Why you can hear the temperature of water

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/science/hot-water-sound-cold.html

by mhb • 2 years ago

206 146 2 years ago

nytimes.com

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/ITRzw

jerbear4328• 2 years ago

And the audio clip (which doesn't work on the archive): https://static.nytimes.com/podcasts/2024/05/09/science/09tb-...

GistNoesis• 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_4dDvcZeM

mikewarot• 2 years ago

I noticed the sound when making hot chocolate for my child. I figured there are a number of things at play... the leidenfrost effect when the water hits the much hotter edge above the waterline in a kettle(not in this video), the air over the hot water being more humid (and thus lighter), the much higher vapor pressure, the difference in surface tension, the dissolving of the hot chocolate powder, etc.

Viscosity isn't something I considered... but it makes sense.

kinow• 2 years ago

I thought I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but when he told me to pause the video to try to guess, I listened to the audio of pouring water again, and thought about "which one sounds like when I pour tea", and that way I could identify the warm/cold water. Interesting!

jaredhallen• 2 years ago

I can definitely hear when the shower gets hot. Cool to have some explanation behind it.

KineticLensman• 2 years ago

Likewise. My shower takes quite a long time to run hot, and I can usually hear when it has reached the point where it is no longer too uncomfortable to get in.

philipswood• 2 years ago

Yeah, my shower takes a a while to run hot, so I also listen for when the water is ready.

Tanoc• 2 years ago

This is something I noticed as a kid. We had a creek in our backyard, which,depending on the temperature the water would be louder or quieter. This annoyed our dog, which after a number of times caused me to notice. Running water is louder and much more sharp when it's cold out, and quieter and muffled when it's hot out. In the same way sounds are louder in a colder environment because there's already a low level of ambient energy contained in the air and so the energy disperses much more readily but dissipates much more quickly. Essentially a difference between a quick "crack" and a lingering "whump" in terms of auditory impact. This effect also propagates to solid materials, as cold metals and ceramics transmit sound better than warm ceramics or metals. A church bell quite literally is louder on a cold winter's day.

axxl• 2 years ago

My thought on the general "loudness" of cold months was due to reduced noise blocking or absorbing greenery like tree leaves, grass, etc. Which is then altered by a significant snowfall leading to sounds being softened again.

ffsm8• 2 years ago

Shouldn't that be an inverse relationship though? Without leaves on the trees you should get less reflection, consequently more of the noise should radiate upwards. Unless you're standing at the other side of a bush/greenery. In that case it definitely absorbs a lot

xattt• 2 years ago

The volume of water flow should/would also vary at different times of the year, based on how much the water table is loaded.

Not sure how much of this would be complimentary to the acoustic effect of temperature. Either way, it’s not a simple single-solution explanation.

BurningFrog• 2 years ago

My guess is that frozen terrain is harder, which reflects more sound and makes hitting it noisier.

xerox13ster• 2 years ago

Cold air is also more dense, less momentous, and can transfer sound energy more efficiently between particles than hot air where the particles are spread out and have their own momentum to maintain rather than the sound's.

soulofmischief• 2 years ago

No one here has mentioned temperature inversion [0] which is responsible for a lot of the cold-induced amplification perceived in urban areas. It's quite a fascinating effect.

[0] https://wisconsindot.gov/Documents/doing-bus/eng-consultants...

quesera• 2 years ago

Could the audible difference be related to varying sound propagation through hot/humid vs cold/dry air?

ajkjk• 2 years ago

I think it's this. Sounds are very different based on the temperature and humidity of air. I have a piano at home and the difference is huge and very apparent over time.

neom• 2 years ago

I'd imagine there may also be a component of sound bouncing off things? I think stuff contracts and expands when it hot or cold? So maybe something that is cold and contracted bounces the sound sharper too? Noooooo clue if that makes any sense, just a bunch of guessing from high school science class.

YuccaGloriosa• 2 years ago

I don't think so. If I pour hot water into a mug from the kettle, it sounds different with cold water with all the same equipment, room etc

K0balt• 2 years ago

That is definitely a thing, but I can tell when the hot water arrives at the bathroom tap by the sound of the water hitting the bowl. So it’s the water too, I’m pretty certain.

nico5• 2 years ago

Thank you for the great anecdote and explanation, it was fun an very illustrative to visualize the concepts while reading your comment

morninglight• 2 years ago

The video is also excellent.

https://youtu.be/9w3Zl3KBDpI

golergka• 2 years ago

I wonder how well it maps to notions of a “cold reverb” or “warm synth” in music production.

wolverine8762• 2 years ago

You controlled for the volume / depth of water, which for the same mass would be greater when warmer, and the resulting changed interaction with objects ...?

Loughla• 2 years ago

There is nothing like a small waterfall in a deep snow on a snowy day. All other sound is muffled by the snow cover and further dampened by the falling snow.

