The mosquito’s exclusionary sound was repurposed as private teen ringtones
Evidence
Young people report these high-level high-frequency sounds to be very annoying, unpleasant and irritating.
However, young people now benefit from this basic idea because it has now been used to provide mobile ringtones, sometimes known as “teen buzz,” that cannot be heard by older people. The original teen buzz was created by recording the output from a mosquito device, but nowadays there are plenty of synthesized downloadable teen buzz ringtones available online.
— David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2576
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- CANDY: A great elevator fact: the anti-loitering sonic weapon became a secret teen ringtone adults can’t hear.
Related
- The same high-frequency targeting lets teens create adult-invisible ringtones (similarity 0.87)
- An 16.8 kHz sine wave is used commercially as a teen deterrent (similarity 0.85)