[dustym]

Two unrelated anecdotes:

1. A few years ago I spent some time in Falmouth, MA and there was an ongoing battle over newly installed wind turbines. The humming sound was getting to people, including to the point where they were getting headaches. Some people heard it and others didn't. The locals were going to war with the initiative. This article reminded me of that and I checked in on the ordeal. Looks like they shuttered the project and have started dismantling the turbines. It seems like a total failure: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-green-new-deal-in-profile-115...

2. I was on a solo canoe trip in a remote part of Maine a couple of weekends ago and I kept hearing the sound of a motor start up and then die down. I heard it multiple times along a 25 or so mile stretch of water with the only other sounds being birds, moose rumbling in the woods, and beavers slapping the water with their tails. I chalked the sound up to some wind turbines I had seen on my drive up there and felt justifiably annoyed at the encroachment of the industrial world into my backwoods trip. I did some research when I got home and it turned out that I was hearing ruffed grouse "drumming" to mark their territory. In retrospect, it's an amazing sound: https://youtu.be/q0obByQW23k?t=21

[joebergeron]

1. Very funny to be reading this. I grew up in Falmouth, and lived there until 2014 when I graduated highschool. I obviously wasn't incredibly attuned to this issue, but as I recall, the only people opposed to the installation of the turbines were a very small, very vocal, and very, very, wealthy minority of people who owned mind-bogglingly expensive beach houses and lived there two months out of the year. I'm fairly certain a lot of the more reasonable-sounding complaints they threw at the project were simply cover-up for their real gripe, that the turbines ruined their view over the bay. I recall an unintentionally hilarious piece of mockup art that was drafted up, comparing the horizon over the water with and without turbines, side by side. They were barely distinguishable blips. It was an interesting phenomenon. Woods Hole, a tiny community on what is essentially a peninsula near Falmouth, is both a center for oceanographic science (WHOI, USGS -- disclaimer, I've worked at both), and a summer home for the insanely rich. The scientific community was largely in support of the turbines, but all anyone ever heard about was how the turbines would be a huge disaster. As I recall, many of the noise complaints ended up being somewhat unfounded.

[dustym]

I have no opinion on anything, FWIW because I actually spent most of my time in Woods Hole. My recollection of all this is from the local paper.

EDIT:

Cliche as it as, the fish bites at Landfall are pretty good! And it was always fun to swing by the aquarium after hours and listen to the seals bumping around in their pool. It's a beautiful place to visit if you ever get a chance.

[1propionyl]

In truth, the real reason for the disparity in perception is... supernatural in origin.

You see... it's the Curse of Chappaquidick. The sound isn't just the breeze passing through turbines. It's the wailing of the immortal soul of Mary Jo Kopechne, her soul mercifully freed from the watery depths but bound to the wind.

Her soul, unable to find rest so long as the negligent and wealthy haunt her resting place, now eternally floats upon the wind... from Chappaquidick into the Vineyard Sound... across Penzance Point... into the Bay, and back out to sea.

But her spirit is not unkind or unfair. She has no discontent for teachers, scientists, artists, or sailors. They cannot hear her. They say... that only the truly wealthy can hear her cries.

[anonu]

One of the stranger things I've read on HN.

[derivagral]

If someone's grown up in the (eastern part?) of the state, the not-very-veiled subtext is quite entertaining with the typical HN cynical bit flipped on.

[dustym]

I agree. This is very weird but also a very subtle and good comment.

[chillingeffect]

Cape-affiliated person here. Currently dealing with multiple issues. There is a powerful coterie of real estate agents, lawyers and regional government members here. The environment is invoked like a playing card to create battles of financial starvation and just as easily overlooked when it would interfere with players' plans. One must be very aware of neighbors' affiliations. It's all sport for the 1%, but families who inherited their parents' properties struggle to hang on to them.

[rasz]

1 Modern CFD techniques enable almost silent blades. If a $10 computer fan can have special dimples/channels why cant wind turbines

https://www.quietpc.com/nf-a12x25-5v

https://cougargaming.com/us/products/cooling/cfd_red_led_fan...

https://aerocool.io/us/product/silent-master-blue-20cm/

[close04]

Well... size matters. The tip of a wind turbine blade moves much faster (~25m/s, up to 80m/s in the biggest ones) than the tip of a silent computer fan (~5-6m/s, up to ~10m/s in the faster ones). You can make the blades more silent but there's a limit to what you can do when your blades move that fast and are up to 75m long. And any solution that reduces efficiency is probably a no go for manufacturers and operators.

From your links you can see that a 140mm computer fan at 1000RPM is noisier than a 120mm fan at 1200RPM. Even if the motor is quieter at the lower RPM, increasing the blade size is more than able to compensate and make it overall noisier, even with dimples and owl-wing tricks.

