The mosquitone and the Carillon

It is known to happen: an adult figures out a way to discipline teenagers and in no time, the teenagers find a way to turn the same idea around to favor themselves (not to mention throw the idea back like a cream pie on the adult’s face.). Around December last year, a well-meaning man named Howard Stapleton in Wales, upon remembering a physics lesson from his youth in his father’s welding workplace, invented a device called the Mosquito Teen Repellent. It is a device that emits a high-frequency noise (17 kilohertz) that most adults over 20 years old cannot hear. The device was meant to send off teenagers who congregate aimlessly and too long in malls, to places where their parents would really wish their kids were instead. By the middle of this year, some teenagers (still unidentified but expectedly gloating), as Stapleton speculated, got hold of the device and discovered what it emitted and what it meant. This, in turn, gave birth to a sibling tone to the "mosquitone" – 15 kHz – that which would repel mosquitoes and teenagers, but would also make it possible for teenagers to hear alerts from their mobile phones without most of their "older" teachers hearing them. One of the teenagers who love this mosquitone is Isabel Stapleton, the 16-year-old daughter of our inventor, Howard Stapleton. I listened to the National Public Radio’s interview of the father and daughter ring team by Melissa Block and it was a crystal-clear version of "what goes around, comes around." So adults, I guess this means that it is back to the drawing board in our quest for the holy grail of teenage disciplinary devices. (I know you are curious to see if you can hear the said ringtone, so here is a link to a website from which you can download the tone and even listen to the interview with Howard and Isabel Stapleton (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5434687).

The principle behind Mr. Stapleton’s invention is that as we humans age, we lose our ability to hear higher sound frequencies. Seventeen kilohertz seem to be that point where if you are over 20, you start to get "old" in terms of hearing. But, of course, unless you discover the fountain of youth before the holy grail of teenage repellents, you cannot help growing old and thus, you really do not have much control over age-related hearing loss. But what studies have found so far is that most societies in relatively much quieter places (usually remote) in the world like in Nepal and Africa, 30-year-olds could still hear 17 kHz sounds. This makes the case for hearing loss that could be attributed to noise pollution. And noise pollution is on the rise because we have more things around us that produce sound to announce, celebrate or sometimes even terrorize us to their existence. Worse, we even use earphones widely to pipe in the sound as close as we could to our ear canals! What is even more ridiculous is that in the gym, I wear earphones because I want to overpower my reception of the dissonant sounds coming from different TV sets installed in the gym. Either way, it dooms me to accelerated hearing loss and the only control I have is over what sound will cause it.

I am 40 but I still hear the 15 kHz mosquitone so for those kids who attend my science workshops, this may be useful to know. While kids now boast of multi-tasking abilities that define them apart from their parents’ generation or older, a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US by Russell Poldrack of UCLA found that distractions inhibit a way of learning that is more flexible – that which is called "declarative learning" which involves the medial temporal lobe in the brain and deals with "learning active facts that can be recalled and used with great flexibility." When distracted, our learning method, according to Poldrack, involves a brain structure called striatum, which is responsible for habit learning. "Habit learning" is not as flexible because they are tied only to particular settings – like, for instance, numbers as they are positioned in the keypad and not numbers as you have memorized them without the keypad. The study so far found that when distracted, the human brain just chooses to do habit learning instead of learning in a way that is more deliberate. This study, of course, has implications on the kinds of distractions we are all bombarded with and the kind of concentration we have to struggle for to do the kind of work we do.

I am not sure what accounts for my having a sensitive ear, aside from genetics. I only know that I have always had to have complete silence when I am writing, even as a child. Right out of college when I started working and they would not give me my own room to write, I would hold office under my table to hide from distractions and concentrate. My then officemates got so used to it that when they came in and they did not see me sitting behind my desk, they still said "hi" to me. I can have all sorts of things and sounds going on when I am observing because I can focus on things that I find meaningful patterns in but when I start to write, I have to have silence so I can find my voice. I guess like in prayer or any other form or meditation, it is the same "homecoming" sort of – to reacquaint you with quiet Earth, so that you do not grow and become a stranger altogether to a quietude that is not empty, but rich because you are able to hear yourself think. I also experience this when I do sign language. I have been learning it lately and it really does make you encounter a kind of quiet in your mind where you are able to express yourself in depths that I find unreachable by sound.

As a counterpoint to this "mosquitone," I also found a "sound" story that could have hordes of former teenagers being attracted to this blast from the past, particularly those who spent their youth in the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines until the early 80s. It is the kind of tone that would cause heavy nostalgia downloads in the minds of UP alumni of certain generations. This nostalgia, as one UP alumnus told me, consists of young men walking young women to the bus stops and being given 30 more privileged minutes when the Carillon would play 30 minutes worth of kundiman songs in the 60s. The Carillon had appointed times that had Diliman campus life collectively swaying to the music that defined their times. The UP Alumni Association, in its Save the UP Carillon Project, has aptly chosen to honor and celebrate UP’s Centennial in 2008 by inviting nostalgia with something omni-directional like sound. Those of you who remember that sound will surely look forward to 2008 when it ends its silence and tolls for all of thee.

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