10/12/2023 0 Comments Funny cricket sounds![]() ![]() The cricket story reminds me of a very similar saga: the Sausalito hum. It has the fastest pulse-repetition rate of any cricket in the Caribbean or North America. “It’s too mechanical-sounding.” But the Indies short-tailed cricket is no ordinary singing insect. “Cicadas don’t sound like that,” his neighbor reportedly said. ![]() As reported by ProPublica, he blamed cicadas (which are not crickets, but do also sing). Somewhat ironically, one of the first diplomats to hear the noise was tantalizingly close to the right answer. But for now it seems that the noise at the heart of the Cuban incidents probably has a benign origin. Diplomats in China also reported mysterious sounds and symptoms, still unexplained. Or their symptoms might be the result of a mass psychosomatic illness. Of course, the diplomats could have been attacked in some other way. That’s “consistent with an insect stopping a call when threatened,” Stubbs and Montealegre-Z write. When he played and recorded the cricket’s call indoors, the result matched the Cuban noise even more closely.Ĭricket behavior could also help explain another mysterious detail of the Cuban incidents: Several diplomats claimed that the sound abruptly stopped when they entered a room or moved around. But that, Stubbs thinks, is because the cricket’s call was probably echoing off the surfaces of an indoor space, creating several sound streams that interfered with one another. Only one thing didn’t match: The pulses in the AP recording were more erratic and variable than those of most insects. Read: The case of the sick Americans in Cuba gets stranger In both, each pulse consists of 30 oscillations, which become slightly lower in pitch as they die away. Both consist of pulses that repeat 180 times a second. Both are loudest at a frequency of 7 kilohertz, roughly an octave beyond the highest notes on a piano. By contrast, the song of the Indies short-tailed cricket matches the Cuban noise in several telltale ways. But they blamed the wrong species-one whose song sounds very different, even to untrained ears. The duo have written a paper that describes their findings and are set to submit it to a journal for formal peer review.Īfter analyzing similar recordings, the Cuban government had also pointed its finger at crickets. As first reported by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times, they found that one species- the Indies short-tailed cricket-makes a call that’s indistinguishable from the enigmatic Cuban recording. Together with Fernando Montealegre-Z, an expert on entomological acoustics, Stubbs scoured an online database of insect recordings. ![]() He realized that the noise sounded like the insects he used to hear while doing fieldwork in the Caribbean. Various parties argued that the strange noise was the result of a sonic weapon, a microwave attack, or malfunctioning eavesdropping equipment.īut when the biologist Alexander Stubbs heard a recording, uploaded by the Associated Press, he heard not mechanical bugs, but biological ones. A team from the University of Pennsylvania examined 21 affected people and concluded that they had “sustained injury to widespread brain networks,” based on evidence that other neurologists said was “ almost unbelievably flimsy.” Donald Trump, without evidence, accused Cuba of being responsible. Many of the diplomats experienced dizziness, insomnia, hearing loss, and other troubling symptoms. In the following years, the mystery ballooned into an international incident. It was high-pitched, deafening, and persistent-and no one could work out where it was coming from. In late 2016, American diplomats living in Cuba started hearing a strange noise in their homes. ![]()
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