Freesound Forums

A user named Awaka has been posting a lot of "sounds" which aren't actually sounds. They are digital signals (e.g., Ethernet) that can harm one's hearing and sound equipment. I and another user posted on one of his sounds asking what he was doing. He didn't reply. I sent him a direct message on April 29th asking him why he was doing it and he still never responded.

Does anybody have any clue what he's doing? Although compressed with mp3, his posts are not sound files, so I can't see any reason to have these files on freesound.org.

(Actually, I can't imagine why anyone would want these files. Maybe as some sort of steganographic message for a spy agency, but that's stretching quite a bit.)

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Here's the message I sent to Awaka in April:

Hi Awaka!

I see you've contributed a lot of sounds, but I'm a bit confused by most of them.

They don't seem to be "sounds" in the traditional sense of something you would want to listen to. They do appear to be waveforms, but are often clearly from a digital signal which should never be played through speakers. (For example, Ethernet on a motherboard).

Are you sure it's a good idea to upload them here to freesound? I don't see how people can use these and Freesound has a button that makes it easy to accidentally play them. That happened to me and it hurt my ears.

So, three questions:

1) What are these files?
2) How can people use them?
3) Are you sure they belong on freesound.org which is for audio? They could damage people's hearing and audio equipment.

Thanks!

--hackerb9

Hello hackerb9

Thanks for the notice.
We have a few 'glitch audio' creations at freesound. A classical way to create these is to play computer data files as audio. Sometimes the results are intresting, and some useful sounds can be produced. Although, most of the time you just get noise.

I am a bit worried in thes case the tags and descriptions seem to be random words. I will speak to the user.

I love glitch audio. I just built a sequencer from a kit that includes a special button for glitching the system.

Awaka's files are definitely not glitch audio. They are data dumps. And I wasn't kidding about them being dangerous. High frequencies, such as you get from binary data, are high energy. Back in college, I had a professor who warned us that digital noise will literally shear off the hairs in your ears. Those hairs never grow back, so you'll be stuck with a limited range of hearing for the rest of your life.