Talk about heavy metal. As you may have read, GE Engineer Jeff Bizub made small pockets of audio and engineering geeks giddy earlier this year when, essentially, he transposed the frequencies of spark ignition engines to pre-diagnose breakdowns before they happened.
Chalk it up to Jeff Bizub's academic background in music theory, which in all likelihood led him to consider transposing those engine sounds into music. Engines like those pictured above, a Waukesha 275GL* gas engine, were the big breed of rumblers the GE whiz needed to sonically dissect. At 66,000 pounds, the Waukesha could power a small power plant, though in principal it operates no different than a typical automobile.
The utility of this concept, which Bizub designed into software that could automatically score the telltale sounds, lies in the fact that most of the knocking frequencies portending a gas explosion and engine damage are inaudible to the human ear. Once the job was done and the software was ready, Bizub went the extra mile and turned those knocking frequencies into an original composition. Check out the score, and give it a listen down at the bottom of this post.
Straight from the school of Hard Knocks: