of tinnitus : “whispe-ring,” “speaking,” and “singing” of the ears.

We now know, though, that it’s actually the brain that’s singing, usually. A study from 1981 looked at patients with tinnitus who had surgery to cut their auditory nerves. Forty-five percent said their tinnitus impro-ved post-surgery, but 55 percent said it stayed the same or got worse. Even after the nerve responsible for hearing was se-vered, they still heard the sound, indicating that whatever was happening to them, it wasn’t only in the ear.

When the ear is damaged, some of the auditory input the brain is used to getting suddenly disappears, explains Jinsheng Zhang, a professor of otolaryngology and communication sciences and disorders at Wayne State University. (Zhang is also the chair of the ATA’s scientific-advisory com-mittee.) To compensate for the loss of those

Labs told Evolver.fm. « With Sonic, we can unlock anything that your iPhone or Android can do, as long as the SonicNotify SDK is built into an app that’s run-ning in the background on your phone. »

At Fashion Week, buyers and journalists with the app installed will be able to access images of the models as they step onto the catwalk, so they can see the outfits up close too.

If you want to give it a try, you can do so right now by grabbing the Sonic Notify app for iOS or Android. Sonic Notify’s website has several demos that you can use.

When a woman threatened suicide because of noises that no one else could hear, the local public health authority contacted a nearby university, and a noise expert went out to check. He could hear nothing, but he recorded the “nothing’* and after analysing the tape was surprised to find it showed a peak in the background noise between 30 and 40 Hz. A newspaper article brought other reports flooding in, and Dr Philip Dickinson and several associates have now investigated more than 50 cases of people complaining about a low throbbing background noise that no one else can hear.

CAN SOME PEOPLE HEAR

THE JET STREAM ?Dr Joseph Hanlon

Weniger Lärm

, Josef Müller-Brockm

ann (1960)

Can some people hear the jet stream ?

8 nov. 1978Dr Joseph HanlonNew Scientist



70 71

He discussed his work in a talk given as part of the Institute of Biology conference The Biology of Urbani-sation on 28 September.

The results are only preliminary — it is a spare time project by a researcher best known for aircraft noise work. But all cases seem to have similar characteris-tics. There is always the peak between 30 and 40 Hz and the noise is only heard when the weather is cool and there is a light breeze (particularly early in the morning). Further, the noise victims always seem to be in an area, perhaps 10 km or more in diameter, where this noise is measureably louder. Preliminary checks with local doctors and medical officers of health suggest that there might be an unusual inci-dence of “tummy upset” in these areas.

What could this noise be, and why should some people respond to it while most do not ? As to the source of the noise, Dickinson suggests that these people may actually be hearing the jet stream — air flowing at a great height at 4500 km/h. The jet stream, he explains, would shear against adjacent slower moving air, and this shearing would make a noise. Acoustic calculations show that the power and frequency of this noise would be about right to cause nearly audible sound at ground level between 10 and 40 Hz, if the transmission conditions were right. The sound would be bent down to the earth in just the right way by a temperature inversion, which occurs about 60 per cent of the time. The time when people respond — cool early mornings with light breezes — just corresponds to a temperature inver-sion plus a lack of other noise to block out this sound.

Manmade factors might amplify the sound and cause additional problems. Power line posts are just the right size to radiate this sound. Half the people inves-tigated have posts nearby and in some cases the posts were vibrating so much that it was painful to place the ear against them. One executive who sometimes went to work at 5 am to get away from the sound could see 25 posts from his window. Another possibility is that the sound is amplified by rooms which have resonant frequencies in this range.

The data are suggestive, but there is no hard proof and the suggestion is highly controversial. Dr Geof-frey Leventhall, a senior lecturer with the Chelsea College Acoustics Group and an expert on low frequency sound, called Dickinson’s suggestion “absolute nonsense”.

signals from the outside world, the brain’s auditory system becomes more active.“Now, you can hear my voice, because my voice is a sound that’s converted to a signal,” Zhang says. “My sound signal is converted by your hair cells into neural signals and they travel to the brain. This stimulates lots of nerve cells in the brain. They become excited and they start to fire. The increased neural activity is coded, it has meaning. But if the ear is damaged, there is no sound but the brain has enhanced ac-tivity. This enhanced activity has no coded meaning.” The meaningless activity can be perceived as a sound, and then you’ve got tinnitus.

This is the simple explanation. Exactly what the brain is doing to compensate is more complex and hard to understand, and likely differs from person to person, given the wide variability in how people experience tinnitus. Some tinnitus, as previously noted, doesn’t involve hearing loss, which doesn’t seem to jive with the idea that the brain is compensating for missing sound. But re-search in mice has shown that there can be damage present in the inner ear even without changes to the animal’s hearing threshold, so it may be that problems can lurk even under seemingly perfect hearing — or that current tools may not be able to detect some kinds of slight hearing loss.

To treat tinnitus, a Welsh manuscript from the 14th century recommends taking a hot loaf of bread out of the oven, tearing it in half and holding it over your ears.

Aside from the auditory system, brain regions that deal with attention, arousal, and emotions are also involved in the expe-rience of tinnitus — the condition is defined not just by the sound, but by how people react to it. If you constantly heard ringing, but you were cool with it, then it wouldn’t be a huge problem. Zhang compares it to pain — two people may get the same injury and one may be able to tolerate the pain better than the other.





But to others the idea seems plausible. In an article in New Scientist recently (vol 59, p 738), Dr Michael Bryan pointed out that there is a group of “noise sensitive” people who are much more bothered by noise than average. Last week, Bryan said that there is ample evidence of people being extremely dis-turbed by specific types of noise. He also noted that odd noises at the extreme ends of the audible spec-trum, that people cannot identify, tend to be more worrying than other noises.

And some people have much better hearing than others. Although he has done no work himself in the area, Bryan said it is plausible that people who are both sensitive and have better hearing might find objectionable low frequency sounds that other people do not even notice.

Dickinson says it is probably like a dripping tap — some people can ignore it while others become obsessed by it. Could this sort of noise, he wondered, be the real problem with some people who have been admitted to mental hospitals because they hear bells ringing or drums beating that no one else can hear ?

Perhaps the most speculative suggestion of all is that low frequency sound might be connected with ill feelings caused by winds like the Fern. They, too, would have shear layers which could cause ground level noise.

“The way we manage it not only needs to treat an audiological problem, but there’s quite a lot of psychology in there as well,” Hall says. “Trying to change the way that people think about their tinnitus and what significance it has for them.”

_________

Here are some ways people tried to treat tinnitus in the past : The ancient Egyptians suggested poking reeds into your ears. The Assyrians would chant an incantation. Pliny the Elder, an ancient Roman scholar, favored earthworms boiled in goose grease and stuck into the ear as a treatment for all manner of ear maladies. A Welsh manuscript from the 14th century recommends taking a hot loaf of bread out of the oven, tearing it in half and holding it over your ears. “Bind and thus produce perspiration, and by the help of God you will be cured,” it reads.

Today, the available treatments are less yeasty. They focus on the two avenues Hall suggested : masking the sound, and helping people cope with it.

There is still a lot about tinnitus that is not understood, and there is no cure. There’s nothing doctors can do as of yet to make the sound go away, though researchers are looking into different kinds of brain stimu-lation as a possibility. But everyone I spoke to was adamant that doctors should not tell patients they just have to live with it.

As with pain, doctors treating tinnitus (usually) only have the patient’s subjective experience to go on. Hall says doctors will typically just talk with the patient about what kinds of sounds they’re hearing, how loud, and how often. To determine the pitch and volume, they may play sound recordings and ask the patient which one matches their tinnitus, but “those kind of objective mea-sures are still more often in the domain of research rather than in the clinic,” she says. Usually, it’s just patient reports. As long as there are no indications of anything more serious, like a brain tumor or the vascular problems that can come with pulsatile tin-nitus, it’s not totally necessary to figure out the sound’s origins in order to treat it.





Here we go again, Y’all!

Sunday was a delightful day, with minimum background of maybe 1 or so.

Grand day !

Went walking with my dogs. Then, about 9 PM, I got the first little inkling that it was going to go up again. Sure did. Little dip around 5 AM, then screaming right on up there ‘til headache time again. It has started its oscillating sound again. Maybe it will rain?

My sympathy to John. Bless your heart.

I concur with all that others have written.

Prayer, and a personal relationship with God is all that ever works.

_____________

Linda C

Tuskegee, AL USA - Monday, March 03, 2003 at 14:04:00 (PST)

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Somebody is REMOVING MESSAGES from this site, is that because this site is MONITORED and the messages are too close to the truth?

hum hearer

_________

USA - Thursday, April 24, 2003 at 13:03:00 (PDT)

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The hum follows me to work out in the middle of nowhere at the coal mine, no gas lines for 30 miles.

The hum follows me to the mountains in Wyoming, no nothing, The hum follows me to Idaho and Washington in remote sites. No gas lines for miles. May be from gas lines in some areas.

Pretty much always the same intensity of 3-4.

_________

Rich <[email protected]>

MT USA - Saturday, May 03, 2003 at 20:30:14 (PDT)

Tonight around 12:00 2I loudness that occured suddenly, like a plane in the distance approa-ching, but sound never changing … very very creepy tonight..

Birds are chattier then normal tonight. =\

_________

Scott <[email protected]>

Ojai, CA USA - Sunday, June 01, 2003 at 01:15:11 (PDT)

My wife can hear the Hum, but we have not heard it for some weeks.

It has completely disappeared, THANK GOD…

_________

Dave Murray <No need>

Bayview, ID USA - Sunday, June 22, 2003 at 19:24:16 (PDT)

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To All Hum hearers.

I was told by a higher power to post this here…

((COPYRIGHT 94)) ((( THE HUM ))) By Stoney Mcneill )))

At end of time we’ll see the dieing of the sun and a roar in our heads like a low pit-ch (HUM) It’s not heard by many only the choosen one’s thats going to fight the battle beside GODS only sun. At night when it’s peacefull and you are laying in your bed the (HUM)it get louder until it vibrates your head God’s gathering up his army for the battle yet to come Gabrial blowing on his trumpet at a low pitch (HUM).

