Lord Rayleigh reported a woman’s voice echoing an octave higher from a fir plantation

Evidence

Echoes that do change the pitch (if they exist) are called harmonic. Over the years, there have been many reports of harmonic echoes returning a third, a fifth, or an octave shifted from the original. However, one such report is hard to shake off, considering its source: In 1873, Lord Rayleigh published a letter in Nature Magazine, the most prestigious journal of science then, and now. He claimed to have heard the sound of a woman’s voice echo from a woods across a valley at Bedgebury Park an octave higher than when it left her. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 2630

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to anyone into the history of acoustics or Lord Rayleigh — a credentialed man reporting a genuinely weird 1873 Nature letter.
• CANDY: A short, fun scientific-wonder anecdote: the greatest physicist of his day hearing an echo that raised a woman’s voice an octave.