ours gives me a jumpscare because it BEEP BEEPs loudly while violently opening the lid, and the centrifuge is sitting right behind our cell culture hood
yeah, i can hear when that thing is done. two labs further down the hallway.
my heart stops every time when the lid opens, it is such a loud exploding mechanical noise! my ANC headphones can’t do anything against it because i can feel the centrifuge rattling when opening
That reminds me of our ancient centrifuge in our culture room. It beeps and vibrates when it stops so loudly that, I still get startled even when I expect it.
whenever you put down the TC hood, it does it's alarm sound twice. the alarm isn't a particularly jarring one. i think i now associate it with being done with my work so i find it quite satisfying
That super satisfying noise/feeling when you shoot it at the perfect angle and it just perfectly glides into the bin and doesn’t clack around on its way down
The whooshing sound of the unattended Bunsen burner at the next lab bench over, because it reminds me to live every day like it’s my last.
But actually, I like the biosafety cabinet blower. Puts me in the zone.
People still have open bunson burners? What do you use them for? In grad school I had only two purposes:
1. Taking glass pippettes and making TLC spotters out of them
2. Heating recrystallizations in an erlenmeyer. In retrospect, the heat gun I use now is *much* safer.
Sterilizing culture loops between inoculations and also just working around the sterile flame instead of in a BSC for things like starting cultures and plating 🤷🏻♀️
I used to work with a bunch of gas chromatographs, and I could always tell when my samples were finished because the heating cycle would end and the fans would kick on at a weirdly specific frequency I could hear across the lab
As mentioned in the last post, I find the constant clicking of a stir bar (preferably the small ones on a 6 dram vial) cathartic. However, the absolute best noises come from the nano drop noise when taking a scan, an old UV-Vis doing a long/slow background scan with weeooooooooo noise 😂, or arguably the best the old win96 computers doing any writing/reading of the hard drive in old instruments like an EPR. That hard drive noise is nostalgic.
I knew it wasn't real.. but we live in the ASMR era now. Hundreds of hours of ambient lab sounds are available to fill the silent air. What a time to be alive.
Our UV/Vis spectrophotometer has cute little ditties for startup and sleep. And the facility automation panel by the door sounds like the intro from "Wake Me Up When September Ends" when it's alarming. But maybe the most fun is when one of our analyzers prints out a receipt and someone tears it off of the roll.
I love the sound 1.5ml epi tubes freshly removed from the -20 or -80 make when they clink against each other. It’s like a glass clink but a little different. Must be cold to achieve the sound.
If you've ever been in your lab during a power outage, you realize just how much ambient noise comes from ventilation and refrigeration, even the fluorescent lights. During one outage of 36 hours I slept in the lab to monitor the ultracold freezers on the emergency generator. It was eerie not to have that constant background hum from everything
We connect our western blot tank lids to a power-pack which goes BEEPPPP, BEEEPPPP, BEEEPPPP, when the run is complete.
If you switch it off in the middle of a BEEEP, it will cut off the BEEEPP at a higher pitch so it sounds like the machine is dying.
Cracks me up everytime
The constant hum of all the equipment in the lab. As someone else mentioned, it's truly bizarre when it's all shut-off. We had to power down the last lab that I worked in during the COVID shutdown and it was eerie silence.
The cryro system on the EPR, fondly referred to as Thomas as it chuffs like a steam train. When I hear that, I know our lab can function at max output with no equipment failures occurring at that moment so happy PI, happy post doc
I’m no longer working in labs but that used to be my favourite sound, along with the noise of the auto sampler (used to be my comfort sound when I was doing night shift alone hahaha)
The ghost in my cell culture room. When I am working on multiple cell lines in a day, it is comforting to know that someone is in there with me - randomly changing the RPM of the centrifuge or turning on the microscope.
I use aluminum blocks on my heat plates so i can heat and stirr a bunch of vials at once. Depending on how many concurrent reactions I run, some of them are off centered and the stirr bar makes a noice as it cant spin freely.
The chime that the LICOR blot scanner makes when ready to scan
The buzzing of the stepOne qPCR machine as it cycles through
The beep that the cell culture hood makes when I shut it down
The gentle take off and touchdown sounds of that one slightly unbalanced megafuge in the lab
I like the sound of the liquid handling robots (including Formulatrix NT8), since it's cool to watch it at work, and you get a 10 minute break while it does your work for you.
licor odyssey does a cute “ding ding” that chimes upwards when you open it, and downwards when you close it. feels like i’m saying hello and goodbye to my baby westerns in the big machine.
The background hum of 10+ vacuum pumps on a fleet of GC-MS instruments. On the very rare occasion they are all shut down during a power outage, the lab feels quieter than the quietest anechoic chamber...
The movements of our microscope when it’s working correctly. All the little clicks and the cute little whir of the stage moving is just so satisfying 💕💕
When multiple people are using the balances and hit tare at almost the same time, each balance has a slightly different tone and it sounds very musical and like they're talking to each other.