Prepare yourself for battle to fight beside the lord what you gain is heaven thats your SOULS reward and when we claim victory and the battle has been won he’ll sound the horn of victory with a low pitch ((HUM ))

_____________

Stoney <[email protected]>

NC USA - Saturday, October 04, 2003 at 11:01:18 (PDT)

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76 77

“The concern is how it interferes with people’s daily life, as opposed to putting a label on it, saying ‘Well, this is due to that,” Hoffman says.

For people whose tinnitus comes with hearing loss, getting a hearing aid can often improve their tinnitus as well as their hea-ring. Doctors may recommend cognitive-be-havioral therapy to reduce the distress that tinnitus can cause. Or they may recommend sound therapy, which distracts the brain from the noise it’s creating by masking it with other sounds. This can be as simple as playing background music, or as elaborate as a hearing aid that can also pipe white noise into the ear.

The American Tinnitus Association has a story its members like to tell, about how its co-founders, Jack Vernon and Charles Unice, came up with the idea for sound therapy. According to West (and to a story in the spring 2011 issue of the ATA’s magazine Tinnitus Today), Unice, who suffered from tinnitus himself, came to Portland from Cali-fornia in 1971 to visit Vernon. While they were out for lunch, they passed Portland’s Love-joy Fountain. Unice stopped in his tracks and declared that while he stood by the fountain, he couldn’t hear his tinnitus. And thus the two men realized that if noise is the pro-blem, the solution is … more noise.

West has found this to be true for herself. After her car accident, she reached out to an ATA support group, which recommended she see Michael Robb, an oto-neurologist in Phoenix, Arizona. “It took him a year to convince me,” she says. “I’ve got a little bit of vanity in me.” But once he fitted her with hearing aids that also provide sound the-rapy, the volume of her tinnitus went down by half. She was so impressed with Robb’s work that she volunteered to work with him as an assistant and a scheduler. A little while later, he hired her for the job as a paid po-sition. She does this now in addition to her role as CEO of the ATA.

"[The hearing aids have] made a tremendous difference, and that’s why I dedicate myself to helping other people enjoy a better quality of life,” she says. “Do, please, in your article, give people hope. And be sure to use some ear protection.”

In 1997, the Bloop was heard on hydro-phones across the Pacific. It was a loud, ultra-low frequency sound that was heard at listening stations underwater over 5,000km apart, and one of many mys-terious noises picked up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Several articles in the years that followed popularised one suggestion that the Bloop might have been the sound of an unknown animal due to the "organic" nature of the noise, a theory that elevated the Bloop to the level of a great unsolved mystery.

THE Bloop MYSTERY HAS BEEN SOLVED : IT WAS NEVER A GIANT SEA MONSTER

Ian Steadman


29 nov. 2012Ian Steadmanwired.com



However, the NOAA is pretty sure that it wasn't an animal, but the sound of a relatively common event — the cracking of an ice shelf as it breaks up from Antarctica. Several people have linked to the NOAA's website over the past week excitedly claiming that the mystery of the Bloop has been "solved", but as the information on the NOAA website was undated and without a source, Wired.co.uk spoke to NOAA and Oregon State University seismologist Robert Dziak by email to check it out. He confirmed that the Bloop really was just an icequake — and it turns out that's kind of what they always thought it was. The theory of a giant animal making noises loud enough to be heard across the Pacific was more fantasy than science.Dziak explained to us the NOAA's findings, and confirmed that "the frequency and time-duration characteristics of the Bloop signal are consistent, and essentially identical, to icequake signals we have recorded off Antarctica". He explained : "We began an acoustic survey of the Bransfield Strait and Drake Passage in 2005 which lasted until 2010. It was in analysis of this recent acoustic data that it became clear that the sounds of ice breaking up and cracking is a dominant source of natural sound in the sou-thern ocean. Each year there are tens of thousands of what we call 'icequakes' created by the cracking and melting of sea ice and ice calving off glaciers into the ocean, and these signals are very similar in character to the Bloop."

That makes it "extremely unlikely" that the sound is animal in origin, but he also pointed out that the hypothesis that the Bloop was caused by an animal wasn't ever really a serious one. He said : "What has led to a lot of the misperception of the animal origin sound of the Bloop is how the sound is played back. Typically, it is played at 16 times normal speed, which makes it sounds like an animal vocalisation of some sort. However, when the sound is played in real-time it has more of a 'quake' sound to it, similar to thun-der." You can hear a recording of the Bloop in the video accompanying this story.

There aren't even that many mysterious sounds picked up by the NOAA's hydrophones, according to Dziak : "Nearly all sounds can be attributed to major sound categories; geophysical (submarine volcanoes or earthquakes), weather (storms, waves, wind), anthropogenic (ships, airguns), ice (sea ice, iceberg groundings), and animals (cetaceans, fish)." Anything else is usually just some kind of electronic interfe-rence with the signal.

It's easy to see why the Bloop was such a compelling mystery. The deep oceans are still mostly unexplored by humans (more than 95 percent, according to the NOAA), and only a few weeks ago an entirely new spe-cies of whale washed up on a beach in New Zealand. It was only in 2004 that the first video footage was recorded of a giant squid in the wild. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we know there's a lot we don't know about the deep ocean.

Un matin en apparence comme les autres, vous vous réveillez tranquillement. Comme à votre habitude, vous consultez votre fil d’actualité Twitter. Et là, vous apprenez que l’homme a découvert la première espèce extraterrestre.

Elle vit sur une exopla-nète. C’est officiel, nous ne sommes plus les seuls dans l’univers !

L’heure est alors venue de communiquer avec eux, de leur parler. Sont-ils hostiles ou bienveillants ? Sont-ils effrayés ou heureux ? Quelles sont leurs intentions ? Disposent-ils d’une intelligence supérieure à la nôtre ? Nous comprennent-ils ? Et si oui, comment s’en assurer ? Il faut leur parler… mais com-ment ? Peut-être en s’inspirant de la façon dont communiquent les dauphins, répond Adrien Rivierre, lecteur et contributeur régu-lier d’Usbek & Rica.

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au

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?

Adrien Rivierre

Comment parler aux extraterrestres ?

usbeketrica.comAdrien Rivierre7 juin 2017



78 79Comment parler aux extraterrestres ?

René Laloux, La Planète Sauvage, 1973


Ce scénario d’une rencontre « physique » avec des extraterrestres, récemment mis en scène dans le film Premier Contact de Denis Villeneuve, est sorti du champ de la science-fiction depuis qu’on découvre des exoplanètes tous les mois ou presque, dont certaines abriteraient de l’eau, ce qui laisse envisager la possibilité d’une forme de vie extraterrestre. Mais certaines de ces pla-nètes se situant à 39 années lumières de notre Terre, aucune rencontre imminente n’est à l’ordre du jour… à moins que, comme dans Premier Contact, ce soient plutôt les extraterrestres qui viennent à nous !



Fans of horror fiction were also delighted to note that the location pinpointed as the source of the Bloop was located a mere 1,760km from the location of the sun-ken city of R'yleh, where (according to HP Lovecraft) the mythical beast Cthulhu is imprisoned.

Pieter van der Heyden (1530–1572)The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish, Satire on the Fall of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, 1557

80 81

Th

e Bloop

Tentative de comunication avec les extraterrestres, dans le film Premier Contact.





Dans un tel cas de figure se pose la question de savoir comment communiquer et interagir avec eux. Par où commencer ? Quelles mé-thodes utiliser ? Nos savoirs et technologies sont-ils assez avancés pour y parvenir ?

Si la recherche a montré depuis longtemps que les végétaux, comme les animaux, communiquent entre eux, le langage de l’homme est plus élaboré car nous sommes capables de manier les symboles ; là où les animaux ne comprennent que des signaux dans un contexte précis. Autrement dit, contrairement à ces derniers, nous sommes capables de dissocier le signe de la réalité exprimée (je peux parler de New York sans jamais être allé à New York). Ainsi, l’homme peut imaginer avoir une maîtrise du monde par ses mots, quand les animaux sont limi-tés à des comportements instinctifs et à l’automatisme.

Cthulhu would certainly fit the bill of a giant sea creature capable of emitting a sound that could travel for thousands of kilometres through the ocean, but unfor-tunately science has, once again, ruined the fun. Alas.

by

Colin Dickey

Sue Taylor first started hearing it at night in 2009. A retired psychiatric nurse, Taylor lives in Roslin, Scotland, a small village seven miles outside of Edinburgh. “A thick, low hum,” is how she described it, something “permeating the entire house,” keeping her awake. At first she thought it was from a nearby factory, or perhaps a generator of some kind. She began spending her evenings looking for the source, listening outside her neighbors’ homes in the early hours of the morning. She couldn’t find anything de-finitive. She had her hearing checked and was told it was perfect, but the noise persisted. She became dizzy and nauseous, overcome, she says, by a crushing sense of despair and hopelessness at her inability to locate or escape the sound. When things got bad, it felt to Taylor like the bed — and the whole house — was vibrating. Like her head was going to explode. Her husband, who had tinnitus, didn’t hear a thing. “People looked at me like I was mad,” she said.

Lori Steinborn lives in Tavares, Florida, outside of Orlando, and in 2006 she had started hearing a noise similar to the one Taylor was hearing. Steinborn thought it was her neighbors at first : some nearby stereo blasting, the bass coming through the walls. It would start most nights between 7 and 8 p.m. and last until the early hours of the morning. Like Taylor, she began searching for the sound; leaving town helped her get away from it, but it was waiting when she returned.

Les dauphins marquent des silences, des pauses, pour laisser leurs congénères répondre, preuve qu’ils s’écoutent et dialoguent !