But the creek will ring like a bell. You can't hear it until you're almost on top of it. It's higher pitched, and will almost always have a tempo based on the shape of the bed of the falls.

There's a waterfall on our farm. It plays music in January. It's amazing, and no one believes me.

dynisor• 2 years ago

Next January you should get an audio or video recording. I'd love to hear that!

iwontberude• 2 years ago

When I used to bake bread commercially early in the morning, the sound of the HVAC, proofing and baking systems would sound like music to me in concert. I can't tell if I was just hallucinating or what, but something about your experience reminded me of it.

animal531• 2 years ago

As the article mentions, most people know how to tell the difference by sound but if you were to ask them they would say no, it's impossible.

That just makes me wonder how many other things there are that people subconsciously learns, without it ever becoming obviously noticeable for them?

abyssin• 2 years ago

I’d say lots of behavioural cues, for instance related to dominance. Many people feel like they’re behaving freely because they’ve completely internalized the constraints their social position imposes upon them.

mbo2• 2 years ago

I _think_ I can tell whether a car is an ICE / hybrid / electric just by the way their weight shifts around corners. My friends maintain they cannot, but under test conditions, I'm sure they'd be fine.

YurgenJurgensen2• 2 years ago

Are you sure it's weight distribution and not conducted engine vibration and gear shift patterns? Seems like it'd be difficult to control for (assuming we're already controlling for engine noise).

xnx• 2 years ago

Many people can perceive polarized light.

DoctorOetker4• 2 years ago

There are many examples of humans being able to observe a difference, yet deny their capability to discern on the basis of abstract rational knowledge.

Another example is frame rates: while its well known that the bandwidth of light sensitive cones on the retina is around 30Hz cycle frequency (and thus ~60Hz framerate), many gamers felt the difference of higher framerates, even though many of the same gamers denied observability of this difference on the basis of knowledge of this basic biological fact.

The biological fact is not wrong: if screen pixel projects are at rest on the retina. But when the eye is rotating to follow a depicted object on the screen, then speeds higher than ~60 pixels per second result in motion blur that would be absent when observing a real life object moving at the same angular speeds. The biological fact is still true, but simply not naively applicable in the context of motion blur due to eyeballs rotating while observing a display.

ajuc• 2 years ago

It's more complicated than that, brain cuts out the blurry "in between" frames when you move your eyes. Which means it has to extrapolate the images from before the movement to fill the gaps. There's many weird effects of this hack - for example when you look at something moving very fast (like wheels of passing vehicles) but don't move your eyes - it looks blurry. But when you move your eyes - the frame in your brain "freezes" and you can notice non-blurry details on the fast moving things. There are even ways to force eyes to see stuff from the past (like seconds' hand on a clock moving at different rates depending if you move your eyes).

You can't actually say that human eye has a strict fps, so the higher screen fps the less weird interactions with the ugly hacks in our brains.

Kudos• 2 years ago

Your eyes being analog and the 60Hz display being offset from your own cycle frequency would play large roles in that.

Ferret7446• 2 years ago

I think you're the one denying rational knowledge here. People are different, and there are in fact people who cannot tell the difference between higher frame rates, as shown in studies.

Just because you can see it doesn't mean others can.

smartscience• 2 years ago

The McGurk effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8fHR9jKVM is another example, which might be described as people learning to lip read without them being aware that they have done so.

plorkyeran2• 2 years ago

Apparently I can't lip read, as I never heard anything other than "baa" even as the video was claiming that I should be hearing something different.

marmaduke• 2 years ago

how many other things there are that people subconsciously learns, without it ever becoming obviously noticeable for them?

95%+? Stuff like how to jiggle keys on a keyring to get the right one for the door you're about to unlock? This only works for your keyring, it's highly kinetic, tactile, initial condition dependent etc, yet yet can usually be done unconsciously IME with the 6 keys on my keyring.

rendaw• 2 years ago

Poor storytelling in modern cinema.

nico5• 2 years ago

There is a cool veritasium video in which they show we are sensitive to changes in the magnetic field surrounding us

We can’t consciously tell, but they can see our brain lighting up when sensing the changes

Link to video: https://youtu.be/dg3pza4y2ws?si=-yXtwIu2n4QR_1Wi

RicoElectrico• 2 years ago

AC electricity on painted metal objects can be felt by sweeping fingertips, even though there's no current path.