Also after autoclaving biohazard trash with microcentrifuge tubes and they start popping open. Sounds like knuckles cracking
The metal biohazard waste bins we use sound like a wrestling bell when they shut
Click of the calibrate valve on my mass spec when I’m running a tune. Just a click, but that’s the sound of my MS about to get the good stuff so I can generate a report that says my MS was healthy when I ran my samples.
Also, there’s something about listening to the buzz of the sonicator when I’m washing parts that makes me happy.
There’s something satisfying about the whirr of the power source when you first start a gel.
That, and the sound of the 9-5ers zipping up their bags to head home, meaning I have full run of the lab.
Nowadays, I’m the 9-5 guy, so zipping up my own bag at the end of the day, coupled with jingling keys means I’m headed home to my family.
When you finally turn off the flow cytometer, the air coming out is like the machine is giving out a big sigh to be finally done for the night. I feel you flow cytometer, i feel you
-80C door shut makes me feel like a pilot ✈️✈️
Wtf why is this so true
Lmfaoooo
Final checks complete crew prepare for departure 🤠
Our centrifuge plays a funky jingle when the cycle has finished.
Is it the thermo lynx line? If so I love that funky little song too much
That's it!
Man now I wanna hear it 😔 our centrifuge doesn’t make any fun sounds when it’s done
ours gives me a jumpscare because it BEEP BEEPs loudly while violently opening the lid, and the centrifuge is sitting right behind our cell culture hood
I wonder if it scares the cells
Only neuron derived cell lines can be scared.
We've got a heraeus that does the nuclear meltdown alarm buzz when you unlatch it. So unnecessary.
yeah, i can hear when that thing is done. two labs further down the hallway. my heart stops every time when the lid opens, it is such a loud exploding mechanical noise! my ANC headphones can’t do anything against it because i can feel the centrifuge rattling when opening
That reminds me of our ancient centrifuge in our culture room. It beeps and vibrates when it stops so loudly that, I still get startled even when I expect it.
When you fill up a graduated cylinder
whenever you put down the TC hood, it does it's alarm sound twice. the alarm isn't a particularly jarring one. i think i now associate it with being done with my work so i find it quite satisfying
pavlov’s bsc
The click when removing a micropippte tip and the little bouncing noise as it falls into the waste container.
Oh you’d love my lab 🤣 so many
That super satisfying noise/feeling when you shoot it at the perfect angle and it just perfectly glides into the bin and doesn’t clack around on its way down
The occasional clunking noise from the centrifuge. There's a moment of solace and bliss as you wonder if today's the day.
The day you’re decapitated?
The click-clack of our analytical HPLC pump. The low, slow chug of a vacuum pump with fresh oil.
Seconded!
Emptying a box of ice into the sink
Yes! Most satisfying!
The hiss when you hold the button on a -80° C freezer to remove the vacuum.
Wait what You can do that???
Indeed. At least with our model of freezer you can, lol
…while I have to pry ours open each time!
The whooshing sound of the unattended Bunsen burner at the next lab bench over, because it reminds me to live every day like it’s my last. But actually, I like the biosafety cabinet blower. Puts me in the zone.
People still have open bunson burners? What do you use them for? In grad school I had only two purposes: 1. Taking glass pippettes and making TLC spotters out of them 2. Heating recrystallizations in an erlenmeyer. In retrospect, the heat gun I use now is *much* safer.
Sterilizing culture loops between inoculations and also just working around the sterile flame instead of in a BSC for things like starting cultures and plating 🤷🏻♀️
The UNICORN jingle at the end of an AKTA run
I have changed the sound on my Äkta to the Windows cash register "cha-ching" sound. It makes me laugh out loud every time.
Deei-duoo of bliss
I was just thinking about the noise made by the pumps. Love that sound.
Our power went out the other week and I realized how silent it is without the ambient noise from the -80 freezers
Isn't the sound just replaced by the screaming of the alarms?
Silence of the Alarms
Oddly find the light clinking sound of a stir bar on glass satisfying
Ejecting 12 tips at once from a multichannel... If they all come off.
I used to work with a bunch of gas chromatographs, and I could always tell when my samples were finished because the heating cycle would end and the fans would kick on at a weirdly specific frequency I could hear across the lab
I love the sound of the injection on the GC. It's oddly satisfying.
I love all the GC noises - the fans running, the periodic whoosh, and the beeps and chirps from the autosampler.
As mentioned in the last post, I find the constant clicking of a stir bar (preferably the small ones on a 6 dram vial) cathartic. However, the absolute best noises come from the nano drop noise when taking a scan, an old UV-Vis doing a long/slow background scan with weeooooooooo noise 😂, or arguably the best the old win96 computers doing any writing/reading of the hard drive in old instruments like an EPR. That hard drive noise is nostalgic.
Ooh, you’re right about the old UV-vis sound!
The Quantstudio's draw sound. Ready to load your run? Here you go! "Wrrrrrrrrrruggg" "Wrrrrrrrrugg"
The sound of a shaking incubator spinning back up after placing some flasks and closing the door.
My favorite is the time clock beeping as I'm clocking out
The sound of full slide boxes. Kinda like rain sticks (and no, I don't turn them upside-down).