Mais il serait faux de penser que la façon dont communiquent les animaux n’a rien à nous apprendre. Dans le monde animal, les dauphins sont réputés pour être parmi les mammifères les plus intelligents et évolués sur Terre. La chercheuse Denise Herzing souligne ainsi que le rapport entre la taille de leur cerveau et de leur corps, indicateur scientifique d’intelligence, est le deuxième meilleur derrière… les humains. Les cétacés passent aussi le test dit « du miroir », qui prouve qu’ils ont conscience d’eux-mêmes (ils se reconnaissent en se voyant, comme les chimpanzés, les bonobos ou les cor-beaux). Nous savons aussi qu’ils utilisent de nombreux sons pour interagir en groupe, chasser ou jouer à plusieurs. Mieux en-core, les dauphins marquent des silences, des pauses, pour laisser leurs congénères répondre, preuve qu’ils s’écoutent et dia-loguent ! Selon les chercheurs, ces quelques caractéristiques non exhaustives signifient que leur langage est proche de celui des êtres humains.

La start-up suédoise Gavagai AB, qui a développé un logiciel basé sur l’intelligence artificielle capable d’analyser des millions de textes dans plus de 40 langues différentes, souhaite aujourd’hui l’enrichir en étudiant le langage des dauphins. En s’associant au KTH Royal Institute of Technology de Stockholm, elle espère décrypter leur communication d’ici quatre ans, en répertoriant tous les sons émis par les dauphins pour créer un véritable dictionnaire. Gavagai AB espère aussi découvrir des mécanismes que nous n’utilisons pas, comme la grande capaci-té des dauphins à se synchroniser grâce à l’émission de sons et la réalisation de gestes simultanés.

Quand nous entendons les sons émis par les dauphins, nous n’en entendons en réalité qu’une partie seulement, notre oreille n’étant pas assez développée.

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8 avr. 2016Colin Dickey

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Colin Dickey

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Colin Dickey

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The experience described by Steinborn and Taylor, and many others, is what’s come to be known as “the Hum,” a mysterious auditory phenomenon that, by some estimates, 2 percent of the population can hear. It’s not clear when the Hum first began, or when people started noticing it, but it started drawing media attention in the 1970s, in Bristol, England. After receiving several isolated reports, the British tabloid the Sunday Mirror asked, in 1977, “Have You Heard the Hum ?” Hundreds of letters came flooding in. For the most part, the reports were consistent : a low, distant rumbling, like an idling diesel engine, mostly audible at night, mostly noticeable indoors. No obvious source.

The story of the Hum begins in such places, far from the hustle and bustle of cities, where stillness blankets everything. That’s where you hear it, and that’s where it becomes intolerable. After it was first reported in Bristol, it emerged in Taos, New Mexico; Kokomo, Indiana; Largs, Scotland. A small city newspaper would publish a report of a local person suffe-ring from an unidentified noise, followed by a torrent of letters to the editor with similar complaints.

Sometimes, this would lead to a begrudging official investigation, but these nearly always ended incon-clusively. Far more likely was widespread dismissal of the complaints, which made the experience that much more frustrating for those who heard the Hum. Though University of Southampton researchers R.N. Vasudevan and Colin G. Gordon, who investi-gated claims of the Hum in 1977, established that it was “very probably” a real phenomenon and not an auditory hallucination, Hum sufferers have been consistently written off as either delusional or simply suffering from tinnitus. When asked by The Inde-pendent about the Hum in 1994, Jonathan Hazell, head of research at the U.K.’s Royal National Institute for Deaf People, responded, “Rubbish. Everybody who has tinnitus complains at first of environmental noise. ‘Hummers’ are a group of people who cannot accept that they have tinnitus.”

Dismissed by governments and mainstream re-searchers, Hum sufferers become demoralized, despondent. In such isolation the discourse festers, breeding conspiracy theories and kooks. In 2009, the first episode of the reality show Conspiracy Theo-ry With Jesse Ventura offered a theory of the Hum possibly stemming from a government mind-control

Comme le montre le film de Denis Villeneuve, dans le cas d’une rencontre extra-terrestre, nous ne pourrions utiliser que les méthodes à notre disposition, c’est-à-dire celles appli-quées, par exemple, lors de la découverte des tribus d’Amazonie. En théorie, décryp-ter un langage extraterrestre ne devrait pas faire appel à des méthodes radicalement différentes, mais plus elles auront été tes-tées sur des êtres vivants variés, plus elles seront robustes.

En l’absence d’espèces extraterrestres à étudier, ce sont les animaux qui servent aujourd’hui de cobayes pour faire progres-ser la recherche. La communication des dauphins offre à ce titre des perspectives enthousiasmantes. Ces cétacés utilisent un spectre sonore bien plus aigu que celui de l’Homme. Quand nous entendons les sons émis par les dauphins, nous n’en entendons en réalité qu’une partie seulement, notre oreille n’étant pas assez développée.

Denise Herzing en train d’essayer de communiquer avec des dauphins dans les eaux des Bahamas

Les équipes de Denise Herzing et de l’Uni-versité de Georgia Tech avaient déjà mis au point des interfaces de communication bilatérales pour permettre aux humains de dialoguer avec les dauphins. Grâce à l’intel-ligence artificielle, les travaux exploratoires de la start-up Gavagai AB auront pour objec-tif de repousser les limites de nos connais-sances sur le langage. Ce qui laisse ainsi es-pérer l’élaboration de logiciels sophistiqués pour réaliser des tâches plus complexes.S’il est aujourd’hui trop tôt pour déterminer quelles seront leurs applications concrètes, les découvertes pourront par exemple servir à la marine américaine. Cette dernière étu-die déjà les animaux marins depuis plusieurs décennies, et notamment les dauphins qui les aident par exemple à détecter des mines sous-marines.

A Maddening Sound

8 avr. 2016Colin Dickeynewrepublic.com



Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises. Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

— Shakespeare, The Tempest

device, and in a 1998 X-Files episode the Hum (or so-mething very much like it) caused spontaneous head explosions. On a Facebook page for Hum sufferers, one rambling post describes how “advanced satellite technology” is being used as “a brutal torture ins-trument by transmitting sounds, voices, and images directly into the brain, creating numerous pains and sensations throughout the body and significantly alte-ring energy level and emotional states.” The post goes on to name several people who have been targeted by this technology, including Miriam Carey, the dental hygienist who drove through a White House check-point in 2013, setting off a high-speed chase that led to her death, and Aaron Alexis, the civilian contractor who, on September 16, 2013, entered the Washing-ton, D.C., Navy Yard and killed twelve people before dying in a firefight with police. Alexis has become, for some, proof positive that the Hum is not merely an annoyance but a massive government conspiracy. In a message later recovered by authorities from his com-puter, Alexis wrote that “Ultra low frequency attack is what I’ve been subject to for the last three months. And to be perfectly honest, that is what has driven me to this.”

There are many things we know the Hum is not, but few things we actually know it is. I’d first heard stories of the Hum a few years ago, in the genre of weird conspiracies and odd occurrences one reads about when traveling the internet : another tin foil hat theory to go with the UFOs, Flat Earthers, and Raelians. But then I learned about Glen MacPherson, a high school math teacher in British Columbia, who had attracted attention not for sharing strange tales of the Hum but for doing serious, scientific work on the phenomenon. Word was that he had undertaken a research project that, if successful, could hold the secret to understanding the Hum once and for all. So I traveled to western Canada to hear about the sound.

As far back as the early nineteenth century, one finds records of strange noises, mysterious humming, inex-plicable sounds. A traveler summiting the Pyrenees in 1828 described how, when his party first beheld Mount Maladeta, “we were most forcibly struck with a dull, low, moaning, aeolian sound, which alone broke upon the deathly silence, evidently proceeding from the body of this mighty mass, though we in vain attempted to connect it with any particular spot, or assign an adequate cause for these solemn strains.” These enigmatic sounds were attributed to various causes — insect swarms just out of sight, shifting sands — but, being rare and benign, they were mostly ignored.

The Industrial Revolution changed attitudes toward noise, as machines and urban life introduced a constant, deafening racket into the world. By the end of the nineteenth century we’d begun a war on the noise we had created, particularly in the United States, where it quickly became a question of personal liberty and privacy. “How soon shall we learn,” the

The Sound of Earth

Murmurs of EarthAnn Druyan1978

Une telle initiative exploratoire pourra en tout cas mener à des découvertes utiles pour développer de nouveaux outils et améliorer la compréhension de notre propre langage, de celui des animaux et, un jour, utiliser ces connaissances pour parler aux extraterrestres.

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The twelve-minute sound essay was conceived for two audiences : the human and the extraterrestrial. In the former, we hoped to evoke smiles of recognition, and in the latter, a sense of the variety of auditory experiences that are part of life on Earth. We wanted to use the microphone as the ear’s camera in further enhancing Voyager’s portrait of our planet and ourselves.The world of our imagined extraterrestrials would be the result of a vastly different pattern of what Darwin described as “life’s ever- branching and beautiful ramifications.” The murmurs of such a place would be very unlike our own, and we might reasonably expect to share with its inhabitants only a few of the most fundamental geological, meteorological and possibly technological idioms. Indeed, the very idea of distingui-shing between “musical” and “nonmusical” sounds posed a problem. We realized that elsewhere in the universe such a distinc-tion would be even more blurred that it is here; perhaps cricket songs, a gavotte and the harbor-filling bray of an ocean liner’s foghorn would seem of a piece to alien senses. Because we could not know how the message would be perceived by them, we decided to risk some fairly flagrant loca-lisms in the interest of presenting as much about ourselves as possible.The process of selecting the sounds be-gan outside of Ithaca, New York, on a bright spring day that was auspiciously abuzz with wild May country noises. Timothy Ferris, Wendy Gradison and I joined the Sagans at their dining-room table for a vigorous round of group onomatopoeia. We tried to think of every sound we’d ever heard, and I wrote most of them down. On the following day I returned to New York City and set about trying to locate the best examples of each. I started by phoning sound libraries and uni-versities all over North America.

“I understand that you have the finest re-cordings of croaking frogs” or “the meanest hyenas” or “the most devastating earth-quake. How would I go about obtaining a copy ?”“For what purpose ?” was the standard res-ponse.“We’re sending a record into interstellar space,” I’d reply in what I judged to be my least manic voice. “And I’m trying to put together a suite of the sounds that we hear on Earth.” This usually meant some empty long-distance static while I reeled off the corroborative phone numbers of federal agencies and well-known scientists. A great

magazine Current Literature editorialized in 1900, “that one has no more right to throw noises than they have to throw stones into a house ?” In 1930, the Saturday Evening Post commented that “People dare not enter a man’s house or peep into it, yet he has no way of preventing them from filling his house and his office with nerve-racking noise.”