And it's not only the decibels that are the issue necessarily but also the frequencies which can propagate quite far and by all accounts are pretty disturbing. That low frequency hum that the blades produce by simply displacing air while they move is not a problem with a computer fan's tiny blades. And turbines come in farms.

[jungletime]

Experiment! How Does An Owl Fly So Silently?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_FEaFgJyfA

[metalliqaz]

Fans are not turbines. You understand that, right?

[adtechperson]

That ruffed grouse video is great but does not really do justice to how startling that sound can be. Imagine walking through the woods, no one around, and all of a sudden it sounds like a lawn mower starting up very close to you. It is unbelievably startling, even if you know what it is.

[alias_neo]

As a horror film fan, I was thinking combustion powered chainsaw.

[emmelaich]

The lyrebird can imitate a chainsaw -- among many other things. This is from the BBC's Life on Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y

[emmelaich]

Note that there is a bit of subterfuge in this -- some or all of the lyrebirds mimicking were in captivity and would have heard these unnatural sounds much more than the typical wild bird.

https://theconversation.com/lyrebirds-mimicking-chainsaws-fa...

[sah2ed]

That’s amazing, thanks for the share! I’m one of today’s lucky 10,000.

[emmelaich]

Excellent! I thought everyone had seen this, indeed.

Don't fall for the parody though ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOFy8QkNWWs

[twic]

Nor this apparent imitation of the clearly inimitable Big Shaq:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzT_TtrVcRk

[alias_neo]

Wow thanks. The camera shutter and car alarm were something but that chain saw sound is incredible.

[mprovost]

Just across Buzzards Bay from Falmouth was the original Marconi transmitting station for transatlantic communication to a receiver in Norway. My great-grandfather helped build it in 1914! At the time it was the most powerful transmitter in the world at 300 kW. There were 14 440-foot towers in a grid, and it was so powerful that apparently anywhere in town you would get zapped while hanging out the laundry on a clothesline, and you couldn't get a TV signal in town until the towers stopped operating. To avoid interference the receiver had to be located 40 miles away in Chatham.

[dustym]

Very interesting. Maine also has a significant transmitter array in Cutler with 30 or so antennas around 900 ft tall apiece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLF_Transmitter_Cutler

I wonder what it's like to try to pull a signal up there.

Your comment brings up memories of Lighthouse Beach in Chatham, which has a ton of warnings about Great White Sharks due to the prevalence of seals in the waters. Beautiful place. If the sharks don't get you the radio frequencies will I guess.

[jimmyswimmy]

Picking up TV and other RF signals near there should not be a problem. Modern transmitters are much different than in Marconi's time. Then they used a spark gap to generate RF, which have a DC to daylight kind of output that GP described. Much like a bad ground on a car ignition system can make a lot of RF noise that really gets around, a spark gap transmitter puts out a signal EVERYWHERE. Which is why it affected so much.

Modern transmitters are tuned and filtered so they can coexist with everything else.

[mprovost]

Just further up the coast is Marconi Beach in the Cape Cod National Seashore - same sharks.

[dylan604]

2) It's amazing how perspective changes with more information. It is very odd how much that sounds just like a mower having difficulty starting, and is exactly the conclusion I would have jumped to it being. Glad you were able to get a better answer.

[dustym]

Yeah, I thought it was a generator or mower at first. It's just quiet enough that I mistook it for a much louder sound that had grown faint due to my distance from the source.

[chubot]

Are the birds imitating sounds they heard in the forest?

Mimicry is a powerful thing

[dylan604]

I went deeper down the rabbit hole, and it is their mating call / territorial signal. The drumming sound is actually created from a vacuum effect caused by the particular movement of their wings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vERkh23mp64

[tejtm]

It's a mating call that predates combustion engines most likely by millennia(s)

[dylan604]

I wonder how long Poly has wanted a cracker

[tejtm]

Two billion years give or take

[blackguardx]

I think the complaints about Falmouth wind turbine noise are eerily similar to complaints that wifi gives people headaches. I don’t think they are founded in reality.

[brendoelfrendo]

My parents lived up that way, and the amount of NIMBY-ism regarding offshore turbines is staggering. I suspect you may be right, and people just latched onto whatever claim got the turbines shut down.

[Drdrdrq]

It is also possible that they generate the sound of the same frequency, but coming from multiple sources it can compound in some areas to be louder than elsewhere - and those areas could change with the direction of the wind.

This is purely speculation from my side of course, as I've never been there.

[DagAgren]

No, it's a pretty safe bet that any of these complaints about wind turbines is just NIMBYism. It happens every single time.

[mandelbrotwurst]

How are those similar? What about this story leads you believe that these people are claiming to be hearing frequencies outside of those known by science to be audible to humans?

