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The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
- sjclemmy 8y agoI was camping in west Wales (UK) in summer and there were some really odd sounds coming in off the sea. The sounds were not audibly ‘loud’; you could here them but they sounded like they were a long way off. What was strange was that they ‘hurt’ the eardrum and could be felt in the chest. I speculated that it was big guns or something. But I’ve no idea really. Does anyone know what this could be? The internet is particularly unhelpful.
- tyingq 8y agoPembrey Sands Air Weapons Range maybe? http://www.aeroresource.co.uk/operational-reports/pembrey-sands-air-weapons-range/ http://www.aeroresource.co.uk/operational-reports/pembrey-sa...
- sjclemmy 8y agoI don’t think so. We were near Tywyn. So Pembrey is probably a bit far south.
- tyingq 8y agoThere's this also: https://www.milfordmarina.com/cardigan-bay-danger-area-mod-aberporth/ https://www.milfordmarina.com/cardigan-bay-danger-area-mod-a... Looks like they have a pretty broad "danger area".
- sjclemmy 8y agoThat’s the range. So definitely a test of some sort. Possibly the MIRACH system as detailed here https://aberporth.qinetiq.com/faq/index.aspx https://aberporth.qinetiq.com/faq/index.aspx
- praptak 8y agoThere's a volume threshold above which the pressure wave in the air reaches the amplitude where the lows fall below the vacuum, right? But what happens if you give the air particles energy level above that threshold?
- TylerE 8y agoYou can continue to get louder, as only the negative part of the waveform is clipped.
- mikeash 8y agoIncidentally, this is why rocket launches sound crackly. It’s not overdriving the microphone, but rather the air itself.
- bjoli 8y agoSounds above 194db are usually just called shockwaves.
- aasasd 8y agoThis is addressed in the article to which the posted one links: http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-earth-four-times http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-... > But there’s a limit to how loud a sound can get. At some point, the fluctuations in air pressure are so large that the low pressure regions hit zero pressure—a vacuum—and you can’t get any lower than that. This limit happens to be about 194 decibels for a sound in Earth’s atmosphere. Any louder, and the sound is no longer just passing through the air, it’s actually pushing the air along with it, creating a pressurized burst of moving air known as a shock wave.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoIn the 90s early 00s I got really into car audio, specifically Sound Pressure Level (SPL) competitions. The goal is to make your car into a resonance chamber for a single note and see how high you can get it. Most competitors just buy a lot of batteries, amps and drivers and call it a day. However being a broke high school student I had to figure out how to win on a budget, so I went deep on the physics. If you go deep enough you start to really get into interesting work on the physics of acoustics and harmonics. One of the things I learned about was the testing and sound suppression work that went into the Saturn V. A genius acoustical engineer named John Hilliard [1] was a main driving force for designing the systems that would protect the Saturn V from it's own reflected sound waves. Not only that but also creating long range signaling systems for the US Military. In order to do the testing he needed to do, he had to build a driver that could simulate the SPL of the Saturn V. That meant figuring out a way to go past the 183 dB limit for sine wave in normal atmospheric conditions. You can't actually do that with the standard inductive-coil driver, because the wave becomes "clipped" and effectively turns into a square wave, which will cause the induction coil to burn up very quickly. So they needed to create a new driver that was based on air passage. Anyway, fascinating engineering work. Unfortunately it wasn't anything I could use in my car but I learned a lot about sound. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Hilliard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Hilliard
- staticautomatic 8y agoFor a time I was very into home/pro speakers that produced tons of bass. I recall reading once about a Kenwood speaker about the size of a fridge that, when driven by a measly 25 watts or so, could rattle the windows of a house across the street. I have no idea if it was real and can't seem to find where I originally read it, but I remember being really taken with the idea.
- iaw 8y agoAccording the wikipedia page Hillard's noise generator was ran on a 220 kilowatt diesel motor.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
- LiamPa 8y agoThe video of the sound wave? from the volcano moving the clouds is impressive!