Different cities tried different tactics. New York set up “Zones of Quiet” around hospitals and schools, and established the Society for the Suppression of Unne-cessary Noise, which pushed through a 1907 act prohi-biting the needless use of steam whistles in maritime traffic — the first noise-abatement legislation passed by Congress. In Baltimore, a dedicated anti-noise cop named Maurice E. Pease was appointed to instruct any huckster shouting about their wares that business could be conducted more efficiently via printed signs. Chicago banned the hawking of wares outright in 1911, and peddlers responded with a riot that stretched over three days, in what the Tribune called “a day of rioting and wild disorder such as has not been seen in Chicago since the garment workers’ strike.”

After the introduction in the 1920s of the decibel as an objective unit for measuring noise, cities were able to implement noise-abatement policies that cut the overall volume to (mostly) manageable levels. But perversely, it’s precisely these noise-reduction laws that allowed the Hum to emerge. In a loud environ-ment like New York City, it’s far too difficult to hear the Hum, since it tends to just blend in with the din and chaos of everything else. The Hum, you could say, is not so much a sound but what’s left over, the noise you hear once all the other noises have been taken away.

Further confusing matters is the fact that some reports of the Hum have been definitively traced to specific sources and corrected. The Hum was heard in Sausalito, California, in the mid-1980s, but was even-tually found to be the result of the mating sounds of a fish called the plainfin midshipman, whose call could penetrate the steel hulls of the houseboats in the marina. The Windsor Hum was investigated by the Canadian government and ultimately traced to facto-ries on Zug Island, across the Detroit River in Michi-gan. After an extensive study of the Hum in Kokomo, Indiana, researchers determined that it was caused by two nearby manufacturing plants whose production facilities were emitting specific low frequencies.

The Hum soon stopped for some people in Kokomo — but not for everyone. Even in cases where there’s a likely culprit, it’s difficult to prove for sure. Dr. Colin Novak, one of the lead researchers of the Windsor Hum, concluded his report in May 2014, but in a CBC article that year he was quoted saying that while there was a high probability the cause was the Zug Island factories, “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find that smoking gun.” Without a longer study and more coo-peration from U.S. authorities, researchers couldn’t

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deal of skepticism was duly expressed, but not one person hung up before they’d heard the whole story.

And some of them were instantly engaged by the notion of Voyager’s grand reach across space and time. Dr. Roger Payne of Rockefeller University was such a person. He was very excited by our desire to extend whale greetings on the record. When I told him that as a long overdue gesture of res-pect for these intelligent co-residents of Earth, we wished to include their salutations among those of the statesmen and diplo-mats, he was thrilled.

“Proper respect !” he cried. “Who is this ? Oh, at last ! Wonderful ! You can have anything I have. I’ll bring it to you myself. The most beautiful whale greeting was one we heard off the coast of Bermuda in 1970. That’s the one that should last forever. Please send that one.”

When we heard the tape, we were en-chanted by its graceful exuberance, a series of expanding exultations so free and com-municative of another way of moving and being on Earth. We listened to it many times and always with a feeling of irony that our imagined extraterrestrials of a billion years hence might grasp a message from fellow earthlings that had been incomprehensible to us.Alan Botto of Princeton, New Jersey, was another friend of the project. Fred Durant of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum told me to call Mr. Botto for the “best rocket launch you ever heard. ” It turned out to be a rousing Saturn 5 lift-off recorded in a highly passionate Mission Control room, with a countdown, ignition roar, cheers, applause and the heartfelt wish “Fly, bird” blurted out by a man mo-mentarily overwhelmed by what people can do. Botto also supplied us with a great hurt-ling freight train.When 1 reached Mickey Kapp, president of Warner Special Products, he was in Rome on his vacation. A space enthusiast for many years, Mr. Kapp spoke of Jupiter and Saturn as if they were stations on an old commute. “Why, sure,” he said from his room at the Excelsior to mine on West 74th, “you’re wel-come to all our sounds. Take as many as you

Ferndale, Rhondda Fawr, 1993, © John Davies

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want. ” He placed the entire Elektra Sound Archives at our disposal and hand-delivered the cuts we selected. It would have been impossible to complete the sound essay in such as short time without his very kind cooperation.

Some of the people who declined to parti-cipate cited their mistrust of any endeavor sponsored by the government. Others wanted substantial amounts of money in return for a moment’s whoosh of the breeze through the trees or the rush of a river. We couldn’t afford to give them much more than the cost of a reel of tape and return postage. One man who was reputed to have a wonderful collection of children’s street cries threw me out of his office, shouting after me that NASA “had some nerve sen-ding a little girl to talk to a big soundman like me.” But almost everyone else was very nice and eager for a dab of the immortality that Voyager’s unique passage to millions of years from now seemed to confer.Timothy Ferris and I went to Washington, D.C., to meet with the Sagans and Murry Sid-lin for a series of late-night musical reper-toire conferences. During the day we visited the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, where we found some huffy oran-gutan grunts. We also went to the Library of Congress’ Archive of Recorded Sound. It was there that we heard a terrible sound.

When we arrived, an engineer was waiting for us with a supermarket shopping cart full of records, some in jackets and others in tom ma- nila sleeves. The engineer told us not to touch them. As he went through them, we were to point to the cuts that we wished to hear. Somewhere in among the wolves and the brine shrimp was a heavy lacquer disc of what is believed to be the first field recording ever made during a bat-tle : an ugly repeating loop of a World War I skirmish in France with an American soldier urging a mustard-gas grenade launcher to fire. The soldier’s voice seems horribly cheerful and thoughtless, as mechanical a sound as the answering hiccup of the poison canister. It drones at us from across sixty years, and Tim and I try to see what this man must have been seeing, but all we can manage is bits of war stolen from movies and some smoke.We try to stop hearing it all day long. It’s so tainting that we both hesitate before men-tioning it to the others at dinner. This leads us into a discussion of just exactly how realistic a picture of life on Earth we wished

definitively identify the source. “It’s like chasing a ghost,” Novak said.

“I love science. I love mysteries. I love figuring things out,” said Glen MacPherson, the high school teacher and founder of the World Hum Map and Database Project, a site that has, since 2012, gathered and map-ped reports of the Hum worldwide, including its loca-tion, intensity, and relevant biographical facts on the individual reporting it. MacPherson lives in Gibsons, British Columbia, a tiny town on the far west side of an inlet called Howe Sound. To get there you hook up with the Trans-Canada Highway and take it west until it runs out of road at a place called Horseshoe Bay, and from there a ferry carries you across the sound.

The air in Gibsons is lucid and still; you can hear the call of birds echoing across that pure stillness. Even the ferry and its cargo seem deferential to the silence of the water and its sparsely inhabited islands. The humble city of Vancouver, 30 miles away, seems a noisy urban nightmare.

We were sitting in the conference room of the Gibsons & District Public Library on a Saturday afternoon. It was quiet inside; any kids who could get away with it were out soaking up one of the last good weekends of the season. As I listened to MacPherson’s story of a mysterious noise, I couldn’t help but notice a sign tacked to the wall behind him, written in the big, gentle hand of a kindergarten teacher : “Be kind, be safe, be listening.”

So I listened. MacPherson’s Hum story, at least initial-ly, was fairly typical : In 2012, he was living in Sechelt, just a few miles from Gibsons, when he began hearing at night the droning of what he assumed were seapla-nes taking off and landing. “I couldn’t tell if it was a week or two or a month,” he recalled, “but it became quite obvious at one point that this sound was not being caused by planes. So I waited until it started the following evening — it seemed to have a pretty regu-lar onset at 10 to 10 :30 p.m. — and I went outside, and the noise stopped.”

“My logic was that if it was louder inside and it stopped outside, then the source was inside : a refrigerator, a piece of machinery, whatever it was. I started walking through the house, and the sound was relatively consistent.” MacPherson began turning off various appliances, all to no avail. One oddity he did notice, however, was that the noise would stop if he turned his head sharply or exhaled, though it would instantly return. “And then I ran out of ideas, and so I did what many people ultimately do : I cut the power to the house — and it got louder.”

Though his experience with the Hum has not been as excruciating as some others (he describes himself as a Hum “hearer” rather than “sufferer”), MacPherson was drawn to the problem of this mysterious noise : “Less than one month after beginning my informal in-

The Sound of Earth


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A Maddening Sound


Using recordings uploaded to YouTube, Louivere+Vanessa broadcast audio files through a digital spectrometer to create images. These were then printed, using archival inkjet printer, onto handmade Japanese kozo paper, which was dibond primed with gesso, covered in gold leaf, and coated with resin.

The resulting photographs are aural visualizations of an elusive noise : the Hum. Above is a recording from Bristol, England.

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© NASA

to convey. Was the Voyager message to be a historical gesture or merely a social one ?Murry was adamant that we should send only the best of ourselves. And while none of us was absolutely convinced that the record would be incomplete without so vivid a demonstration of our imperfection as our violence, there was a feeling that being truthful was important in ways that might be momentarily obscured by culture. Most of the cherished beliefs of the previous decade turned flimsy in this one. And even now the prejudices of this particular moment lose their currency and change into something else. When we contemplated Voyager’s inconceivable future, composed of maybe a million times ten years or sixty years, we despaired at knowing what the citizens of that age would understand or prize. If we showed ourselves as we really are, a spe-cies involved with struggle, wouldn’t we at least be assured of the record’s value as an accurate document ?

