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Anyone who has used the Internet more than a week has probably received at least one of those annoying lists of facts: dozens and dozens of items of no real significance that somebody thought would be cool for you to know. It is indeed fortunate that the lists are usually composed of items of no real significance, because many of the entries are of dubious veracity. The purpose of these lists apparently is not to educate the masses (however trivially), but to induce readers into the information age equivalent of a scavenger hunt, sending them scurrying all over the Internet in an attempt to verify the truthfulness of the entries. Ours is one of the virtual doors that gets knocked on quite frequently by these scavengers, and while we're glad to help, our job is never done because anyone can make up lists like these: just invent four or five of the most far-fetched statements you can imagine, and follow them with the phrase and no one knows why. To wit: The winner (so far) of the Most Ludicrous Entry contest is the claim that a duck's quack doesn't echo. Unfortunately, it's also the item we're most frequently asked about. The premise is just silly: a duck's quack (and presumably, of all the sounds known to man, only a duck's quack) has some special sonic property that causes it not to echo. We're not talking about a situation where a landform creates an acoustic shadow (a phenomenon under which even loud sounds can be inaudible to nearby listeners), but the claim that a duck's quack doesn't echo under any conditions. One of the main problems with such a claim is that the term a duck's quack is non-specific. Different species of duck make different sounds, and there are a lot of breeds of duck in the world. And anyone who has spent time around ducks knows that even within the same species of duck, a male's quack can sound nothing like a female's. (Female mallards, for example, make loud honking sounds, but male mallards produce a much softer, rasping sound.) Do all these varied sounds, without exception, fail to produce echoes? I could dismiss this one merely from personal experience. Although I grew up in suburbia, much of my youth was spent raising various kinds of domesticated animals, particularly ducks and geese. When our ducks got to quacking in unison, I could most assuredly hear the cacophony of sound as it echoed off the stone walls that surrounded our yard and entered my bedroom window. So could neighbors who lived a few hundred feet down the street and frequently called us to complain about the noise. The surprise was not that our ducks' quacks didn't echo, but that they echoed so remarkably well. Fortunately, we now have more than my personal experience to offer in debunking this myth, as an acoustic research experiment carried out in 2003 by Trevor Cox of the acoustics research center at the University of Salford in Greater Manchester set this legend to rest: Trevor Cox expounds on this bit of research in his forthcoming work, The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World:
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