Public exposure to airborne ultrasound and very high frequency sound

Abstract

Over the last decade, members of the public have complained of “high-pitched” sounds in public places causing adverse effects (e.g., headaches). Their reports were dismissed by colleagues, family, and friends, who could hear nothing, and by health care professionals and experts for arange of reasons, including assertions that airborne ultrasound could not affect humans because it mostly reflects off the skin and because the ultrasonic intensities in air are low. Those complaining were told that even if such sounds existed, the sounds could not be ultrasonic because“humans cannot hear above 20 kHz.” Faced with universal dismissals, in 2015, the concerned individuals consulte done of the authors, Professor Leighton. He published evidence that such tones existed (Leighton, 2016a), providedmethods for the public to detect them (Leighton, 2016a,b),identified a range of commercially available sources and others in development, outlined why the regulatory framework needed revisiting (Leighton, 2016a), and cast doubt on assertions that these high-frequency sources cannot cause adverse effects (Leighton 2017). Fletcher etal. (2018a,b) conducted human trials and interest grew around the world, including in a special issue in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Leighton, 2018).International interest in this topic further increased with claims of ultrasonic attacks on the Cuban embassy (Leighton,2018). A scheme by which the public can distinguish such tones from, say, tinnitus was provided, as illustrated in the following case study.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Timothy Leighton: orcid.org/0000-0002-1649-8750

ORCID for Ben Lineton: orcid.org/0000-0003-4784-7762

ORCID for Craig Dolder: orcid.org/0000-0002-0817-326X

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