We failed to come to any conclusion that evening. Instead, we drifted back into the debate about the musical repertoire. The next day Tim and I flew back to New York City and took my father to a Mets game. There were roughly sixty thousand people making noise at Shea Stadium. Several times I found myself shutting my eyes as tightly as I could to see what I could hear.A week later, we had the fifty sounds we’d been looking for and we were ready to begin our work in the studio that CBS had provided for us. Our sound engineer was a calm, rus-ty-haired man in his early fifties named Russ Payne. He is a very patient man, a student of the Jain philosophy who speaks with a cowboy accent. During our breaks he would eat a piece of fruit, smoke a cigarette and talk about the life of the spirit. When we got to the part of the tape with the locomotive on it, he told us that his daddy has been an engineer and had taken him on some trains that sounded just like that one.A rock-and-roll sound prodigy from Brooklyn named Jimmy Iovine showed up a couple of times to raise the levels on the elephants and to check out the surf. He was very an-xious to have a photograph taken of him-self in front of the rocket ship. He said he wanted to give it to his mother. But the task of engineering the sound essay fell entirely to Russ and Tim. They used a sixteen-track Ampex.

There were many helpful suggestions made, most notably Tim’s and Jon Lomberg’s, as to

quiries, I did what essentially every single person who visits the Hum web site has done : You go to Google.” He found an article in The Journal of Scientific Explo-ration, by a geophysicist named David Deming, titled “The Hum : An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World.”

Deming, who has taught at the University of Oklaho-ma since 1992, was one of the first scientists to take the problem of the Hum seriously. (He also heard the Hum.) Crucially, Deming was able to distinguish the Hum from tinnitus. Tinnitus, usually a ringing in the ear, can take a number of forms, but while its inten-sity may wax and wane, it is more or less omnipresent, and those who suffer from it tend to hear it in any environment. The Hum, which is constant but only under certain circumstances (indoors, rural areas, etc.), defies a simple correlation with tinnitus. Addi-tionally, Deming notes that if the Hum were related to tinnitus, one would expect a fairly normal geographic distribution rather than clusters in small towns.

Deming believed that the Hum wasn’t an acoustic sound, but possibly a low-frequency vibration that some people interpret as sound. The most likely culprit of the Hum was a Navy project known as Take Charge and Move Out, or TACAMO. Begun in the early 1960s, TACAMO is a network of aircraft that carry very low frequency (VLF) antennae to communicate with nuclear submarines. VLF waves, which require extre-mely long broadcast antennae and massive amounts of energy, can cover the globe and penetrate nearly any surface (they reach submarines a hundred feet below the surface). Deming proposed a simple experi-ment to test this hypothesis : Three boxes, each large enough to hold a human, one that blocked sound, one that blocked low-frequency waves and other types of electromagnetic radiation, and a control box that blocked neither.

Aside from Deming’s article, MacPherson realized, there was very little out there : The few user forums were rife with nonsense, heavy on anecdote, and light on fact. There were enough reports from far-flung places to suggest that the problem went beyond Taos and Bristol, but no one seemed to be doing anything systematic to gather all this information. As it hap-pens, MacPherson had a background in technology. “My degree major was in computer science program-ming, minors in mathematics and Russian language. I also worked briefly as a web professional in the early 2000s alongside my teaching.” In 2012, he used a simple Google Docs tool to create a list of self-re-ported experiences with the Hum. “In combination of that and the Google form, and me knowing how to whip up web sites in a few hours, it began : the World Hum Map.”

MacPherson’s database allows users to input their experience with the Hum, including information on where and when it’s the loudest, if the hearer has tinnitus, if anything makes it stop, and so on.

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how the sounds should be organized within the essay. I felt that it would be most infor-mative to arrange them chronologically. We took many liberties within that very broad structure, but the fundamental direction of the montage is evolutionary : from the geo-logical through the biological into the tech-nological.Since horsecarts, chopping wood, the hiss of bus brakes, and other sounds of our era take up as much time on the record as the rippling of primeval ponds, the sequence is open to the criticism that it, like our written history, vastly overemphasizes the last few thousand years at the expense of the millions that preceded them in the chro-nicle of our species. But if the sounds in the essay accurately reflected the time scale of Earth’s four-and-a-half-billion-year story, all but the last few moments would have been only the gurgle of waves and the whisper of wind across barren plains; mammals would have to roar out all they had to roar in a few seconds, and the proud accomplishments of all human civilization would have expired in a single beep of Morse code. If the denizens of a distant planet can make sense of the essay — and arguably it may be the easiest part of the record for an alien intelligence to relate to — perhaps they will not be wholly unacquainted with the paradoxes time en-genders, and will listen in a tolerant spirit.Here are the Sounds of the Earth in sequen-tial order :

1Music of the Spheres

The essay begins with the giddy whirl of tones reflecting the motions of the Sun’s planets in their orbits — a musical readout of Johannes Kepler’s Harmonica Mundi, the sixteenth-century mathematical tract whose echoes may still be found in the formu-las that make Voyager possible. Kepler’s concept was realized on a computer at Bell Telephone Laboratories by composer Laurie Spiegel in collaboration with Yale professors John Rogers and Willie Ruff. Each frequency represents a planet; the highest pitch repre-sents the motion of Mercury around the Sun as seen from Earth; the lowest frequency represents Jupiter’s orbital motion. Inner planets circle the Sun more swiftly than outer planets. The particular segment that appears on the record corresponds to very roughly a century of planetary motion. Ke-pler was enamored of a literal “music of the

U534, Birkenhead 2004, © John Davies

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"Supermarket", one of the photographs on the Voyager Golden Record

The World Hum Map soon came to the attention of Reddit, and submissions began pouring in; there are now over 5,000 data points. The first thing the site revealed was that the Hum wasn’t restricted to Taos and Bristol. It was everywhere.

It’s in Overland Park, Kansas, where it sounds like “a metallic sound of something vibrating”; in Ankara, Turkey, where it’s a “very deep and quiet rumble that sounds like a very distant diesel generator”; and in Hervey Bay, Australia, where it’s “a pulsating conti-nuous low background aircraft rumble that does not go away.” It seems to show up mostly in rural areas and in small cities : More people have heard it in Boise, Idaho, than in Washington, D.C. Reports dot the globe, from Iceland to the Philippines, but they’re concentrated in North America and Europe; MacPher-son surmises this is only because the site is in English.

As I listened to MacPherson tell his story, the wind kept batting a branch against the windows, creating a noise just slight enough to hear but that gradually became maddening, as I found myself unable to tune it out. Hearing is complicated. It’s not just the physi-cal sound waves that matter; it’s also what your brain does with that information. It’s important to remem-ber that there’s so much we still don’t know about how hearing works. We know low-frequency waves can cause pain, nausea, and other deleterious effects on humans — indeed, the United States and other governments have long experimented with using sound and vibration as non-lethal weapons. Over a decade ago, the WaveBand Corporation introduced a device known as Mob Excess Deterrent Using Sound Audio (MEDUSA), which uses directed microwaves to create a strong, discomforting audio sensation in the victim’s head. More common are Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADS), which use ear-splitting focused noise and have been used on everyone from protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, to Somali pirates attacking cruise ships. Add to this the fact that since the early twentieth century we’ve been bombarding the atmosphere with all manner of frequencies and waves. Rather than dismiss Hum hearers as delu-sional tinnitus sufferers, the question that might be better asked is why don’t more of us hear it ?

MacPherson liked his map and thought it was useful for creating a community for Hum sufferers. But he knew there was nothing scientific about it, nothing that would lead to a breakthrough in the Hum’s source. “People tell me where they are and what they hear and I put a dot on a map,” he said. Then, a few months after he started hearing the Hum, he realized “this crucial experiment that Deming had envisioned hadn’t been done yet.” The boxes. No one had thought to attempt Deming’s simple proposal of three boxes that could easily and definitively prove whether the Hum was an acoustic noise or a frequency, and no one had thought to try it. “I couldn’t believe it.” So MacPherson crowdsourced a few hundred dollars to cover the material costs and built the first one, the one that would block VLF waves.

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spheres, ” and I think he would have loved their haunting representation here.

2Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Thunder

A series of rumblings to signify the dramatic upheavals of our planet’s early history, inclu-ding a rare tape of a 1971 Australian earth-quake, obtained from Dr. David Simpson of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Laboratories. Most of the Earth’s atmosphere is thought to have been outgassed through volca-noes, fumaroles and cracks in the surface of our planet in the first few hundred million years of geological time. Chemical reactions induced by solar ultraviolet light and electri-cal storms initiated a sequence of chemical reactions that led eventually to the origin of life.

3Mud Pots

Geological gurgling sounds similar to the glub-glub of chocolate pudding on a stove — suggestive, we hoped, of simmering life.

4Wind, Rain and Surf

A momentary evocation of the hundreds of millions of years when these were the only Sounds of Earth, with special emphasis on the oceans as the scene of our origins. The oceans themselves were outgassed from the Earth’s interior.

5Crickets, Frogs

Intended to betoken the debut of vociferous life on earth, most of these sounds were taken from the CBS library, with the excep-tion of one adult male cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus, who is performing a solo sere-nade to the females. He was recorded by Dr. Ronald R. Hoy at the Langmuir Laboratory at Cornell University.

MacPherson’s Deming box is six feet by three feet by two feet, and made of black low-carbon steel. It looks like a cross between a coffin and the monolith from 2001. He keeps it in a woodshed not far from his house. “Deming,” MacPherson said, “suggested that the first box out of three — which is what this is — should be able to completely block VLF radio waves.” Deming’s solution was a box with walls made from inch-thick aluminum, which would have been cost-prohibitive, to say nothing of technically diffi-cult. “Then I went on with my research and disco-vered that mild steel, with a minimum thickness of 1.2 millimeters, would provide what they call, in the physics lingo, about ten skin depths. Each skin depth of mild steel attenuates the signal to, let’s see,” — he mumbled a few figures, working out some math in his head — “about 30 percent of what the original signal strength would be. Ten skin depths essentially provi-des 100 percent coverage.” If a Hum sufferer were to get in the box, and if the Hum was indeed caused by VLF waves, then the noise should stop once inside the box. This is the test that MacPherson was planning to do while I was there. His goal was to take it on the road, bringing it down the Pacific Coast to meet up with other Hum sufferers and test it.

The welds on the box were thick, running along the edges like long-healed scars; as I ran a finger along one of them, he said, “The welding is crucial, because VLF radio waves have a peculiar habit of being able to penetrate, and find cracks, just like water.”

He pried open the hatch so I could peer inside. It looked claustrophobic, a pure black interior not long enough for an adult to lie in comfortably.

