Merged US may close Cuba Embassy over 'health attacks'

[Checkmite]

Sure thing; Sherkeu posted it just above:

Compare to the AP recording here.

If working on the AP's recording makes it obvious the sound was produced by an animal, the way you've shown for the cricket sound clip, I'll have to capitulate on the potential evidentiary value of the AP sound clip.

 

[dann]

Wait a minute, let me get this straight: So if the AP's alleged recording seems to have been created by de-noising and filtering an actual recording of crickets, then it doesn't have any potential evidentiary value, whereas if it seems never to have been anywhere near the sound made by a cricket (or any other animal), then it does?
Will somebody playing around with e.g. sinus waves and presenting a tape, claiming: 'This is a recording of the supersonic weapon (noise harassment, whatever),' have potential evidentiary value? If that is the case, then of what exactly?

PS I guess that what I'm asking is the question that we usually confront believers with: What evidence would it take to change your mind? i.e. about this case being an attack (harassment, whatever) on … let's call them: US diplomats in Havana perpetrated by the Cubans (Russian, ISIS, whatever)?

 

[Jack by the hedge]

The evidence I would like to hear is a good quality recording of several of those same crickets, to show whether it produces the same noise around 7kHz without the clear chirping an individual animal makes.

If the AP recording really is of multiple animals will Calebprime be able to pick out the same characteristics he identified from an individual, or will they be masked by the multiple sources?

 

[Sherkeu]

It doesn't need to be a cricket, or even a cicada (most cicadas make noise in the daytime).
There are a few species of loud katydids that make a continuous high-pitched sound.

Let's check out some more noisy Cuban bugs!

The Robust Conehead. Listen here.

"Song: A continuous harsh buzz of incredible volume, with a peak frequency of about 8 kHz. Can be heard more than a thousand feet away! At close range, it becomes painful to listen to. One would think that the insect would burst into flames from the friction produced in creating such an intense song." ....
"In addition to being loudest, this species has the fastest stridulatory wing-stroke rate of any katydid--208 cycles of wing movement per second in the example above. The song must be slowed to one-sixteenth speed to allow individual wing-movement cycles to be heard."

The Cuban Ground Cricket is a fast trill sound, but at 42 pulses per second, it is a relative slowpoke to this turbo katydid at 208! (normal cricket noise is somewhere around 5/second).

I'm not sure with the volume (up to an ear-splitting 100db) and insane speed that it could be reliably recorded with a cellphone. The mic on my Samsung doesn't 'do' loud well and I'm pretty sure it's all compressed. Perhaps the victim doing this AP recording had some better tech to use. We really don't know how it was made, or altered, or even transferred for that matter.

The runners up :
The Swift Conehead. Listen here.

The Broad-tipped (Triops) Conehead. Listen here. (atypical summer song)

All the Coneheads are loud, but these 3 can live in Cuba and make a continuous high-pitched tone.

 

[dann]

"It's the same bandwidth and it's audibly very similar," said Lt. Col. Juan Carlos Molina, a telecommunications specialist with the Interior Ministry. "We compared the spectrums of the sounds and evidently this common sound is very similar to the sound of a cicada."
Cuba bugged by US allegations of sonic attacks (Fox News Oct. 27, 2017)

Breitbart, by the way, thinks that the Cuban report

… does not address the Castro regime’s decades-long history of harassing and tormenting diplomats from nations it considers adversarial, particularly Americans and Canadians.
Cuba: Sonic Attacks on U.S. Diplomats Were Cricket, Cicada Noises (Breitbart, Oct. 27, 2017)

and also claims that

At least one former Cuban political prisoner has testified to being tortured in prison with a sonic device that emitted sounds very similar to what the Associated Press released as the audio diplomats reported hearing before suffering adverse health effects. The incident in Cuban prisons in question required the use of loudspeakers and occurred in the 1970s, suggesting that Cuba has had access to such technology for decades.

The report corresponds with several anti-American opinion pieces published in the numerous websites controlled by the communist regime. One particularly scathing attack surfaced on the website CubaDebate, which referred to President Donald Trump as “the sorcerer’s apprentice” and compared him to Mickey Mouse.

