Enticing Siren Songs to Warning Siren Sounds

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Ben Kelman calling from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hi, Ben. Welcome to the program. What’s on your mind?

Thanks so much for having me. I was calling to ask about the word siren. Seems to have moved from, you know, the Odyssey, where it was not great, to kind of great news.

You know, if you’re in a dangerous situation right now and you hear a siren, oftentimes that’s great news.

And I was wondering how that change happened.

So sirens in Homer’s Odyssey to sirens in the modern day, you’re saying great news as in good news?

Well, I mean, if you’re in a situation that requires sirens and you hear sirens, you are now in a much better situation.

Oh, I see. Help is on the way.

Yeah.

Gotcha. All right. That makes sense.

I was thinking about nightclubs and sirens under the beats.

Oh, interesting. All right.

That was the positive siren situation that occurred to me.

Absolutely, I’m going to call that a stretch.

Beep, beep, beep, boom.

Oh, yeah, so you’ve got the two ends of the history, but there’s so much in between.

That’s what I was suspecting, and I would love to hear more about that.

Well, Ben, the good news is that help is on the way.

We can help you with that one.

Yeah, you were referencing the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, and these were the women who had the bodies of birds and this song that supposedly would lure men to their death.

And so you’ll probably recall that Odysseus was returning home and asked his sailors to tie him up to the mast of the ship and stuff their ears with wax so that they couldn’t hear the sirens and be diverted.

But he could hear just out of curiosity.

And so that’s quite different from what we think of either in nightclubs or on police vehicles.

I can’t be the only one.

I didn’t go there.

I suppose it’s good news in the nightclub, too.

I mean, I think it’s an indication something fun is coming.

Yeah, yeah.

They’re changing it up, right?

The beat’s going to change, a new DJ is taking over, or everybody’s going to start to do the same kind of dance moves.

Yeah.

Oh, that’s a good point.

It’s been a while.

Well, if we fast forward to the early 19th century, there was a French engineer and physicist named Charles Cagnard de la Tour.

And Cagnard was fascinated by acoustics.

This is a really interesting story.

He did a lot of experiments to try to measure musical frequencies.

And a lot of people were trying to do that back in those days.

But in 1819, he built on this idea that had been circulating, and he constructed this device that forced air through two perforated brass discs.

And one of those discs was spinning.

And as the air passed through the holes, it produced this musical tone.

And he figured out that by changing the speed of that one disc spinning, he could change the pitch.

And so he started to have a lot of fun with that.

And he’s measured musical frequencies.

He even tried to measure the speed of a mosquito’s wings.

And he also showed how this noisemaking device could be used on, say, ships as a warning.

And then he figured out that you could also produce sound waves underwater with this thing.

And he actually wrote about this and said it’s because of this property making sound in water that I thought I could give it the name Siren.

So it was very deliberate.

Yes, yes.

It was a deliberate connection with the mythological creatures of the Odyssey.

Was there any indication of his consideration of its relationship to danger, or that’s all just sort of after that?

I think that was after that.

I mean, he was just fascinated by sound and musical tones and that kind of thing.

And then people started applying it to all different kinds of things, you know, to ships or to emergency vehicles, lighthouses, that kind of thing.

So people took that idea and gave it all kinds of practical applications, including playing the siren in nightclubs.

I’m now picturing Grant just, you know, throwing down on the floor.

There was a time.

There was a time.

Well, it’s an underwater nightclub, so, you know, it all fits together.

There you go.

Yeah.

All right.

There you go.

Less than moves to the mermaids.

Well, thank you so much for your question.

We really appreciate it, Ben.

Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that with me.

Have a great day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’ll hit that siren button for the cherries and berries on top of your car.

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