[gwright]

So funny to hear your story about your canoe trip. When I hiked the AT in 2002, I spent the first several days having the same experience you had. I thought I was hearing things, then I thought I was much closer to civilization that I expected and hearing lawn mowers, finally talked to other hikers and got the story.

I found my trail journal entry about this: https://www.trailjournals.com/journal/entry/14113

[heelix]

Same think was driving me nuts in the BWCA, camping in areas where there should not be any engines. Came back all salty that someone must have a gas powered well or something. Outfitter said I should find a recording of a horny grouse... and I'll be damned, that was it beating its wings. Last trip over Memorial weekend we had one nearby, and it brought nothing but smiles.

[greggman3]

So how has this affected your life since? Did you stop assuming things more? Do you like the sound of lawn mowers because they sound like a natural sound?

[heelix]

Not a huge change - a smile rather than a tut when I hear the distinctive sound. The BWCA is a protected area where they really try to keep the water clean. Folks have cabins near the area (heck, some day I'd like a cabin up there) and I was sure someone had a well pump or something that was spinning up sporadically. Changed my perceptions of the noise - rather than assuming I'd failed to get far enough into the wilderness, I came to realize I'm in the thick of it.

Headed back up there in a couple days. Hope to hear the grouse pounding their wings, the moose walking through the water, and a wolf howling away.

[rewtraw]

When I thru hiked the Appalachian Trail I nearly went mad trying to identify that “drumming” sound. It was so deep that it felt like it was coming from inside my body, and I was concerned that it was some strange condition.

Finally, at one point I asked a group of other thru hikers if they had experienced it, and they all excitedly nodded, but none of us knew the source. Finally, some local day hiker said “oh, it’s probably just a grouse”. And the mystery was solved. Many of us were very confused for months!

[dustym]

This is funny, the first couple of times I heard it I also wondered if I was going a bit mad. When you are out all alone and you hear a sound that you can't explain I think it's pretty natural to think that.

[yread]

Your description reminded me of a similar sound on my first night on anchor with my first chartered yacht. Turns out it was a fan in our inverter that was somehow switched on and it completely drained both our batteries (wrong installation) overnight so we couldn't lift the anchor nor start the engine in the morning

[forgotmyp77]

how did you get out of that one?

[allannienhuis]

I've had this happen. Our boat has a separate battery for the generator, so normally if you accidentally drain the main and engine batteries, you can recharge via the generator. But during maintenance someone reset a switch that connected the generator battery to the mains without realizing it. We were in the proverbial middle of no-where - I had a 1+ hour row in my dingy to a remote camp to find someone to rescue us (jump-start the generator).

Now I never leave the dock without one of those portable car-starting batteries, completely disconnected from everything.

[yread]

cried a little and called the charter company. Spent the day swimming at the anchorage waiting for them to show up with a new charged battery (the old ones were so discharged they couldn't even be charged by a fresh one)

[dustym]

I don't have an ocean-going vessel, but if I did I'd buy rescue/tow insurance. It's not super expensive and when you need it, you need it.

[thw0rted]

Dude rented a charter. It would be pretty silly of the charter company not to have some kind of "rescue" provision, wouldn't it?

We had a very similar story, except we were the first to rent the boat at the start of the season and the battery bank hadn't been very well tested before they gave it to us -- a few had gone off over the winter. They drove out from HQ, replaced the bad ones with fresh stock from their van, and sent us on our way.

[alias_neo]

Use the sails and lift the anchor manually? (I'm guessing, don't have a yacht).

[Drdrdrq]

You would have trouble landing without the engine though. Better not to risk it if there's no problem with being anchored there, and just waiting for the fix.

[yread]

It's possible - I did the RYA training which describes the theory of it and we even involuntarily attempted it in practicals (gearbox broke and it wouldn't go forward). But it's definitely not easy. In the end we hit a spot in the marina with absolutely no wind and had to swallow our seamanship pride and back up there

[alias_neo]

I forgot about the part where you would have a phone and can call for help! Why is the landing part hard, is it about maneuvering and slowing?

[Drdrdrq]

In the marinas you have limited maneuvering space and with sails you are limited in which directions you can go - directly against the wind is not possible, you need to zig-zag. Slowing is also a bit more difficult. To add to trouble, marines are often built in places with less wind (of course) and wind might change direction during landing. Note that it's still quite possible, just more challenging, risky too I guess, and also forbidden in many marines. But it's a good exercise, it makes one respect ancient mariners even more.

[twic]

I've sailed with a guy who makes a point of doing it. At one point, he sailed a yacht with no engine, and certainly no electric motor for the anchor!

[Wowfunhappy]

Geez, I'm torn on number one, since obviously locals should be able to live in peace, but the world is in such incredibly dire need of clean energy.