I am not sure that I sympathize with this comparison, however. If I were Disney, I would probably sue ...

 

[calebprime]

I've slowed down the AP sound, but it just sounds like a couple of crickets with no definition and no high end at all.

I could post it, but there's not much to hear -- just a bunch of vaguely pulsing sine-like waves.

I'm not sure how much individual variation there is in the bugs, but the best way would be to get a clean recording of the "attack" and then simply see if it more or less matches pitch with some insect. (This seems close.)

I say this without hearing the two back-to-back, which I'm doing now:

Listening back-to-back, I'd say the pitch-match is remarkable, especially considering we're probably hearing some aliasing in the AP recording from crappy electronic processing.

I'd go with crickets being the source of that sound unless there's something better.

 

[Sherkeu]

Here is a katydid being filmed and collected in Zapata Swamp - about 70mi from Havana (as crows fly). Something in the swamp is making noise!

 

[dann]

There are a few species of loud katydids that make a continuous high-pitched sound.

Wow! It would be amazing if that could also be the rational explanation for the allegations of torture: "… has testified to being tortured in prison with a sonic device that emitted sounds very similar to what the Associated Press released."

 

[Jack by the hedge]

I'm alarmed to learn that the Cuban regime has had access to loudspeakers since at least the 1970s. If they ever get their hands on amplifiers goodness knows what they might do.

 

[dann]

Some vehicles even have wheels nowadays!

 

[Checkmite]

I've slowed down the AP sound, but it just sounds like a couple of crickets with no definition and no high end at all.

I could post it, but there's not much to hear -- just a bunch of vaguely pulsing sine-like waves.

I'm not sure how much individual variation there is in the bugs, but the best way would be to get a clean recording of the "attack" and then simply see if it more or less matches pitch with some insect. (This seems close.)

I say this without hearing the two back-to-back, which I'm doing now:

Listening back-to-back, I'd say the pitch-match is remarkable, especially considering we're probably hearing some aliasing in the AP recording from crappy electronic processing.

I'd go with crickets being the source of that sound unless there's something better.

Without hearing the comparison for myself I suppose I need to take your word for it; but I don't see why that should be problematic. Crickets it is.

 

[dann]

This one slipped by me until now:

And American experts said they know of no technology that would explain the symptoms.
"There's never been any kind of physiological response that reflects the symptoms that have been reported that has ever been caused by sound waves of any type," said Joe Pompei, a former MIT researcher who is the founder and president of Holosonics, a sound technology company.
"Unless they had transducers in the bathtub and had the diplomats submerge their heads for a long time, it's just not possible," Pompei added.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...-blame-u-s-diplomats-mystery-ailments-n813581 (NBC News, Oct. 24, 2017)

I found the link to the NBC News article at CubaDebate, but the Cuban article seems to be merely a summary in Spanish (My Spanish is a little rusty and was never very good in the first place) of the NBC News article: Expertos de Cuba y EEUU coinciden: No hay evidencias de “ataques sónicos” (CubaDebate, Oct. 25, 2017)

 

[dann]

Without hearing the comparison for myself I suppose I need to take your word for it; but I don't see why that should be problematic. Crickets it is.

With my own impaired hearing, I guess it wouldn't give me any kind of certainty to hear calebprime's sound sample for myself, but let's not dismiss his "probably" and "unless there's something better."

 

[calebprime]

Without hearing the comparison for myself I suppose I need to take your word for it; but I don't see why that should be problematic. Crickets it is.

What I didn't say clearly enough is that the best way right now is simply to listen to the 2 soundfiles that you and S. linked to, back-to-back.

Because we don't have enough samples of the noise, and nothing clear, no amount of slowing down is going to reveal much new detail, or give an insight, I think.

Happy to keep trying.

If it really bugs you, I can dig up the slowed down AP sound again, or make it again. I might have cleaned up and thrown it out.


As for what I'm saying: I've made a living with my ears and technology and this sounds like a bad recording of crickets.

