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If you’ve ever been in New York City, you’ve probably heard this sound.
Or wait, sorry, wrong one.
I meant to play this.
In New York City, the wailing siren is part of the symphony of the streets.
It’s an icon of the city, but like many of New York City’s icons—Times Square,
the subway system, and Rudy Giuliani—it sucks… but it doesn’t have to.
This is a European siren.
If you’ve ever been to Europe, and especially anywhere near Birmingham, you’ll recognize
this sound—which is called the “high-low siren”—immediately.
New York and other places in America are reportedly considering switching to the European siren,
and this video is my manifesto about why they should, because while all sirens are unpleasant,
and interrupt and make me doom-scroll Twitter for thirty seconds while recording audio,
European sirens can be scientifically proven to suck less than New York and the rest of
America’s sirens.
To understand why, you first have to understand a bit about sound waves.
This is a sound wave.
You can call him Wavey, although technically his full name is Waverton B. Dorito, heir
to the Cool Ranch fortune, but we’ll stick with Wavey for now.
This part of Wavey, his height, which you can call amplitude if you want to be fancy
about it, determines how loud he is, which is measured in decibels.
Both the New York and the European siren hit the same decibel level—118—which, by the
way, is more than the human ear should hear, because our ears start taking on damage at
around 80, but sirens still exceed it because I mean, it’s an ambulance.
They don’t have time to worry bout your health or safety.
So the New York and European sirens are equally as loud, but the difference comes here—in
their frequency, which we usually call pitch, mainly because Frequency Perfect 3 is a terrible
movie title.
We traditionally measure pitch in Hertz—in honor of the world’s third most mediocre
car rental company—and the higher a frequency, the higher the pitch and hertz level.
Here, I’ll show you: as Wavey’s frequency increases, you’ll hear the pitch go up—and
this is the key difference between the New York siren and the European siren.
The New York wail siren is traditionally between 600 and 1200 hertz, while the European high-low
siren moves between 450 and 600 hertz, meaning the European siren’s highest pitch is only
half the highest pitch of the New York siren.
That’s what makes it so much better.
People generally perceive high-pitched sounds to be piercing and unpleasant—think of a
baby crying, or a mosquito buzzing, or Ariana Grande singing—so because the European siren
is lower, most people find it less annoying.
In addition, by alternating clearly and distinctly between the 600 Hz pitch and the lower 450
Hz pitch, the siren offers listeners a clear respite from its highest pitch, while’s
the New York siren’s pitch change is continuous, so you never feel like you get a break.
Now, you probably have three questions: first, if I rage comment something on this will that
boost the video’s algorithmic performance; second, are all people who eat cereal inherently
evil; and third, considering its less annoying, is the European siren less effective?
Well, the answers are yes, yes, and no.
It turns out that European sirens are actually more effective than New York sirens, mainly
because lower-frequency pitches move further than higher-frequency pitches.
I guess that explains why I never get responses to my daily pitch emails to Netflix for a
reality show about a towel factory but to understand why lower-frequency pitches move
further, you first need to know that sound waves have to move through a medium.
Given that the Long Island medium is normally busy with her tv show, sound most frequently
has to travel through air.
As sound waves travel, they’re vibrating the particles in the air to transfer the sound,
or energy, and because low-frequency waves are, you know, less frequent, they transfer
less energy to the air particles than high-frequency waves, thus running out of energy less quickly,
and thus moving further.
This principle extends to sirens, according to a study conducted in 2013 by a group of
scientists who were definitely totally not wasting their engineering PhD’s by studying
the wee woo machines.
They found that a 40-year-old with average hearing could detect the New York wail siren
at a maximum of 249 feet or 76 meters, and a 60-year-old could detect it at 125 feet
or 38 meters.
For the European two-tone siren, those numbers were nearly doubled: the 40-year-old could
detect it at 508 feet or 155 meters, and the 60-year-old at 206 feet or 63 meters.
So, in the end, when it comes to sirens, it turns out that the European way is just better
than the New York way.
However, the good news for New Yorkers is that, with the small exception of healthcare,
infrastructure, social safety nets, paid family leave, criminal justice, rock-and-roll, silly
hats, bread, cheese, football chants, life expectancy, singing competitions, and a medium-sized
grouping of other things, America does absolutely everything else better than Europe.
If you wanted to convince New York to change its terrible sirens, you might want to start
a campaign to convince the city council and the best place to start would be with a website—maybe
something like stopthesirensoriwillstoppayingmytaxes.com or makeitquietorwewillriot.com.
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