Webhamster Henry's Top 10 Imaginary Sound Events of 2017

  1. The Drone of Drones The Dopplers (Velocity Records 2017)
    The Dopplers mounted speakers on a series of tiny drones, all playing a square wave at 220 Hz, and as they fly past and dive toward you, other pitches are created. It's like being attacked by tuned hummingbirds. This is a recording, but... you had to be there.
  2. Bumpharp Mechanical device provided by several anonymous inventors(2017)
    Autoharps are really semi-automatic: you have to hold down a button and strum the thing to get any music. Normally, you're lucky to get 8 or 10 notes per second even on a well maintained machine. But no longer! Legally specious military grade "bump stock" additions can be found at music fairs to upgrade your autoharp to fully automatic! Just select at your chord, and a 3500RPM motor strums the string furiously, unleashing a massacre of notes! And to think some people are thinking of making them illegal.
    "A well-regulated string set being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right to bear Zithers shall not to be infringed."
  3. Stratified squamous keratinized epithelium Audible propilitories Research (2017)
    As a side effect of research into hair regrowing techniques, a comatose patient was the subject of a study on the speed of hair growth. Using nano-particular strain gauges, the precise speed of the growth of her hair was monitored continuously over a period of several weeks. It turns out that hair grows in three phases (anagen, cataogen, telogen) at different speeds at different times of the day. This recording sonifies this data so that you can hear approximately 150 of her hairs growing.
  4. Spirogyro Spirogyro (device by NotToBeConfused, Inc. 2017)
    Vinyl is so "back", now, it's starting to go out of fashion, so the game steps up with Spirogyro's custom scribing devices which write out the sonic groves in Lissajous curves via a series of replaceable gears. These will actually play back on a normal turntable, but the instantaneous speed changes so there's a distinct wow/flutter thing going on.
  5. Funic soufflé Babeats (2017)
    Babeats is a sample loop and sound pack company which specialized in sounds of the unborn. The virtual instruments have lots of variations and round-robining. You get heartbeats, which are amazingly fast, bubbles and other liquid noises, and the eponymous funic soufflé, which is the sound of blood rushing through an umbilical cord. Tastefully mixed and looped for your pleasure.
  6. A Hairy Prone Companion podcast (Gary Kellerson, 2017)
    What started out as a kind of parody slash fiction radio piece featuring the sexual antics of down to earth, lutefisk huffing residents of a forgotten lakeside town has turned into a spookily prescient audio document of one of 2017's enduring stories.
  7. Frankenphone Demolition Derby event (Wayne NJ, 2017)
    Collectors of gaudy, imported Victrola and Edison rip-offs faced off in the parking lot of this famous antique phono trading event. The much denigrated machines were fitted with casters and rammed into each other by enthusiastic collectors, all while playing surplus Caruso 78s.
  8. RETURN TO THE ROUTE Beantown Backseat Drivers (YouTube video, 2017)
    Fourteen fully charged navigation devices simultaneously take us on a talky video tour through Boston. Not all of them want to go the same way.
  9. Urbin Nbiru S'edna Eris (Escatology Records 2017)
    Nbiru, the rogue planet, destroyed the Earth yet again in October 2017, just as it did in May 2003 and December 2012. These events were the subject of this engrossing rap, detailing the top ten pseudoscience reasons behind the astonishing predictions. Verse #4 will really shock you. We all knew it was bogus because it would clearly fly by the edge of the flat earth.
  10. OMMY App (Mother Of All Apps 2017)
    This innovative app listens to the ambient sound in the room, and using clever predictive AI and phase cancelling technology, replaces what it perceives as stressful talk with a simple long, "OMMM".
  11. ... and this special bonus event:
    Howard, Irma & Maria Hurricane (Weather 2017)
    2017 had a number of spectacular natural disasters: earthquakes, wildfires and especially hurricanes. Sound is prioduced by changing air pressure, and no audio piece was louder for longer than Hurricane Irma, 37 hours over 185 MPH. Irma flattened the islands of Barbuda, St. Barts, St. Martin, Anguilla and the Virgin Islands. And some of these places and more were also flattened by the nearly as powerful Maria two weeks later.
    The old philosophical chestnut about the hearability of falling trees was turned on its head, and became a matter of stunning relevance as literally every tree in those islands' forests was falling because of a sound.