RALEIGH, N.C. — Researchers made a groundbreaking discovery late last night, as sources confirm experts were able to reproduce the loudest sound in recorded history by unmuting that one player in voice chat.
“I received the call at around 10:50 PM,” said Dr. Catherine Halpern, an acoustician and professor at Duke University. “I’m usually in bed by then, but tonight was different. Maybe my body felt the sound instinctually, the same way sailors 40 miles from Krakatoa felt their eardrums burst like grapes. I pick up the phone and hear gunfire over the line and assume the worst, but after a second it becomes clear I’m listening to my colleague Dr. Martinez getting his ass spawn-peeked in Rainbow Six: Siege like a chump. I don’t have time for that bronze shit—I’m trying to sleep—so I hang up, but Dr. Martinez, Steve, calls me right back and tells me to get over here, and bring my equipment. Says I need to hear this, that it’ll blow my research wide open. Normally I wouldn’t have given him a second thought, but there was something in his voice that scared me. That, and it was 1v4 on Theme Park with Steve as Monty going for the plant and you know I had to see that shit go down.”
“When I get there, Steve is crying,” continued Dr. Halpern. “I think, okay, normal Ranked match. But there’s blood pooling in his ears, and his apartment looks like a hurricane blew through. I set up my equipment, put on ear protection, then give Dr. Martinez the thumbs-up. He tells me to hold onto something, and I watch him bring up the player menu where someone named xxxChestTHIRSTer_Xxx is muted.”
“Steve only unmuted him for a second, but it was enough to make an atheist of any Holy Man.”
After exposure to the unprecedented sound, which registered at a whopping 410 dB, the scientists reportedly had time to move Dr. Martinez’s gaming setup to a laboratory at Duke without completing the match, a miracle Dr. Halpern credits to “the average buffer time between rounds.”
“When I heard the sounds coming from THIRSTer’s mic, my first thought was obviously, ‘Can we communicate with this being?’” said Craig Gamborji, a tenured linguist at Duke who was brought in by Drs. Halpern and Martinez. “At first we weren’t even sure that was a voice coming from the mic. All data pointed to it being the sound of every alarm on Earth going off at once, or a garbage disposal unit that had learned to scream. But Steve was adamant he could hear the occasional poorly-timed callout, and Catherine made out a few slurs, so we were confident this was an intelligent—or rather, sapient—being.”
“After confirming this was indeed a man from Earth, I tried to make contact through Dr. Martinez’s shitty headset mic. I asked questions like ‘Can you understand me?’ ‘Am I comprehending your true form?’ and ‘Why are you playing Doc like a roaming defender lol bronze trash EZ win’ ChestTHIRSTer, unfortunately, made no attempt to enter a dialogue with us. His intentions, apart from the godless screech and blowing the opposing team, are still unknown.”
The only other testimony to this mystifying yet tremendous discovery reportedly came from Lee Newsom, a Siege player located in New Zealand who also played on Dr. Martinez’s team on the night of the fateful match.
“I never figured out the whole muting thing, so at first I just tried to ignore it,” said Newsom, who goes by the gamer tag LoveleeLadeeZ. “As a competitive gamer, you get used to rookie players who leave their mics on by mistake or break the record previously held by the Mount Krakatoa eruption for loudest recorded sound. It comes with the territory. At first it was just annoying, but after two rounds of hearing that thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes, it started to make sense. It was as if xxxChestTHIRSTer_Xxx was teaching me words in a sentence that, once spoken, could unlock the inconceivable, unlighted chambers of the Universe. Words that spoke not to my brain but to the puppet strings of ancestral memory. I blacked out after round three, and when I came to, I was MVP of my team with 18 kills as Caveira. I’ve never played that well in my life, and I doubt I will again.”
At press time, sources reported Dr. Halpern and her team’s research had unfortunately been upstaged by a new record for the loudest recorded sound, which is currently held by the Amber Alert that went off just as you were falling asleep even though you silenced your phone.
