Mystery of Forest Grove, Oregon, Noise May Never Be Solved

[Lodestar]

A piercing noise that plagued an Oregon city earlier this year, drawing comparisons to "Satan's teakettle" and hypothesized to be everything from a defective water valve to aliens or a signal for the end of times, stopped as suddenly as it started.

In the silence left behind, it appears the mystery may live on forever.

cont'd

(Sound recording at link (piercing sound!)
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mystery-forest-grove-oregon-noise-may-never-be-solved-n579456

[Baitball Blogger]

1. It sounds metallic and my dog went ape-shit over it.

Never saw her cock her head that way before.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. My cat, too...

They hear frequencies we don't, so that noise is more complex than it seems to us.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Very unlikely your computer can reproduce those frequencies, though

You have to specifically build electronics to make high frequencies, and it's unlikely anyone would bother with that in a computer - or that the digital encoding can reproduce them either. The animals are probably just freaking out at what we hear too.

[TreasonousBastard]

7. True, but human hearing taps out at about 20kH...

with 15kH a common high end for a lot of us. Most audio systems, even computers, get up at least to 15kH, with the good ones a lot higher.

Cats tap out at about 79kH, which is way beyond anything we normally reproduce so she didn't hear that, but she could have heard a few things I didn't. And she definitely heard something-- she doesn't normally react like that to sounds from TV, stereo, or computer.

[pressbox69]

3. How could it stop?

After all tRump's lips are still moving.

[Festivito]

5. Like a large wooden music instrument. I'm thinking hoax.

3/4 second echo reverberations tells me it would be hard to pinpoint that it would be in an area offering a lot of sound bouncing.

Few seconds, pause, few more seconds, pause, long run with scratchiness makes it seem like a hoax. Someone with a somewhat silent source of gas, such as steam, they learn the exact angle and release and get better at it as they go for the second and third attempts.

They just need to lower the release level. Sounds like they are overdriving it on the last long burst.

Could be an old train whistle with compressed air. A little rustiness could make it sound more wooden.

Just thnk'n

[kag]

6. Maybe it's one of these "mystery" sounds...