“So you’ll need some kind of oxygen source,” I asked, feeling a bit queasy at the thought of spending time locked in there.

“No need,” MacPherson answered. “There’s plenty of air inside a box that size, enough for, I don’t know, four hours of breathing.” This was probably technical-ly correct but not at all reassuring.

MacPherson propped a foot up on the edge of the box. “If it were a different frequency than VLF,” he said, “like something around microwave, or cell phone frequency, which some people suggest, then this would not have taken me off and on three years to build.” I asked why, and he said that those waves can easily be blocked by thin layers of foil. “You know, the classic — ”

“The tin foil hat,” I finished, both of us laughing. That he’s able to joke about this suggests his even-keeled approach to this whole question, but the hint of fringe conspiracy theories always lurks just around the corner and makes actual progress on solving the Hum extraordinarily difficult.

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Tao's Hum

Visualization of a Hum recording from Taos, New Mexico.

Take, for instance, another prominent voice in the Hum community : Steve Kohlhase, a mechanical engineer living in Brookfield, Connecticut, who first started hearing the Hum in 2009. “At one time it was very quiet around here,” Kohlhase told me over the phone. “We moved up here from New Jersey in 1994, and there were two Algonquin pipelines by us” — gas pipelines — “and an Iroquois pipeline behind us. We bought the house realizing all that. But it was quiet, no issues at all. And during the 2000s, under Bush and all that — and I’m a Republican by the way — they decided they were going to start expanding. They put a couple of compressor stations behind us, and after they installed those, probably seven months later, I started sensing a low-frequency disturbing noise when I was in bed — the typical thing : One person hears it and the rest of the family doesn’t.” He wasn’t alone in hearing the noise, he said. “The dog started acting up, and the coyotes started acting up : They started to walk up and down the street, leaving their habitat. … The dog went on Prozac because he couldn’t handle it.”

Kohlhase believes the pipelines running through his neighborhood and throughout the country are producing the Hum. He claims many of his neighbors hear it too but are afraid to say anything for fear of driving down property values. Other Hum sufferers have connected the Hum to electromagnetic radia-tion from nearby power plants, cell phone towers, or “smart” utility meters that broadcast their readings. Any facet of modern life that emits a signal or has moving parts has at one point or another been put forward as a potential cause of this unbearable noise, as though the Hum were something of a Rorschach blot of technological woe.

But from this set of information Kohlhase has ex-trapolated a conclusion more and more sweeping in scope. He believes that most — if not all — mass shootings of the past few decades can be traced to na-tural gas pipelines emitting low-frequency radiation. I asked Kohlhase about Aaron Alexis, the Washington Navy Yard shooter. “I don’t think he was crazy,” he said. “I think he was basically sane given the condi-tions he was experiencing.” Nor does he think Alexis was alone. Using MacPherson’s maps of Hum reports, and his own research, Kohlhase claimed to have found a correlation between high numbers of Hum sufferers and mass shootings : “[Alexis] was probably affected mentally by living in these Hum clusters, such as many of these other murderers — in Denver, Albuquerque, Tucson, out in California, even out here in Connecticut, at Newtown.” In the wake of the San-dy Hook shooting, Kohlhase submitted material to the Connecticut State Police suggesting that a natural gas pipeline near Adam Lanza’s home may have been what drove him to kill 27 people.

This reading of recent gun tragedies is pretty distur-bing in its desire to explain with one stroke the root cause of these violent episodes, neatly sidestepping

6Birds, Hyena and Elephant

A chorus of creatures to suggest the deve-loping varieties of fauna as Earth gets really busy with life.

7Chimpanzee

The voice of a lone primate rises above the others and seems to screech its mad an-nouncement of a new consciousness.

8Wild Dog

A lonely baying that reverberates with the dangers and uncertainties of our beginnings.

9Footsteps, Heartbeats and Laughter

A human being makes its first appearance, walking erect with its hands free to change the world.

10Fire and Speech

Humans begin to use fire to alter their envi-ronment, and the hearth becomes, perhaps, the site of the birth of language and culture. The words are those of Professor Richard Lee of the University of Toronto extending greetings in the !Kung language of the Ka-lahari Bushmen, one of the last representa-tives of the hunter-gatherer societies that sustained the human endeavor for almost all our several-million-year history. A pho-tograph of Bushman hunters is included as item 60 of the picture sequence.

11The First Tools

Our upright posture left our hands free for manipulating the environment. A critical mo-ment in human history occurred when the first stone tools were made out of soft rock more than two million years ago. Enormous

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the problem of mental health, easy access to high-ca-pacity assault weapons, and many other factors. It also sidesteps the deep conflicts, ambiguous pro-blems, and difficult solutions in favor of what you could call a magic bullet that resolves the problem once and for all. But in the absence of serious scien-tific inquiry, this is precisely the kind of logic that’s allowed to prevail.

Perhaps this is the reason so many people have seized on MacPherson’s experiment : its elegant simpli-city, its promise of silencing the crackpots. With one simple test, it seems, we’ll know once and for all whether the Hum is related to VLF waves. If this theory is correct, we’ll know right away : If someone can hear the Hum outside of the box but not inside it, there will be strong evidence that it’s a low-frequency issue (the box isn’t soundproof). But the fact that it’s such a simple experiment is also why it’s so frustra-ting that MacPherson hasn’t tried it yet.

“As it turns out,” MacPherson told me, standing next to his steel monolith, “this unit, despite its very mun-dane and sepulchral appearance, has not been tested. Nobody has entered this yet, and I’m going to be the first person.”

When I asked him why he hasn’t gone in yet, MacPherson gave me a range of answers. “For one,” he said, “I don’t think this location will work. For many people the Hum is inaudible out of doors.” The wood-shed MacPherson uses for the box is covered but not sealed, and has no door on it. He won’t bring it inside his own house, claiming it won’t fit inside the door. So he has to move it. “In the big picture scientifically, this sounds ludicrous, but I need a trailer. The box looks too much like a coffin. I don’t want it seen out in public too much.”

But it’s not just that he doesn’t want to be seen driving it around; he doesn’t want to be seen testing it, either. “It’ll need to be put in someone’s garage, because that will provide the blocking for the ambient sound, but it’ll also provide the privacy necessary.” When I threw out the possibility of just going ahead and renting him a U-Haul, he demurred, changing the topic back to the theoretical discussion. Having come this far, he seemed suddenly uncomfortable with what he had made.

Gibsons, after all, is a small town of only a few thousand people, and MacPherson has taught high school here for 26 years. Without exaggeration, it’s safe to say that most everyone who lives here or their children has gone through his classroom. Since he’s begun this project he’s become known locally as the Hum guy : When he goes grocery shopping, one of the teenage clerks will stand behind him out of sight and hum quietly. It’s the kind of joke MacPherson takes in stride. “If I don’t show a sense of humor on this,” he said, “it’s going to be hell.”

David Deming has more or less ended his involve-

numbers of stone-cutting, flaking, penetra-ting and pounding tools are found in many paleolithic sites. We wished to include the sound of stone on stone, of stone tools in the course of being fashioned. Carl walked the streets of midtown New York in a poi-gnant effort to find two suitable rocks; not only were there no suitable rocks, there were no rocks of any sort to be found. He called Alexander Marshack of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard for recom-mendations on a source of soft rock and a short description of the method of ma-nufacturing stone tools. Linda Sagan then obtained appropriate flint samples from Dr. Ralph Solecki of the Department of Anthro-pology, Columbia University, who also provi-ded thick gloves and goggles : flint is sharp, and there must have been many accidents attendant to the ancient manufacture of tools. The record includes this satisfying sound of flint fracturing and crumbling when struck sharply with another rock. Some of the results would have made adequate, al-though rudimentary, knives and spears.

12Tame Dog

The dog is heard to bark again, but this time all traces of menace are gone; animals have been domesticated. Almost every sound that follows on the essay is the result of hu-man activity. Dogs are represented as items 43, 61 and 68 of the picture sequence.

13Herding Sheep, Blacksmith Shop, Sawing,

Tractor and Riveter

A suite of agricultural and construction sounds. We tested several roosters and cows, but they all sounded terribly stagy.

14Morse Code

When it came time to decide what message within the message we would be sending in Morse code, Carl immediately suggested Ad astra per aspera — To the stars through dif-ficulties. William R. Schoppe, Jr. (WB2FWS), a ham radio operator at CBS, was kind enough to tap it out for us.

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15Ships, Horse and Cart, Train, Truck, Tractor, Bus, Automobile, F-lll Flyby, Saturn 5 Lift-Off

A great many human miles are covered in this transportation sequence. The horse and cart start out on a dirt road and end up on a paved one. The transition modes from there on come very quickly and reflect accura-tely the astonishing pace of progress in the development of transportation over the last hundred years. The train and the supersonic aircraft convey in stereo a satisfying sense of motion. This sequence roughly parallels pictures 102, 105, and 113.

16Kiss

This wonderful sound proved to be the most difficult to record. We were under strict or-ders from NASA to keep it heterosexual, and within such a constraint we tried every per-mutation we could think of without success. Jimmy Iovine happened to show up that day, and he was most anxious to produce a be-lievable kiss by sucking his arm. But this was to be that impossible thing, a kiss that would last forever, and we wanted it to be real. After many unusable kisses that were either too faint or too smacky, Tim kissed me softly on the cheek; it felt and sounded fine.

17Mother and Child

The very first cries of an infant and the stil-ling of a six-month-old’s cries by his mother were provided for us through the courtesy of Dr. Margaret Bullowa and Dr. Lise Menn of M.I.T.

18Life Signs

We know that EEG patterns register some changes in thought. Would it be possible, I wondered, for a highly advanced technology of several million years from now to deci-pher my thoughts ? On the chance that it might be, I contacted Dr. Julius Korein of the New York University Medical Center, and with Tim’s help we set up a recording session

Agecroft Power Station, Salford, 1983, © John Davies

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ment with the Hum; he’s no longer doing research on it, and he declined an interview on the topic (though he did answer a few brief questions via email). One wonders if this is because of people like Kohlhase, who Deming sees as the main problem standing in the way of understanding the Hum and other scientific anomalies. “They are inexorably attracted to anoma-lies of all types, but their behavior is fundamentally irrational,” he wrote in a 2007 paper. “On internet discussion forums, these people relentlessly drive out good posters and ruin everything they come into contact with. They need to be condemned swiftly and mercilessly.”