You're absolutely right that people ignore whole lot going on around them in terms of sound, smell etc.

tomsmeding3• 2 years ago

I have felt this (?) often. Dragging fingers over a (metal) Mac Mini, some random laptop, a metal keyboard. Presumably this feeling triggers already at low power levels, otherwise I'd probably be dead.

proaralyst• 2 years ago

Is that explained by capacitance? I'm sure the capacitance of your finger through paint is pretty low but capacitors allow AC to pass

quickthrowman• 2 years ago

Can you provide an example of an object where this can be felt? I’ve touched hundreds of painted electrical enclosures on energized transformers, panels, switchgear, etc and have never noticed this.

goosejuice• 2 years ago

The woman who can smell Parkinson's comes to mind as a recent example.

plusfour• 2 years ago

Most of your knowledge is implicit.

neltnerb2• 2 years ago

I remember the first time I noticed that I could guess correctly which fingertip a friend shining a tiny red pen laser was shining it on, just from minuscule temperature differences.

That you can feel artificial lighting as heat (the actual light, demonstrated as it was a laser some distance away) at such a low power level (<5mW) was pretty surprising to me.

antognini• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Feynman's trick of guessing which book on a bookshelf a person had handled based on the smell.

dopylitty• 2 years ago

I noticed if I stare into the forest without focusing on any particular thing my vision starts to shimmer a bit and sometimes there are distinctive little perturbations in my peripheral vision.

My mind wants to immediately look directly at the perturbations at an almost instinctive level. If I do look I frequently see a leaf moving in the wind or a bird or squirrel moving around in the tree.

By intentionally using this effect rather than actively scanning the forest I find I am much better at finding birds when bird watching or seeing larger animals such as foxes, deer, or snakes moving in the grass.

It's amazing how many things our bodies are capable of that we don't know about until we step away from electronics and machinery and just let the body do its thing.

inglor_cz• 2 years ago

Absolutely, yes. Pouring hot water into a cup sounds very different from pouring cold water into a cup. Even the flow looks visibly different, hot water is a lot more "lively". Noticed this as a kid, never made a mistake.

is_true• 2 years ago

also the sound the cup makes when you hit it with a spoon while stirring

eimrine2• 2 years ago

Do you know how to download sound from nytimes.com? I can show the article on the website (not on archive one) and I would like to analyze the sound in audio software.

perilunar• 2 years ago

If you wade through the (incredibly verbose) HTML you can eventually find a script with the source for the audio file, which is:

https://static.nytimes.com/podcasts/2024/05/09/science/09tb-...

kosolam• 2 years ago

Let us know the results please

eimrine2• 2 years ago

Second sample has significant hi-hat style sustain, since I know it is hot water it should be a steam. First sample has really little amount of this sound which might be produced from bubbles. First sample is really interesting because it has 2 bass lines: first starts at 900Hz and rising to 100Hz, second starts at 600Hz and quickly dropping to 400Hz and keep lowering slowly to 300Hz. Definitely not harmonicas, it is something like 2 independent resonating frequencies for something inside of glass-and-water sound source. Bassline of second sound is singular fat line; firstly it starts at 700Hz and slowly grows upto 1kHz.

Probably the 2 basslines from the first samples (cold) was something that bothered the dog, maybe the thing is in rich sound such as chord vs single note. I don't care about bubbles but when I will have an access to a nice microphone I will try to record more samples of this. The hard part is how to remove water from the glass between 2 or more experiments because it is important to have really similar setups without moving the glass even slightly.

extragood2• 2 years ago

It's easy enough to reproduce - may as well run a quick experiment and record that.

wolverine8762• 2 years ago

You some controls: for example, the same mass/second of water - your water pressure might differ between hot and cold sources.

ynniv2• 2 years ago

Huh, I guess this is why movies never have convincingly cold water. Everyone is shivering, but it never sounds cold.

erehweb• 2 years ago

Googling, it sounds like cold showers are fairly common in movies https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dg52a5/e...

YurgenJurgensen2• 2 years ago

That kind of sound effect is usually added in post anyway.

ynniv2• 2 years ago

Right, my point is that everything about a scene should sound cold. Foley work can get you some of the way, but the ambient temperature is probably less like a prop and more like white balance. Since no one is approaching it that way, it never sounds right. If you didn't grow up in the cold you probably never noticed, but few movies ever properly convey it.

novaRom• 2 years ago

Also hard vs soft water may sound different, not just carbonated water. Soft water feels smoother and silkier on the skin because it contains less minerals.

anfractuosity• 2 years ago

Someone appears to have made an android app to attempt to distinguish temperature from sound of pour - https://petter.saterskog.com/ai-thermometer/index.htm

I thought I'd heard the 'stickiness' of the water affects how it sounds. Not sure if that is stiction or something else.