It's simply the "think horses, not zebras" school of diagnosis.

Last time I checked I could only hear to 13k. But I'm in a quiet room with great gear.

 

[Checkmite]

This one slipped by me until now:

I found the link to the NBC News article at CubaDebate, but the Cuban article seems to be merely a summary in Spanish (My Spanish is a little rusty and was never very good in the first place) of the NBC News article: Expertos de Cuba y EEUU coinciden: No hay evidencias de “ataques sónicos” (CubaDebate, Oct. 25, 2017)

These statements seem to echo those quoted in the Guardian article I linked to a couple of pages ago:

“Brain damage and concussions, it’s not possible,” said Joseph Pompei, a former MIT researcher and psychoacoustics expert. “Somebody would have to submerge their head into a pool lined with very powerful ultrasound transducers.”

 

[Checkmite]

What I didn't say clearly enough is that the best way right now is simply to listen to the 2 soundfiles that you and S. linked to, back-to-back.

Because we don't have enough samples of the noise, and nothing clear, no amount of slowing down is going to reveal much new detail, or give an insight, I think.

Happy to keep trying.

No! I wasn't being facetious - I'm quite satisfied.

 

[dann]

These statements seem to echo those quoted in the Guardian article I linked to a couple of pages ago:

Yes, they do. The acoustics experts have been pretty consistent from the very beginning. Tragic Monkey referred to a similar statement as early as Sep. 18.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

Yes, they do. The acoustics experts have been pretty consistent from the very beginning. Tragic Monkey referred to a similar statement as early as Sep. 18.

"Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 US victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba."

Dafuq?

"Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the US government initially realized."

When people can't keep their story straight from one interview to the next, that doesn't strengthen the claims!

The only thing consistent about this story is the absurd efforts many are going through to make completely unrelated observations into a Grand Unified Theory.

We stuffed our government full of sycophants and cronies, many of the dingbat conspiracy persuasion.

Were reaping what we've sewn.

This is where the tapatalk signature that annoys people used to be

 

[dann]

You are not the first one in this thread to talk about the present US Administration in this thread, and there is a new actable by Robert E. Bartholomew, who quotes several acoustics (or weapons) experts in a recent article in Skeptic: THE “SONIC ATTACK” ON U.S. DIPLOMATS IN CUBA: Why the State Department’s Claims Don’t Add Up

“A leading figure in the field of psychoacoustics, former MIT researcher Joseph Pompei,” “German physicist and acoustics specialist Jürgen Altmann of Technology University Dortmund,” “Former Brown University neuroscientist Seth Horowitz Former CIA officer Fulton Armstrong,” “Timothy Leighton, professor of Ultrasonics and Acoustics at Southampton University in the United Kingdom,” “Drs. James Jauchem and Michael Cook of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in San Antonio, Texas,”

He ends his article with speculations that

It may be no coincidence then that the outbreak reportedly began just days after the election of Donald Trump, an administration known for promoting conspiracy theories.

and one of the comments to the article thinks that

Maybe the diplomats were just getting nauseous at the idea of Donald Trump overseeing foreign policy. I’ve been experiencing some of the same symptoms myself whenever I read the papers.

So maybe for future references we should start calling this as a case of Sick President Syndrome.


There is a reference and link to Bartholomew's article in Real Clear Science, also Oct. 25, 2017)
And for people who are into superheroes, there’s now an article called No, Ulysses Klaw did not attack U.S. diplomats in Cuba (adventuresinpoortaste.com, 26. Oct., 2017)
I hadn’t heard about Ulysses Klaw, but he appears to be

a human physicist who has been transformed into solid sound, and who wears a sonic emitter on his right wrist as a prosthetic device.
Ulysses Klaw (Wikipedia)

 

[Checkmite]

"Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the US government initially realized."

When people can't keep their story straight from one interview to the next, that doesn't strengthen the claims!

I think it strengthens the "claim" such as it is that those having such issues are suffering from a genuine malady of some kind. It doesn't strengthen any relationship to whatever sounds they believe they heard in Cuba.