Commercial Device Repels Teens – We’ve heard the news kickers about store owners playing classical music thru speakers where teenagers have been loitering and annoying customers to drive them away, but now there is a patented device designed especially for that purpose, which produces sounds of such high frequencies that they are inaudible to nearly everyone over 25. It’s called The Mosquito, but in the UK they are calling it The Sonic Teenager Deterrent. Costing from $1500 to $1900 in the U.S., the small squarish device emits a sort of European siren sound that alternates between two high frequencies around 15,000 to 17,000 Hz, and at about 75 dB level. It can be heard up to 60 feet away, thru headphones and over loud music. The sound is so irritating that teenagers are forced to move on with fingers jammed in their ears. I recall being driven nuts by the “flyback” horizontal oscillators in early TV sets when I was a youth; they were at about 17,500 Hz. But age-related hearing loss reduces the highest frequencies first, and many people cannot hear anything past about 8000 Hz – the top end of what was once the best AM radio reception.
Some UK human rights organization have complained that the Mosquito discriminates against young people. But the word is that some of them are already turning this weapon right back on the adult population: Some kids in the UK have converted the Mosquito’s high-pitched noise into a ringtone which can be transferred to their cell phones and thus enable them to receive calls and text-messaging in classes without alerting the teachers, who are unable to hear it! They have named the sound Teen Buzz and spread it from cell phone to cell phone. Teachers don’t have the faintest idea what is going on while schoolchildren are receiving calls and everybody but the teacher is hearing the rings.
