Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'

h a l f b a k e r y

On the one hand, true. On the other hand, bollocks.

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...
Khrushchev-esque shoe-related mechanical clock
MagnetiClock
military socket clock
Remembrance Clock
Simple Auditory Clock Using Dissonant Sine Waves
Subliminal Sound Clock
Surrealist clock
Village clock
Wall scroll clock

product:clock: display

... analogue
... digital
... figure
... light
... rotation
... sky
... water

Subliminal Sound Clock

Unconsciously tell time by varying sounds

(+2)

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The learning curve would be a bitch, but...

Create a tone generator with two tones that oscillate over a 24-hr period, such that at no two points in the period is the tone the same. Play these sounds quietly through speakers placed throughout a house.

If you were in this environment long enough, you would constanly hear the sounds, unconsciously associate those particular tones with a particular time, and thus have an intuitive sense of what time it was. At first you'd have to be looking at a clock occasionally to build the associations, but eventually you wouldn't need to.

—	esomas, Jan 30 2004

[link]

"At the sound of the tone the time is <beep>"

—	k_sra, Jan 30 2004

It'd be funny if there was no universality:

"Oh Sh!t I'm 7 hours late to work again!!"

"No, we got model #c17-1767. Get with the times, man."

—	yabba do yabba dabba, Jan 30 2004

How about louder beeps at predetermined intervals? The beeps themselves could be of differing tones. Wait...

How about different chords for each hour? Invert the chords every 15 minutes, and add different dissonant tones to the chord every 5.

There are twelve semitones in our octave, and twelve hours. Play everything on a lower octave from midnight through 11:59 AM, and a higher octave in the PM hours (or vice versa). But instead of one semitone up each hour, maybe up a perfect third, fourth, or fifth, but rotating on the same octave so you stay on the same octave. That way, you could tell what hour it just became by how far down the tone went.

Example: Say it's 6:59 and the root of the chord is B-flat. Going up a perfect third would be to D, but that would be going to the next octave, so instead go *down* to D.

A very hearty welcome to the halfbakery! Excellent job.

—	galukalock, Jan 30 2004

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