Ever heard about people complaining about subsonic noise emitted by wind turbines? Indeed, these people exist and yes… that does not only sound weird, it is pretty much bull shit and there isn’t any evidence justifying the fear of a wind turbine’s subsonic vibrations. (You can produce a subsonic vibration by yourself by lifting and lowering your arm once per second. Does it hurt? I hope not!)

But what is this subsonic noise about? As an engineer I’m constantly dealing with low frequent vibration data of wind turbines. To make this data tangible I usually plot a graph and evaluate it visually (or I use one of many other methods depending on what I want to know). Recently, however, I wanted my data not to be viewed but to be heard (Some may call it procrastination, I don’t care)

So I resampled my vibration signal to play it much faster and shift this non-audible “infra-sound” below 20Hz up to an audible level. I imported the resampled wave form into my DAW and since I’m used to produce music with my DAW, we have another experimental techno track now entirely made of a wind turbine tower’s vibration record sliced, sampled and sent through some fancy audio effects. Before you ask: Yes, Kick and Hi Hat are made of it, as well. This is REAL industrial techno 😉

Side fact: Right in the beginning of the track you hear an interval of 2 notes, changing from a low to a high pitch. This change in frequency is induced by the wind turbine rotor increasing its rotational speed after wind is speeeding up. This change to a higher rotor speed usually takes a minute or more. After resampling, however, there’s barely a second left of it.