Saturday, 27 August 2016

I'm positive those elevators are making different sounds.

My apartment building has two elevators, descriptively labeled "elevator 1" and "elevator 2".  Recently, something happened, and elevator 2 was out of service for nearly a month.  When it started working again, the floor display didn't work, and the sounds sounded vaguely off.

Over the past two days, I've been trying to ride on both, so I could take videos that I could then extract the audio and do a power spectrum analysis on the beeps.

Those peaks are definitely different.
One thing to note is that the elevator 1 audio is much noisier than elevator 2.  I suspect this is partially my fault (holding the phone in different ways), but it points out another difference since elevator 2's problem: elevator 2 no longer has a functional fan.  There's also some noticeable impacts of my phone's microphone, with the dip at 5500 Hz and 8000 Hz.

The spikes are clearly the sound of the beep, and taking the peaks of the ~1000 Hz spike shows that elevator 1 has the peak at 1007.8125 Hz, with elevator 2 at 937.5 Hz (with these values being very dependent on the fairly low sampling frequency I'm using.  The samples are separated by 23.4375 Hz).

It's easy to scale elevator 2 by the ratio of the peaks.

This aligns the peaks at ~3000 Hz and ~4000 Hz.  The lower noise elevator 2 suggests a peak at ~2000 Hz as well.

So yes, those elevators are definitely making different sounds.



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