MacPherson is a bit more tolerant. “Everybody gets a chance with me,” he said. An inexorable attraction to anomalies is one of the ways science moves forward. William R. Corliss, the controversial physicist who spent years collecting records of scientific oddities from singing sands to the Nazca Lines, once wrote of such research that, “while not science per se,” it no-netheless “has the potential to destabilize paradigms and accelerate scientific change. Anomalies reveal nature as it really is : complex, chaotic, possibly even unplumbable.”

When Wolfgang Pauli first proposed the existence of neutrino particles in 1930, he almost immediately regretted it, referring to them as a “desperate remedy” to explain anomalous readings of radioactive decay. The work that ultimately proved their existence led to a Nobel Prize in 1995, but there were still problems, and neutrinos continued to confront scientists with unexplained readings, unpredictable data, and other anomalies that confound known models. Ultimately the so-called solar neutrino problem (referring to the fact that only a third of expected neutrinos emitted from the sun are recorded as expected) was solved in 1998, leading to another Nobel in 2015 for neutrino research.

There are many in the Hum community who see MacPherson’s box as an equally important scientific feat. “Regardless of the ultimate findings,” a poster commented on MacPherson’s site, “you have moved the investigation on the Hum forward in an unpa-ralleled manner.” Having come this far, on the verge of finally testing the VLF theory, excitement among the Hum community is pretty high. “Thank you,” another commenter wrote, “for the inspiring initia-tive which may eventually bring back a life to many wandering spirits.”

But having finally completed the box, MacPherson suddenly stopped. After weeks of telling me that he would conduct his experiment in my presence, he made it clear that it would not happen. Partly, he said, this had to do with the school year starting up again and the increasing demands of his main job and his other hobbies. A few weeks later, when MacPherson still hadn’t tested it, a poster on MacPherson’s web site snarled at him. “Go in already,” he wrote. “What is it with this cliff-hanger shit ?”

for my innermost self. Using a medical-data recorder attached to an audiotape recorder, I was left to meditate alone in a room for an hour while the workings of my brain, heart, eyes and muscles were being recorded. A short segment of the graphs of my vital signs appears below.Despite the fact that there was only a tiny chance that my mind would ever be read in this way, the course of my thoughts seemed to me to be worthy of serious consideration. I made a sort of mental itinerary of the ideas and individuals of history whose memory I hoped to perpetuate, and with the exception of a couple of irrepressible facts of my own life, I managed to stick to it pretty well. The hour was electronically compressed into a minute, and it is a fierce sound, something like a string of exploding firecrackers.

19Pulsar

The concluding moment of the essay sounds ironically like the rasp of a phonograph nee-dle left to languish unattended at the end of a record. It is in fact a recording of a quickly varying natural radio source some 600 light-years away from us and designated CP1133. It was provided for us by Frank Drake and Amahl Shakhashiri of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center. The regularity of the pulsar beat was considered, when the first pulsar was discovered, to be a sign of intelli-gent life (although we now know that pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars). My re-corded life signs sound a little like recorded radio static from the depths of space. The electrical signatures of a human being and a star seem, in such recordings, not so diffe-rent, and symbolize our relatedness and indebtedness to the cosmos.Nineteen hundred years ago Horace wrote that “words challenge eternity.” The fact that we recall his epigram proves him right. We have no way of knowing how much of this beautiful planet will have been obliterated long before Voyager ceases its wandering; how many of the voices celebrated on this record will have been silenced forever by our carelessness or merely by time. Voyager moves among the stars, bearing its cargo of echoes and images, and, in the logic of such distances, it keeps us alive.

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There was only so long I could stare at a metal box, particularly once MacPherson made it clear that neither of us were going inside it. We’d talked about going out to one of the places where MacPherson has heard the Hum the loudest, but instead he took me to his high school. He was eager to show me the garden he’d set up in the back of his classroom, where his students were growing tomatoes and various herbs. He talked about his other hobbies — surfing, cooking, playing bass guitar. He seemed far more enthusiastic about what his students are doing, and at times see-med quite over the Hum and his role in it.

I’d come to Gibsons to see the thing that was finally going to solve the problem of the Hum, made by the one man best positioned to make that happen. But MacPherson has already begun downplaying the im-pact of the box he’s built. It doesn’t have much prac-tical use, after all : You can’t live in an airtight steel box all your life. Several people have written about the possibility of living in metal shipping containers as a means to escape the Hum, but since VLF waves can permeate most surfaces, one would have to flawlessly seal the container to get any kind of permanent relief. If it is VLF, in other words, it is inescapable, and MacPherson will at best only be able to verify that the Hum is everywhere.

Rather than hoping to end the problem once and for all, MacPherson hopes that his experiment — if he ever conducts it — will serve as a catalyst for more serious investigation. “I expect at some point I’ll have this taken away from me by a big university lab,” he said. He believes that the entire problem could be solved with a good lab and a small amount of funding.

“The problem is that no one’s paying for this, no one has picked this up,” he said. “It’s me and a few people sending me PayPal accounts through the mail that’s essentially made a big metal box sitting in a woodshed.”

In space, no-one can hear you scream, but you can now hear what is going on out there, thanks to Nasa's Voyager

Voyager's journey past the heliosphere and into the interstellar medium is one of the most astonishing and moving feats of human exploration. Voyager's, er, voyage, puts us all in our place : remember that photo it sent back in 1990, with the Earth a minuscule, barely visible blue dot ? Here was, made real, the terrifying Total Perspective Vortex from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that showed its hapless victims how tiny our lives are in the grand scheme of the uni-verse's quasi-infinity !

The reason Nasa knew that Voyager had entered a new interstellar realm is that they heard it : or rather, they saw the vibrations of interstellar plasma detected by Voyager's

How Nasa's Voyager is bringing the sound of space down to Earth

theguardian.comTom Service

Tom Service

17 sept. 2013

How Nasa s

Voyager is bringing

the sound of space down to

Earth

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antennae, and amplified and played them through a speaker. "These frequencies are within the range heard by human ears", Nasa says - and you too can hear them, here. It was these eruptions of plasmic vibration, interstellar records of explosions on the sun that happened a year before, that told Don Gurnett and his team of plasma-wave wat-chers at the University of Iowa that Voyager had finally breached the heliosphere and gone still further out there where no man may quite possibly ever (alas) go. (Officially, Voyager has still got a long way - another 14-28,000 years, according to NASA - to truly get out of the reach of the solar sys-tem; that's how long it will take to escape the Oort cloud and the last vestiges of the gravitational pull of the sun, by which time Voyager's power will have long since been run out, probably by 2025.)

As any fule - but very few Hollywood direc-tors - kno, in space no-one can hear you scream, or fire lasers, or attack aliens. As Josh Dzieza of The Daily Beast explains, the interstellar sounds are "not something you could hear if you were aboard Voyager. [They are] the result of electrons oscillating back and forth, creating an electro- static wave, not air particles colliding, like the pressure waves we hear." But when the waves are transliterated into sound, what you hear are those pulses of corusca-ting, ever-rising whistling. Nasa and Voyager have already given us the sounds of the solar system (and Don Gurnett has collected some of his favourites here, including "Jovian upstream ion acoustic waves", and other greatest hits), but these audible messages from the furthest limits of how far humanity has travelled in the universe are perhaps the most extraordinary of all. Listen to the universe !

POURQUOI N'Y A-T-IL PAS DE SON DANS L'ESPACE ?

Chacun a en tête l'image de combats spa-tiaux dantesques où X-Wing, Enterprise ou autres Vipers participent à des joutes tonitruantes. Pourtant, depuis Alien, chacun le sait : dans l'espace, personne ne vous entendra crier ! Et en effet, le son ne se propage pas en ces terres arides.

Mais pourquoi donc que le son y s'aven-ture pas en ces lieux ?

Vous vous doutez bien que ce n'est pas parce qu'il est frileux ou qu'il a peur du noir. En réalité, la plupart d'entre-vous connaissent certainement une réponse simplifiée, utilisant un raccourci certes vrai, mais dénué d'explication : il n'y a pas de son dans l'espace, car il n'y a pas d'air.

En effet, le son est une onde, et chaque onde a besoin d'un support pour se propager. Jetez un caillou dans de l'eau, et vous verrez une onde se créer et s'étaler de plus en plus.

C'est pareil dans l'air. Un son va créer un mouve-ment au niveau microscopique, un choc, qui va faire vibrer l'air de façon différente selon son intensité et son positionnement dans le spectre sonore (grave ou aigu). Les particules composant l'air vont se "pous-ser" les unes les autres pour étendre l'onde, qui ira en s'atténuant au fur et à mesure qu'elle s'éloignera de son point d'origine.


18 mars 2013 Loïc Massaïa

Loïc Massaïa

sciences-tech.krinein.com

How Nasa's Voyager is bringing the sound of space down to Earth

theguardian.comTom Service17 sept. 2013

L'étendue et sa vitesse de propagation sont liées à la densité du support sur lequel l'onde navigue. En effet, plus ce support est dense plus la vitesse de propaga-tion va être grande. Cela s'explique par le fait que les particules de matière qui le composent sont plus ser-rées. Elles interagissent donc plus vite. Par exemple, dans l'air la vitesse du son est de 343m par seconde. Dans l'eau, elle est 4,37 fois plus rapide, et dans l'acier 14,57 fois plus rapide que dans l'air.

A contrario, cette densité est un obstacle à son éten-due, puisqu'il devient plus difficile de faire "bouger" des choses quand elles sont plus serrées. Ainsi l'onde, si elle se propagera plus vite dans l'eau, ira finalement moins loin…


18 mars 2013 Loïc Massaïasciences-tech.krinein.com

Plouf ! L'eau permet à l'onde de se propager.

Sound captured by Voyager 1

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Quid de l'espace, donc ?

