eli5 what is this iconic high pitched sound you hear, when a movie or game character activates night vision goggles? Is this a real thing?
In: Technology
It is the buzzing of capacitors. A lot of electronics will make that sound but most of them do not, and night vision goggles are not really ones that would. Much like how swords being drawn from a scabbard almost always make a metallic scraping sound in TV and movies, that is just a sound effect that people have become accustomed to so they keep putting it in.
When Peter Jackson was making The Lord of the Rings at first he made sure the unsheathing of swords did not make that sound. But test audiences hated it and thought it was not believable.
It just goes to show that believability and realism are not the same thing when it comes to movies.
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