Really Obnoxious Sound

-The fat female coworker on the phone in Office Space.:)

-A set of oscillators (a single 4069 IC will provide plenty) tuned to creat that dissonance often used in old electronic musical instruments to simulate cymbals before the digital era. Once one finds the right frequency ratio they can be really annoying.

"Office Space"... is that some TV show? I don't recognize it.

Dissonance is what I'm after.

Anyone have an idea as to what is particularly annoying?

I'm perfecting my 800 number killer. To avoid rolling into voice mail I want to automatically answer with severe annoyance/dissonance ;-)

IIRC odd harmonics sound pretty bad? Maybe a single oscillator with dividers? ...Jim Thompson

That is probably a good idea as to a source of obnoxious sounds. Anything loud or square wave is probably band by law, but if you had an "on hold" function that after announcing the "on hold" message continued with a whining account of complaints to waste the callers time... well they won't be back.

That obnoxious "Please Hold" would be excellent. Any simple way to implement? ...Jim Thompson

Google "phone company recordings" and DL all kinds of obnoxious crap various phone companies spew. Art

message

Any recommended digital recorder that will interface easily to a phone line?

I'm not above recording farts and a toilet flushing ;-) ...Jim Thompson

message

Your modem may be able to do it. Google "modem record phone conversations" Art

or a cheap MP3 player and an isolation transformer

Not cheap

I gues google "caller on hold" or "music on hold"

message

Oh come on now! I've never seen a modem fart or flush a toilet!

wrote

And a capacitor for blocking DC, and some clamping for when the 90VAC ringer signal decides to show up..

I have been known to put the '...number you have reached, is not a working number' recording on the answering machine.

It works well at causing people to disconnect.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

Obama saying anything.

=========

Two tones with frequency ratio of 7 to 5, a musical interval known as a tritone, essentially a half octave. This sounds to me the least musical of all 12 of them. Have the tones in upper midrange to lower treble audio frequencies, between 1.5-2 KHz and the highest that goes through phones well (~3.6 KHz?).

Maybe 2 sinewaves of this ratio, with the mixture amplified and clipped to essentially rectangular.

Maybe try some other ratio that is neither a nice simple rational number nor available on a usual keyboard instrument.

========

There are some disonant chords out there, but I don't know what they are. Try a keyboard with a bright-sounding tone, such as a screechy violin or something close to scratching a chalkboard. I have heard some screechy chords with more than 3 notes, but I don't know what they are. Guessing from one that woke me up from a nightmare, one could be root,

========

~2.7 KHz modulated in amplitude or frequency by power line frequency or twice the power line frequency. Many fire alarms use this nowadays.

Maybe modulate by a rounded squarewave to have the modulating waveform include lots of both fundamental and 3rd harmonic.

Better still, have the higher frequency signal also modulated in frequency by a much lower frequency sinewave, maybe half a Hz to a few Hz.

========

Siamese cat in heat. As bad as that is, I give some chance that it can be worsened by one or some combination of pitch change, filtering and clipping.

=========

Whatever you choose, it will probably come through louder and may sound more harsh if you clip it or severely compress its dynamic range.

And afterwards filter it to accentuate frequencies around 2-3.5 KHz or the uppermost roughly an octave or somewhat less that both gets through phones well and concentrates around the ~2.7 KHz peak of human hearing.

Frequencies below 250-300 Hz or so don't get through phone lines well, and frequency content below 400-500 Hz easily detracts from contributing to perceived loudness when audio signal strength is limited.

Two tones with frequency ratio of 7 to 5, a musical interval known as a tritone, essentially a half octave. This sounds to me the least musical of all 12 of them. Have the tones in upper midrange to lower treble audio frequencies, between 1.5-2 KHz and the highest that goes through phones well (~3.6 KHz?).

Maybe 2 sinewaves of this ratio, with the mixture amplified and clipped to essentially rectangular.

Maybe try some other ratio that is neither a nice simple rational number nor available on a usual keyboard instrument.

=A0wrote

=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

=A0Or

=A0 =A0 =A0...Jim Thompson

Hold music is Roseanne's Star-Spangled Banner.

Actually, that's about all you rate. Except that you should be IN the toilet when you flush it, s*****ad.

The Lilly Tomlin website? ;-)

Then you've never used DSL? ;-)