I recently found out about an interesting little experiment where it was shown that people could identify when hot or cold water was being poured from the sound alone. This is a little surprising since we don’t usually think of temperature as having a sound.
Here are two sound samples;
Which one do you think was hot water and which was cold water? Scroll down for the answer..
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The work was first done by a London advertising agency, Condiment Junkie, who use sound design in branding and marketing, in collaboration with researchers from University of Oxford, and they published a research paper on this. The experiment is first described in Condiment Junkie’s blog, and was picked up by NPR and lots of others. There’s even a YouTube video about this phenomenon that has over 600,000 views.
But its all speculation. Most of the arguments are half-formed and involve a fair amount of handwaving. No one actually analysed the audio.
So I put the two samples above through some analysis using Sonic Visualiser. Spectrograms are very good for this sort of thing because they show you how the frequency content is changing over time. But you have to be careful because if you don’t choose how to visualise it carefully, you’ll easily overlook the interesting stuff.
Here’s the spectrograms of the two files, cold water on top, hot water on bottom. Frequency is on a log scale (otherwise all the detail will be crammed at the bottom) and the peak frequencies are heavily emphasised (there’s an awful lot of noise).
There’s more analysis than shown, but the most striking feature is that the same frequencies are present in both signals! There is a strong, dominant frequency that linearly increases from about 650 Hz to just over 1 kilohertz. And there is a second frequency that appears a little later, starting at around 720 Hz, falling all the way to 250 Hz, then climbing back up again.
The higher frequency line in the spectrogram which linearly increases could be related to the volume of air left in the vessel the liquid is being poured into. As the fluid is poured in the volume of air decreases and the resonant frequency of the remaining ‘chamber’ increases.The lower line of frequencies could be related to the force of liquid being added. As the pouring speed increases, increasing the force, the falling liquid pushes further into the reservoir. This means a deeper column of air is trapped and becomes a bubble. The larger the bubble the lower the resonant frequency. This is the theory of Minneart and described in the attached paper.My last thought was that for hot water, especially boiling, there will be steam in the vessel and surrounding the contact area of the pour. Perhaps the steam has an acoustic filtering effect and/or a physical effect on the initial pour or splashes.