Il est vide, ou presque (environ 1 atome par mètre cube). Ce qui ne permet pas aux ondes de se propager. Effectivement, envoyez un cailloux dans une mare vide, ou parsemée de quelques gouttes d'eau, et vous pourrez attendre longtemps l'observation de petites vagues (même si des ondes se créent tout de même lors du contact avec le sol, l'une se propageant dans l'air, l'autre au travers de la terre) ! Ainsi, vous n'enten-drez pas l'explosion d'un chasseur TIE même si vous mettez un micro à quelques mètres de lui.

Par contre, le choc produit sera suffisamment violent pour éjecter de la chaleur, des rayonnements (lumi-neux, electro-magnétiques…), d'éventuels effets gra-vitationnels (même si infimes à cette échelle) et de la matière (les débris de l'appareil) jusqu'à votre X-Wing, provocant -outre d'éventuels dégâts- un puissant capharnaüm sonore dans votre cabine de pilotage. En effet, les vibrations auxquelles votre appareil est soumis se propageront très efficacement sous forme de sons dans votre cabine pressurisée et oxygénée.

Du coup on peut se poser une nouvelle question : une telle explosion est-elle possible dans l'univers, puisque nous savons qu'il n'y a pas d'oxygène (indis-pensable à la combustion) et que la propagation due au choc s'avère difficile ?

Et bien oui ! Comment ferions-nous décoller des appareils de la Lune autrement ? Pour qu'il y ait combustion, il suffit d'avoir suffisamment de com-bustible et de comburant pour démarrer la réaction et la maintenir. Les moteurs et réacteurs sont ainsi alimentés en combustible (un carburant comme le kérosène par exemple) et en comburant (le dioxygène est le plus courant). Un chasseur TIE transporte suffi-samment de matière explosive (carburant et arsenal) et d'oxygène (la cabine et son système d'alimentation) pour réaliser une jolie explosion, mais silencieuse, et peu étendue, carburant et comburant se consumant, se dispersant et se refroidissant vite.

Mais…

…Une autre question pourrait tarauder les plus curieux d'entre vous : "Si l'onde sonore a tant de diffi-culté à se propager dans l'espace, pourquoi n'en est-il pas de même pour les ondes lumineuses et pour les ondes radios ?"

Ah ah, bonne question, petit sacripant, tu auras un bon point !

Eh bien, parce que la lumière, si elle se comporte comme une onde, se déplace avec son propre sup-port : Le photon. Mais ça tu le savais déjà, n'est-ce pas ? Alors pourquoi poser la question ? Rends-moi ton bon point !

AMBISONIC

Field recordist Chris Watson is mapping the sounds of the sea to create immersive au-dio art

“As a teenager, way back when, I remem-ber reading a book by the famous marine biologist Jacques Cousteau called ‘The Silent Undersea World’…and I thought that it was bollocks,” says Chris Watson. As a field recordist, sound designer and composer, Watson’s work uncovers the natural, audial phenomena of our world.

Throughout September, he will take resi-dence at Torbay’s The Tale arts festival with the sound piece No Man’s Land. “The sea is full of sound, it’s very sound rich, and a lot of the sounds of the sea we allude to as music. We call it ‘seal song’, or ‘whale song’, and there’s a remarkable characteristic in that which I find very engaging. We think we live on planet Earth. We don’t, we live on pla-net Ocean.”

Watson turns natural sound into narratives by placing a microphone where you can’t

AMB I SON I C

Open your ears to the freaky ambisonic magic of the ocean

wired.co.ukJack Needham

Jack

7 sept. 2017

Need

ham



Les satellites communiquent par radio© NASA



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put your ears. In No Man’s Land, perched atop a cliff in Berry Head, Torquay, Watson uses frequencies from the deep to carry the listener through the ocean currents of the world.

“The cliff face is a place that was once on the sea bed, so I thought it would be great to create something that would place an audience within the environment where that cliff face once stood,” he says. “So that’s what we did. You experience the sounds of Weddell seals under the sea ice of the An-tarctic, then travel to coral reefs in the south China sea,” Watson explains. “You hear the songs of humpback whales off the coast of the Dominican Republic, to Orcas hunting in the north atlantic. This creates an amazing musical composition, and I hope it liberates people to think about what’s underneath the water. It’s a journey of the imagination, if anything.”

Watson’s journey into sound began as a founding member of Sheffield’s pop-indus-trialists Cabaret Voltaire. Since then, he has recorded polar bears in the Antarctic for the BBC Frozen Planet series with Sir David Attenborough, and spent a month crafting music from the natural tectonic rhythms of Mexico’s Ghost Train for his 2011 LP El Tren Fantasma.

But, by Watson’s own admission, No Man’s Land is his most ambitious project yet, one three years in the making that covers thou-sands of miles. “If I’ve ever been anywhere near the sea during my travels I’ve made new recordings with this project in mind,” he says. “But even in Torbay there are still areas left undiscovered, the sea bed being one of them. Sound travels almost five times faster underwater than it does through the air, and that’s the only reason why we’re able to hear these sounds. I’m interested in explo-ring what’s there. It’s a celebration of ocean sound.”

Using ambisonic recordings, a technique that derives height, depth and width from a sound source, Watson’s 45-minute long composition is mapped to the specifica-tions of the cliff face using spatialized audio

C'est exactement la même chose pour l'onde radio : Tout comme la lumière, elle est une onde électroma-gnétique. De fait, d'un point de vue quantique, ces ondes sont à la fois onde et matière (sous forme d e corpuscules), elles peuvent donc également se déplacer dans l'espace grace à leur corps matériel…


wired.co.ukJack Needham7 sept. 2017

Pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas de son dans l'espace ? The cause of the Earth's maddening humming noise

18 mars 2013 16 avr., 2015 Loïc Massaïa Plymouth Heraldsciences-tech.krinein.com independent.co.uk

software. A 16-channel mixer, four subwoo-fers and four vertical speaker systems suspended from the walls of the cliff creates a 360-degree sphere of audio – where the gulls of Brixham Harbour circle above your head as the shore of Berry Head washes against your feet.

“No Man’s Land is rooted in a sound that everybody will know. The sound of waves on a beach, or the opening and closing of the ocean,” Watson explains. “But we’ve taken these sounds into a really strange, some-times dark, scary and wild place. We’d last literally two minutes under the surface, but it’s a place that we can experience sonically.”


wired.co.ukJack Needham7 sept. 2017

People all over the world have complained of a strange humming noise.

Scientists have confirmed the cause of a strange humming noise that emanates from the Earth and has baffled people for more than forty years – and was even a factor in one reported suicide.

The noise has been talked about worldwide and also made local newspaper headlines in the UK. It is often referred to as a “phenomenon” and “the hum”, usually prefixed with the location of where it is heard.

In Britain, the most famous example was the “Bristol hum” that made the news in the late 1970s. One news-paper asked readers in the city: “Have you heard the Hum?” and at least 800 people said they had – accor-ding to the BBC – and some had suffered headaches and nosebleeds from it.

It has been described like “a diesel car idling in the distance” by a BBC interviewee and the maddening sound has driven people stir-crazy in trying to figure it out. Especially when they can only hear it at home and during the night.

People living on the south coast have complained this week of a constant and low-pitched sound for which they have found no cause – as reported by Plymouth Herald.

SCIENTISTS THINK THEY'VE FOUND THE CAUSE OF THE EARTH'S MADDENING HUMMING NOISE

Plymouth Herald

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It has been mistaken for leaking pipes, phone masts, wind farms, low-frequency submarine communica-tions and even mating fish.

“For the first few years I lost sleep, couldn’t concen-trate and was unable to do anything. I was constantly in tears, which put a great strain on my husband. It has changed me from an active, creative person to a stifled, angry pessimist,” a woman told The Inde-pendent back in 1994.

Doctors blamed patients’ abilities to hear it on tinni-tus, until Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge had confirmed sometime in the 1990s that the cause is external.

_____________

However, the search for the truth could now be over as researchers claim that microseismic activity from long ocean waves impacting the sea bed is what makes our planet vibrate and produces the droning sound.

The pressure of the waves on the seafloor generates seismic waves that cause the Earth to oscillate, said Fabrice Ardhuin, a senior research scientist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France.

The continuous waves produce sounds lasting from 13 to 300 seconds. They can be heard by a relatively small proportion of people – who are sensitive to the hums – and also by seismic instruments.

“We have made a big step in explaining this myste-rious signal and where it is coming from and what is the mechanism,” Ardhuin said of the study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Understanding the ringing could also help resear-chers gain a better knowledge of the Earth’s structure, he added.

Microseismic waves penetrate through the Earth’s mantle so recording these waves could give scientists a much more detailed picture of what lies beneath.

Discovering fainter seismic signals could also allow scientists to better detect small or faraway earthquakes.

Submarines, as well as masts and gas pipes, were blamed for the hum

The cause of the Earth's maddening humming noiseThe cause of the Earth's maddening humming noise

16 avr., 201516 avr., 2015 Plymouth HeraldPlymouth Herald independent.co.ukindependent.co.uk

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I bounced out of bed at exactly 1:00AM. Very dominating HUM. Now 1:16, the pul-sating begins. No decrease.

Trembling within the body, nausea.

Better get my book out and turn up the T.V.

_________

Terry Harris <[email protected]>

Parkersburg, WV USA - Wednesday, February 13, 2002 at 22:20:45 (PST)

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Cet ouvrage, version web d'un livre bien réel et physique, peut être téléchargé et imprimé si besoin, mais non vendu, sous format physique ou numérique.Il fut conçu Léo Fouan, graphiste et musicien de 21 ans, dans le cadre du cours de Patrick Paleta, à l'ESAD d'Amiens, entre septembre 2017 et fevrier 2018.Il regroupe des articles de sources diverses se concentrant autour du thème de la preuve de présence par la captation du son.Cette troisième version s'appelle TROIS.© Léo Fouan 2018

Documents

H HUM - leomarin.frleomarin.fr/pdf/the_hum_big.pdfThe hum tonight has been the most intense yet. I feel my muscles vibrating and aching all over, something I have yet to experience!