more mosquitos

As I tootled around the net, hunting for more on the aforementioned Mosquito audio teenager-be-gone, I came across a great piece in the free daily paper Metro.

A high-pitched alarm which cannot be heard by adults has been hijacked by schoolchildren to create ringtones so they can get away with using phones in class. ... 'One of the other children told me all about it later. I couldn't be too cross, because it shows resourcefulness.'

A good teacher that.

The comments on the story are funny too; the majority think this is a nonsense story, absurd and also scientifically impossible. ("The frequency of those ringtones on mobiles is capped at 10kHz, easily audible by all but the functionally deaf.") Another sizeable proportion, meanwhile, are just looking for somewhere to download the thing for their phones.

I like this anecdote, provided by an anonymous Mancunian:

About a year ago I was trying to make a noise that would make dogs go mad, without their owners knowing what I was doing. This was possibly the first high pitched noise, created by ME! Anyway, the speaker on my mobile was not capable of playing the sound well, so I sent it to my friend, who had a new sony erricson, he then proceeded play it at full volume around the Trafford Centre, it didnt have the desired effect but was incredible annoying.

Dan at the Architectures of Control in Design blog seems to be following various Mosquito developments and comments all over. He threw together some high-frequency sound files, replicating the Mosquito, and then was barraged by a bunch of Eastern European and Russian traffic and so took them offline.