Modified30192• 2 years ago

From personal experience, walking on snow/ice sounds different based on temperature. From my time of walking to work at 6am in Michigan when I was younger, I could tell the temperature in approximately 10 degree F increments based on the sound. At least between 30F to -10F

apitman2• 2 years ago

As someone from Arizona I learned relatively late in life that ~15F is when my nose hairs start to freeze.

zulban• 2 years ago

There's definitely many, many different sounds of snow and ice based on temperature, and probably humidity, pressure, etc. Or what those conditions were 2 days ago when the snow fell, what they were yesterday, and what they are now. I live in Canada, Québec so maybe that makes me some kind of subjective authority.

galaxyLogic• 2 years ago

This is a well-known phenomenon in Nordic countries I believe. There is a verb "narskua" in Finnish which is only used to describe the sound of walking on snow in below freezing temperatures.

Google AI tells me:

"The Finnish word narskua translates to "crunch" or "scrunch" in English. It's an onomatopoetic verb that describes the sound snow makes when you step on it in very cold temperatures"

ubutler• 2 years ago

It surprises me that this is a surprise, I thought this was a given.

extragood2• 2 years ago

Yeah, I'm very certain that I've read about this phenomenon in the not so recent past. To the point where I've intentionally listened for the difference on many occassions since then.

Wistar3• 2 years ago

When running some water to warm up before turning on the shower head, I can tell when the hot water has arrived by the distinct change in the sound as it splashes on the shower basin. The splash sounds soften when the water starts to run hot.

apitman2• 2 years ago

This is the same context where I noticed this. One of those weird things that would be really easy to google but I never did. Wasn't expected to get that random mystery solved today but I'll take it!

dtgriscom• 2 years ago

I've heard this as the shower warms up while spraying at the (plastic) shower curtain. However, I thought that it was because the plastic gets more flexible as things warm up.

Wistar3• 2 years ago

That may well be true. In my case the water is splashing on hard porcelain.

throwaway2562• 2 years ago

Can anyone explain why hot water tastes different to cold water? Is taste not separable from temperature or is there another mechanism at work?

datameta• 2 years ago

I would imagine it has with the biomechanics of our tongue as it relates to available dissolved minerals.

ruined• 2 years ago

it makes sense to me that the chemistry of taste would be very sensitive to temperature. but often, heated water has more substances in solution

thfuran4• 2 years ago

I'd expect it has less. Usually minerals accumulate in the water heater.

Arn_Thor• 2 years ago

Taste is absolutely linked with temperature. Cold vs hot coffee for example. Don’t know exactly why. Most things tend to taste “more” when hot. Could be the intensity of molecular activity, which is what temperature is, that varies and so registers more or less strongly with our taste preceptors

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

This can be more readily observed with food IMO. Hot pizza tastes way better than cold pizza (though, of course, cold pizza still tastes great)

itsgrimetime• 2 years ago

Or why kids tend to let their ice cream melt into “soup”, it tastes sweeter when warm

bassrattle• 2 years ago

Just look at the inside of any water heater. Usually disgusting! This is why we heat cold water up when we cook, rather than start with hot water

hkpack• 2 years ago

A lot of things at play.

1) We actually can sense "coldness" or "hotness" as separate tastes. Think about mint candies or pepper for example.

2) Our receptors have different sensitivity based on the temperature. For example cold sweet drink feels much less sweet. That's why warm cola is disgustingly sweet for example.

And water does contain a lot of dissolved salts which have a taste.

3) More than half of the taste we feel is actually coming from the smell, and warm water contains more vapour, and therefore, more smell.

So our brain takes all these inputs from different sources and synthesises the feeling of taste in our brain.

Source of this knowledge is from: https://www.cookingforgeeks.com

486sx332• 2 years ago

Non paywall link ?

flypunk• 2 years ago

https://archive.md/20240509203946/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

amelius• 2 years ago

Yes, for sure, but at what resolution?

4RealFreedom• 2 years ago

I read about the viscosity difference in hot/cold water a while back. Every time I think about it while drinking water, I put my water down. I don't know why it bothers me so much but it does. I feel like I peered into the eyes of God and can never return to normal life.

neltnerb2• 2 years ago

It took a while to find the original source files [i.e. the ones the author published as supplementary information]

Includes raw recordings as well as actual raw results for those of us without NYT subscriptions.

https://osf.io/brp2a/?view_only=7f49783ebbf646b29af32ca64524...

Audio comparison video, the fun part for me anyway.

https://osf.io/brp2a/files/osfstorage/62fe7d9da06acd0f5b2db3...

ethanholt1• 2 years ago

Humans can sense quite a few strange things. Like the smell of rain up to 100 parts per trillion.

jval43• 2 years ago

Petrichor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor

kj4ips• 2 years ago

I was taught to listen to the sound the water made in the sink to tell when the hot was ready. I had always assumed this was something most folks already knew about.

_delirium• 2 years ago

Link to the preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14740

moi2388• 2 years ago

The article doesn’t even give the reason lmfao journalism is so dead

michaelcampbell• 2 years ago

I always thought I could do this but hadn't admitted it to anyone because of its preposterousness. Huh.

Why you can hear the temperature of water

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