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It has occurred to me that hard disks could probably have an embedded audio recording of some sort to move the heads. It would probably need to be a structured sound.

Probably the sounds or music we hear from faulty disks is the actual sound that it's supposed to use to move the head. Probably some known electronic-like music themes are actually appropriate to be used for hard disks, or are being used in some models.

Probably it would need to be a sound capable of commanding the movements of the head and it should be easy to divide with a precise timing. It gives the impression that different parts of a music executed over a given time could move the heads like a speaker, stopping at the moment it reaches the intended microscopic location in the platters.
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What makes me think it the most is that over the last 3 years I've been hearing ghost-like conversations all around me in any environmental sound, and also ghostly self-conversation. I think that there is some factor or somebody playing a sound that induces a resonance that initiates environmental voice-like noise and abnormal self-talk. It would need to be a very specific sound sequence that achieves it.

I have also noticed that if I leave the TV with old movies that I feel entertaining, for example with a volume of 1 or 2 such that I don't seem to hear it, I end up hearing some conversation from the movie, as if small noises were amplified by the brain after some few seconds, so that gradual amplification could also be used to move the heads in the most precise cases, for example when moving it from a track to another in a 8 or 10-Terabyte disk.

It's like a pseudoghost sound effect where a small sound seems to induce another sound coherent with the small sound after some time.

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Probably something like this could be used to try to see if a test hard disk can be made properly operational, by embedding a recording of an audio piece to be used as a way to measure calibration of the head position down to a microscopic level.

~ wrote:It has occurred to me that hard disks could probably have an embedded audio recording of some sort to move the heads. It would probably need to be a structured sound.

The heads in my SSD are controlled by John Cage's 4'33.

~ wrote:What makes me think it the most is that over the last 3 years I've been hearing ghost-like conversations all around me in any environmental sound, and also ghostly self-conversation. I think that there is some factor or somebody playing a sound that induces a resonance that initiates environmental voice-like noise and abnormal self-talk. It would need to be a very specific sound sequence that achieves it.

When you hear a sound and recognize it as speech even though it's something else, it's called pareidolia.

When you don't hear a sound but still recognize speech even though you're not hearing anything, it's called an auditory hallucination.

If either of these are happening to you more often than they happen to other people you know, tell your doctor. They might be symptoms of a health issue that could cause serious problems for you.

Before I go on, I want to second Octocontrabass's recommendation to seek medical help. While paradolia (and apophenia in general) is a simple consequence of how the human brain recognizes patterns - whether it is in sounds, visual images, or in connecting various ideas - frequent and persistent paradolia of the sort you describe is definitely a possible sign of either psychological or neurological problems.

Auditory hallucinations are even more concerning, as they are often indicative of a serious problem, such as schizophrenia, or some kind of brain injury or disease such as a tumor or a slowly enlarging aneurysm. If you are hearing sound somewhere that is otherwise silent, that's a major warning sign of something being seriously wrong.

And no, I am not saying this because of my opinions of your work; this isn't something to joke about. Besides, my own work is at least as crazy, and we mad scientists need to stick together.

(Yeah, 'mad computer scientist' is a thing, something that should already be obvious for anyone frequenting this group, or for that matter anyone who has ever poked around the projects on Kickstarter - Busco Quadnary, anyone? Even if we discount those who are actually mentally ill, such as Terry Davis - or to a lesser degree, myself - there's plenty of oddness to be found among programmers.)

~ wrote:It has occurred to me that hard disks could probably have an embedded audio recording of some sort to move the heads. It would probably need to be a structured sound.

If I am reading this and the following paragraphs right, it sounds as if you think that the sounds coming from the drives are used to move the drive heads? Uh... no. They are a side effect of the heads moving. The movement causes the sounds, not the other way around.

I think how the slow and fast USB chirps would actually sound. I'm referring to the chirps used by the USB controller to detect if a newly plugged USB device is USB 1.0, 1.1, 2, 3, etc.

They are supposed to be high frequency chirps, but they are still programmed logic and they could be represented as some sort of sound which should be interesting to hear at a normal speed.

~ wrote:I think how the slow and fast USB chirps would actually sound.

The... what? WTF are you talking about? The USB standard is entirely electronic - it has no audio component, or anything else other than electrical signals, for that matter (i.e., there is no requirement that a device have any kind of sound or light indicator to show the connection - some do, but those are specific to the device, as a convenience to the users, not part of the USB system itself).

What could possible have given you the idea it did?

AFAICT, the USB connection type (and things such as transfer mode, voltage, etc.) is determined in a handshake consisting of several header packets sent between the devices and the host at the time the device is plugged in. These data packets are sent as USB 1.0 in the 'low-speed' mode, for compatibility, but contain data describing which versions of the standard are supported by the device, with similar packets coming back describing the host's capabilities; the two the negotiate the speed, transfer mode, etc. based on that information.

I suppose some documents might call this handshaking a 'chirp', by analogy to the tone-based handshaking (the so-called 'whalesong') used in older analog phone line modems. If so, that's a really misleading name for it, as it is a) entirely electrical, and b) not a single datum, but a series of packets being sent back and forth.

In any case, the conversation going from the sounds made by hard drive heads moving to USB devices handshaking is... a non sequitur at best. AFAIK, all external hard drives which can be connected via USB still use a drive controller connection such as SATA or SCSI, with a bridge connecting it the the external USB connection - the drive's internal controller has no way of knowing that there is a USB connection involved in the chain. And of course, solid-state drives don't have moving parts larger than electrons at all... that's part of why they are called 'solid state'.

~ wrote:I think how the slow and fast USB chirps would actually sound. I'm referring to the chirps used by the USB controller to detect if a newly plugged USB device is USB 1.0, 1.1, 2, 3, etc.

They are supposed to be high frequency chirps, but they are still programmed logic and they could be represented as some sort of sound which should be interesting to hear at a normal speed.

There may be a way of turning them into sound. You could probably do the same thing with the CPU and turn everything it does into sound, but slowed down to make the patterns easier to pick up. Lots of artistic possibilities there to explore.