Techno life of today bringing on more cases of ringxiety

Six minutes 39 seconds into the Richard Thompson song “Calvary Cross,” Mike Pelusi, a music reviewer in Philadelphia, will almost invariably check his cellphone.

Minka Wiltz, an actress in Atlanta, has tried to answer her phone to the thrrrrup, thrrrrup, thrrrrup of a truck bouncing down a pothole-pocked street.

Others say they thought they heard phones ring while taking a shower, using a blow-dryer or watching commercials.

What they are hearing is a barely discernable sound — perhaps chimes, a faint trill or an electronic bleat — that they mistake for the ringtone of their cellphone, which isn’t ringing. This audio illusion — called phantom phone rings or, more whimsically, ringxiety or fauxcellarm — has emerged recently as an Internet discussion topic and has become a new reason for people to either bemoan the techno-saturation of modern life or question their sanity.

Some sound experts believe that because cellphones have become a fifth limb for many, people now live in a constant state of phone vigilance, and hearing sounds that seem like a telephone’s ring can send an expectant brain into action.

“My experience has been hearing just a few notes that are similar to my phone’s ring, my brain will fill in the rest,” said David Laramie, a doctoral student at the Los Angeles campus of the California School of Professional Psychology, who is writing his dissertation about the effect of cellphones on behavior.

He plans to send questionnaires this summer to earn when and how often phantom rings happen and who is most likely to experience them. A few notes in the background of a television commercial can fool him, he said. Other times the culprit will be the sound effects in a song on the radio.

“Another place I hear it is running water, so I sometimes hear it while I’m shaving,” Laramie said.

Phantom rings are a “psycho-acoustic phenomenon” related to the way the human brain interprets sound, said Rob Nokes, president of Sound Dogs, a sound effects company in California.

The ear gives unequal weights to certain frequencies, making it particularly sensitive to sounds in the range of 1,000 to 6,000 hertz, scientists say. Babies cry in this range, for example, and the familiar “brrring, brrring” ringtone hits this sweet spot, too. (Simple ringtones are more likely to produce phantom rings than popular music used as a ringtone.)

“Your brain is conditioned to respond to a phone ring just as it is to a baby crying,” Nokes said.

Why people seem to be hearing phantom rings more often now is another question. The answers range from the paranoid to the vast exposure to cellphones in people’s lives — there were 207 million wireless subscribers nationwide at the end of 2005, a nearly sevenfold increase in just a decade, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association.

On blogs, some cellphone users wonder if an ominous agenda is at work when a phantom ring is triggered by a television or radio broadcast. A writer posting as Koan on forumgarden.com said that at first, songs played on the radio triggered a phantom ring. “Thing is, the high-pitched sounds, although a lot fainter, are still present during announcements now,” Koan wrote. “What is this? Is it subliminal advertising or something else?”

Peter Arnell, the chief creative officer of the Arnell Group in New York and a major force in the marketing business, said that theory might not be far off the mark.