Something flew by and aha

On Fridays at 9:20 I finish my first class at the university. And, you will laugh, on February 15, my students and I were just discussing the topic “drawing noises as an expressive means of radio.” That is, immediately before this wonderful fireball exploded somewhere in the sky above our blessed city, we listened to a number of radio programs where something rumbled, flowed, clicked, fell, and in one story about Christmas fortune-telling there was an obvious overkill with all sorts of sound devilry - the brownie laughed demonically, the floorboards creaked shrilly, etc. And now, instead of the expected call, there was a bright flash. It was already light outside, but the electric light was still on, so at first it seemed like it was just a voltage drop in the network, to which the floodlights at the construction site under the window also reacted. I would rather believe in a technical glitch than in Elijah the prophet on a chariot of fire. And since nothing smoked or caught fire - silence - we calmly completed the lecture.

Here I am forced to make a short excursion into the past. You will laugh again, but a couple of months ago, on December 21, when they frightened us from every angle about the end of the world, it was also Friday, and I had my first pair of radio engineering students; So, in the middle of the couple, and it was still very dark outside the windows, suddenly there was a roar - little could be seen through the window, but from the sounds it became clear that this was not an explosion or a shootout between the brothers near Teplotek, but still fireworks. As it turned out later, it was indeed a fireworks display, it’s unclear why the hell it was arranged in the city center, either in honor of the day of the energy worker and the end of the world, or in honor of the store’s birthday. In short, we are not so easily intimidated by strange sounds and flashes outside the window during the first couple.

But when the explosion rumbled and the old building of the university vibrated like some kind of washing machine made in Kopeys, and the fire alarm demanded to immediately leave the building, the skills practiced during civil defense exercises had already worked: turn off the electricity, quickly brethren and evacuate. One of the flights of stairs was littered with broken glass, so we had to go down the one farthest from us; on the first floor near the wardrobe, all the glass was also broken, but, fortunately, no smoke or collapsed ceilings were visible. In the lobby I met a student who decided to return to the classroom to get her belongings, I reassured her by saying that the door was locked and first we need to find out what happened and whether it was possible to return to the university. “There’s a weird cloud hanging over there,” she said. The cloud looked like a very powerful jet trail and appeared slightly orange, most likely due to the rising sun. Nothing like a nuclear explosion. Or a cloud from a burning wagon with bromine (no, a wagon with bromine burned in Chelyabinsk on September 1, 2011, and I had the first pair the next day).

The landline phone did not work, almost everyone lost mobile communications, although some lucky ones managed to call either their relatives or the news editors - the journalism department, after all. At first, nothing was clear at all - it was some kind of local explosion or the whole city was bombed, but the students who arrived to the second couple said that they saw a flying object, which then exploded, and someone even managed to film it on their phone. In a word, the picture has cleared up at least a little, at least it has become clear that there is no need to call emergency services, and children should be sent home. While returning to pick up the things left in the classroom, my student and I talked on the way about a strange coincidence - we had just discussed sound effects and symbolism and the emotional impact of sound, and here it is on you, please!

My mobile phone was useless, I had to restore communications with my family in a prehistoric way - on foot, fortunately, my sister works two blocks from the third building of ChelSU. Thank God, she was just talking on the phone with her mother. No one was hurt, only the cat suffered a shock comparable to a cabinet falling during renovation. So I could go to work. On the way in the minibus that was traveling from Shagol (this is a village at the former military flight school), it turned out that it was not a plane that had fallen, but part of the brick wall near the zinc plant was destroyed and smoke was coming from there. The driver tried to find at least some official information on the radio, but all he could hear was the chatter of DJs who drew rumors from the Internet: about aliens, a Korean rocket, an asteroid the size of a football field, a bomber that fell in Gagarin Park, an explosion at the Signal State Enterprise. , because it was flying from somewhere in the Leninsky district. The phrase “operational headquarters” was never heard anywhere.

Sharing my morning impressions with my colleagues, I told them about the topic of the lesson. They laughed: “Maybe, Yulia Vladimirovna, you will no longer prepare so carefully for a meeting with students.” And I say, I also have a recording of a radio film about an exercise with testing nuclear weapons at the Totsky test site, using the example of which I show how to work with documentary sources. Remember the black and white footage of the atomic explosion that is still shown in life safety classes? They filmed then and there. But we will have this topic next semester. And twice into one funnel...

PS By the way, during the lecture they also remembered Orson Welles’ famous radio show on “War of the Worlds” and talked about how realistic the sound picture could be.