The answers range from the paranoid to the vast exposure to cellphones in people's lives - there were 207 million wireless subscribers nationwide at the end of 2005, a nearly sevenfold increase in just a decade, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. Why people seem to be hearing phantom rings more often now is another question. "Your brain is conditioned to respond to a phone ring just as it is to a baby crying," Mr. (Simple ringtones are more likely to produce phantom rings than popular music used as a ringtone.) Babies cry in this range, for example, and the familiar "brrring, brrring" ringtone hits this sweet spot, too. The ear gives unequal weights to certain frequencies, making it particularly sensitive to sounds in the range of 1,000 to 6,000 hertz, scientists say. Phantom rings are a "psycho-acoustic phenomenon" related to the way the human brain interprets sound, said Rob Nokes, president of Sound Dogs, a sound effects company in California. "Another place I hear it is running water, so I sometimes hear it while I'm shaving," Mr. Other times the culprit will be the sound effects in a song on the radio. A few notes in the background of a television commercial can fool him, he said. He plans to send questionnaires this summer to learn when and how often phantom rings happen and who is most likely to experience them.
BRITISH LANDLINE OLD PHONE RINGTONE PROFESSIONAL
"My experience has been hearing just a few notes that are similar to my phone's ring, my brain will fill in the rest," said David Laramie, a doctoral student at the Los Angeles campus of the California School of Professional Psychology, who is writing his dissertation about the effect of cellphones on behavior. Some sound experts believe that because cellphones have become a fifth limb for many, people now live in a constant state of phone vigilance, and hearing sounds that seem like a telephone's ring can send an expectant brain into action.
This audio illusion - called phantom phone rings or, more whimsically, ringxiety or fauxcellarm - has emerged recently as an Internet discussion topic and has become a new reason for people to either bemoan the techno-saturation of modern life or question their sanity. What they are hearing is a barely discernable sound - perhaps chimes, a faint trill or an electronic bleat - that they mistake for the ringtone of their cellphone, which isn't ringing. Others say they thought they heard phones ring while taking a shower, using a blow-dryer or watching commercials.
Minka Wiltz, an actress in Atlanta, has tried to answer her phone to the thrrrrup, thrrrrup, thrrrrup of a truck bouncing down a pothole-pocked street. SIX minutes 39 seconds into the Richard Thompson song "Calvary Cross," Mike Pelusi, a music reviewer in Philadelphia, will almost invariably check his cellphone.
0 kommentar(er)