- cyberferret 8y agoAlso note the ground around the point of explosion being turned over by the shock wave as it moves out. That video was a great illustration of how the pressure wave moves out in all directions as an expanding ball - it is too easy to misinterpret the wave as a flat circle moving outwards from a point, rather than a sphere.
- nodesocket 8y agoSomewhat related, the huge explosion in China (Tianjin) as captured on video. Not sure how loud that explosion was, but it looked apocalyptic. In some of the angles you can see the shock wave. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hUtrkfLKyFE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hUtrkfLKyFE
- runarb 8y agoVideo from the PEPCON disaster also show quit the shock wave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVpzjxRjPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVpzjxRjPk
- spookthesunset 8y agoIt's kind of funny that they made sure the explosion sound was heard when the explosion happened and not when the person filming it actually heard it.
- Izmaki 8y agoI remember this as an incident that was shushed down so much afterwards. Pretty crazy explosion indeed
- missingPieces 8y agoThe author draws a comparison between Krakatoa and the Saturn V, one being a singular energetic event, and the other being a sustained projection of energy. On the one hand, you have a shockwave of pressure differential travelling out from a central point of release, and on the other you have sustained stimulation due to a high-volume controlled dump of potential energy. That the consistent oscillations of the Saturn V can melt concrete and set fire to grass at a distance by disturbing the air and conveying thermal energy through kinetic collisions alone doesn't really seem like a useful correlation to an impulse event that reverberates across the entire atmosphere. If I had my druthers, though, I'd wager that the gravity waves of a supermassive black hole merger, as detected by LIGO, would likely make for a better analogue to the Krakatoa event. The Saturn V engines are loud, but the nature of the concept is probably better modeled by the fact that you can boil water with a high-end kitchen blender or similar food processing appliance.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoYou - and everyone on Earth - should probably be thankful Krakatoa wasn't trying to play rock music.
- m-i-l 8y agoDon't forget: "Disaster Area was a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones and was generally regarded as not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but also as being the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judged that the best sound balance was usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles away from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves played their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stayed in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet."[0] On a more serious note, I did see a band once that I later found out were infamous for their loud gigs. While most in the audience had gone prepared with earplugs, I had none, and for their "finale" (which incidentally didn't feature the band actually on stage presumably because it had become too loud even for them) I had to go outside of the main room and keep my hands over my ears. Even now I sometimes worry that night might have permanently damaged my hearing. The stupid things some people do when they are younger. [0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Disaster_Area https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Disaster_Area
- cyberferret 8y agoAs a former guitarist in a loud rock band, I concur. I didn't use hearing protection in my teenage years and 20's, and now (in my 50's) I suffer from tinnitus. My hearing is actually OK, because at some point, I decided to start using hearing protection (and still do now when I roadie for my son's metal band), but the tinnitus I think could have easily been averted by just not exposing myself to those sorts of volumes at close range when I was young. The damage is permanent and not worth the few seconds of 'coolness' to stand at the front of the stage at a hideously loud live gig. (NB: My best friend at high school was deaf, and a favourite party trick of his at concerts was to turn his hearing aids off, then stick his head into the cone of any exposed speakers at the front/side of the stage for a minute, then back off and watch other kids come up and try it. In hindsight, that probably permanently damaged the hearing of MANY foolish kids who tried it out of peer pressure or wanting to outdo him, and not something to be proud of upon retrospection.)
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoWow. Your friend is ruthless haha.
- gooseyard 8y agoI'd like to recommend Simon Winchester's "Krakatoa The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883" to anyone interested in learning more about the Krakatoa eruption. It's quite a story.
- golergka 8y agoThat makes me wonder, why didn't this eruption leave a more of a trail in popular culture of the time? Shouldn't it have been the THING everybody would talk about non-stop for a few years afterwards?
- cbkeller 8y agoWell, for one thing there was no telecommunication, so most people may not have known it was a global event.. people (outside of the range where it was entirely ear-shattering) may have just thought "huh, I guess they're firing the guns down at the battery" and only months later found out it was some faraway volcano
- ohiovr 8y agoThat’s twice as loud as Tsar bomba which sent a wave around the world twice. Or 5 times louder than car stereos in my neighborhood!