Surely this was an issue with these specific turbines, right? Not a problem with all of them?

[fragmede]

Low-grade humming is exhausting anyway. That's one of the reasons people are so tired after a long plane flight, despite just sitting there.

Giant stationary installations with very loud noises tend to cause weird noise issues. It's a lot of unfocused, or weirdly focused sonic energy that can't be heard from a little further away, but at exactly the right (well, wrong) place, it can get re-focused, leading to a droning noise that starts and stops unexpectedly. A good example that shows this phenomenon is real, despite being invisible is the Listening Vessels[0] exhibit at the Exploratorium or similar, with two giant parabolic sound reflectors.

For the wind farm, the issue isn't just turbines, but that specific turbine, down to the serial number and the serial number plate, at that exact location, temperature, humidity, causing a resonance in a specific resident's door, miles away. The resident may be able to replace, eg, the door, but often there are factors outside of the resident's control that contribute to the issue. Like the siding on the neighbor's house, or where their car is parked.

Ideally an acoustical consultant would be brought in during the design stage (just like SREs should be brought in during the design phase of a new service and not 5 minutes before it goes live), but that almost never happens, as we see (well hear) here.

At least in this case the noise can be heard by everybody. Imagine this noise coming off the bridge, but it's only audible from your bedroom Tuesdays when its cloudy. And none of your neighbors can hear it. You'd think you'd gone mad!

[0] https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/listening-vessels

[eigenvector]

> Ideally an acoustical consultant would be brought in during the design stage (just like SREs should be brought in during the design phase of a new service and not 5 minutes before it goes live), but that almost never happens, as we see (well hear) here.

Noise studies by qualified acoustical engineers are the rule not the exception in many jurisdictions.[1] But these only go so far, because the model of the predicted noise emissions from the as-yet-unbuilt turbine is only so detailed.

For what it's worth, no matter how much engineering you do there are always people who think they can hear something that can't be measured and won't be convinced otherwise.

On the other hand, a thing that really does reduce complaints is paying a community dividend to everyone who lives nearby (instead of just paying the owners of the actual land under the turbines).

[1] https://www.ontario.ca/page/noise-guidelines-wind-farms

[klohto]

Anecdotal evidence, but I have the same experience as well. I’m not from US, so I will assume it’s a different type of turbine. Wind turbines were installed near our village and my family started hearing sounds and feeling vibrations. I didn’t hear and don’t hear them when I return there, but it forced my parents to leave their home.

It’s a horrible feeling, especially since people don’t believe you. It can hardly be measured, because people with the correct equipment don’t pay attention to you and other people think you’re crazy.

Actually, if anybody has more information on how would I go around fixing this issue or which party should I raise this with, I would welcome that. It’s been more than a decade but the turbine is still there even though affected people have moved out.

[technicaldonut]

That's actually a scientifically recorded fact.

German researches recorded the sleep patterns of 397 residents in areas where there was previously no mobile reception. After erecting 10 towers, many people complained about a change in sleep patterns. 5 of the 10 towers were turned off though so had no actual effect. Just the believe was enough to cause problems. [0]

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20737608/

[oliveshell]

Well, it could have been unrelated to radio emissions: resonant sounds caused by wind blowing through the tall towers, for example.

[mike_red5hift]

RE: #2. I remember the first time I heard that sound when I moved from the city to the woods of NH. I thought someone was trying to crank up some kind of motor, too. Then I eventually caught a glimpse of a ruffed grouse doing its thing. Neat.

[TaylorAlexander]

"felt justifiably annoyed at the encroachment of the industrial world into my backwoods trip"

Sure, yes. The annoyance is justifiable. And I do not mean to come off as combative. I just wanted to say that our alternative forms of energy also encroach on the natural world in other ways (climate change, dirty mining, etc). So while turbines might more viscerally feel like an encroachment on nature, we must remember that they may displace some more destructive form of energy generation. I am not equipped to argue definitively that they are better, just that the visibility of wind turbines might influence our perception of them.

[DagAgren]

Wind turbines do not make that kind of noise. It's always, every single time, people angry about their view or any kind of change at all.

Every single time.

[tomcam]

OK that grouse sound is very trippy considering the context. I would’ve been in the exact same mindset as you. Thank you for sharing.

[tejtm]

We called them "partridge" they will stand on a hollow log and use it as a resonator. Sounds like a hit-n-miss engine starting up then petering our

[yellowapple]

Speaking of #2, awhile back I was wondering what noises emus make and it turns out to be something I wouldn't have ever expected any animal to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOLF7JhW2Iw

Kinda soothing, really. Just soft, deep thumps.

[exabrial]

Reminds me of the first time I heard a moose as a kid. Something from just out of this world.

[rconti]

1. didn't feel like something that needed to be editorialized, but I guess WSJ disagrees.