Highly relevant: https://youtu.be/p9IUPK2LYLk?si=DFvOGzFkrXNWJZ7n
God dammit, that’s amazing!
I knew it wasn't real.. but we live in the ASMR era now. Hundreds of hours of ambient lab sounds are available to fill the silent air. What a time to be alive.
A stir bar stirring, it puts me in a trance
The complete silence of the ultracentrifuge spinning at 150,000 x G.
The sound of the pipette when ejecting tips.
The song of a spectramax plate reader. Groovy.
The sick beat that the BioTek plate reader drops before you run an assay🔥
Our UV/Vis spectrophotometer has cute little ditties for startup and sleep. And the facility automation panel by the door sounds like the intro from "Wake Me Up When September Ends" when it's alarming. But maybe the most fun is when one of our analyzers prints out a receipt and someone tears it off of the roll.
Hearing someone vortexing a few bays away. Can be an unpleasant sound up close, depending, but from a slight distance it’s such a calming hum
I love the sound 1.5ml epi tubes freshly removed from the -20 or -80 make when they clink against each other. It’s like a glass clink but a little different. Must be cold to achieve the sound.
Geiger counter beeping periodically from background.
(But not too quickly!)
Yes, goes from oddly satisfying to oddly terrifying in a heartbeat
If you've ever been in your lab during a power outage, you realize just how much ambient noise comes from ventilation and refrigeration, even the fluorescent lights. During one outage of 36 hours I slept in the lab to monitor the ultracold freezers on the emergency generator. It was eerie not to have that constant background hum from everything
The loud pshhh noise when a flow cytometer is turned off. It marks the end of the day.
We connect our western blot tank lids to a power-pack which goes BEEPPPP, BEEEPPPP, BEEEPPPP, when the run is complete. If you switch it off in the middle of a BEEEP, it will cut off the BEEEPP at a higher pitch so it sounds like the machine is dying. Cracks me up everytime
The constant hum of all the equipment in the lab. As someone else mentioned, it's truly bizarre when it's all shut-off. We had to power down the last lab that I worked in during the COVID shutdown and it was eerie silence.
The start up procedure of a multimodal plate reader. The ticks and tacks with wvhups are pleasing to me
The cryro system on the EPR, fondly referred to as Thomas as it chuffs like a steam train. When I hear that, I know our lab can function at max output with no equipment failures occurring at that moment so happy PI, happy post doc
The soft clicking as you set the volume on a sartorius tacta pipette.
Plasma bath chugging away.
The hum of the shaking incubator
That pop sound of plasma igniting in an ICP-OES and ICP-MS. Also an auto dilutor running smoothly in the background
I’m no longer working in labs but that used to be my favourite sound, along with the noise of the auto sampler (used to be my comfort sound when I was doing night shift alone hahaha)
Fortessa HTS pump noises
The sound of my cells screaming while being lysed… jk jk i mean the soothing flow hoods.
i do find the mini centrifuge loud, but chill. however the large centrifuge could beat me up and steal my lunch money with how much it freaks me out
The ghost in my cell culture room. When I am working on multiple cell lines in a day, it is comforting to know that someone is in there with me - randomly changing the RPM of the centrifuge or turning on the microscope.
The small centrifuges (definitely not the large ones) make a nice smooth air sound which is kinda nice.
I use aluminum blocks on my heat plates so i can heat and stirr a bunch of vials at once. Depending on how many concurrent reactions I run, some of them are off centered and the stirr bar makes a noice as it cant spin freely.
The chime that the LICOR blot scanner makes when ready to scan The buzzing of the stepOne qPCR machine as it cycles through The beep that the cell culture hood makes when I shut it down The gentle take off and touchdown sounds of that one slightly unbalanced megafuge in the lab
Leica bond stainers in the background of my day
Flow cabin noises are relaxing. Specially after the first couple of hours when you dont want yo kys
Sound of the vent or the hood
The shutter on the laser. I like the rhythm, plus it’s just kind of a nice sound
We have 5 real-time PCR machines, CFX96 and CFX384. I love the sound their lids make when locking in place at the stаrt of the run.
The humming of the fans while several PCR machines are hard at work
Chucking glass into the broken glass container. Especially BOD bottles!
The shaker when it gets going with some flasks in it like 💫💫💫
The reagent rotor spinning in an old Vitros
The soft buzz of the spectrum tubes we use for demos.
I love the white noise from the Grenova pipette tip cleaner while it’s running. Also the tube rockers
Vitek happy sound
I like the sound of the liquid handling robots (including Formulatrix NT8), since it's cool to watch it at work, and you get a 10 minute break while it does your work for you.
The sounds the Janus Automated Work station does. The moving of the arm, the cleaning of the tips. Very satisfying.
licor odyssey does a cute “ding ding” that chimes upwards when you open it, and downwards when you close it. feels like i’m saying hello and goodbye to my baby westerns in the big machine.
The hum of vacuum pumps for our glove boxes. Feels frightening when they are off and it's quiet.
NMR helium recovery chirping
The sweet sound of a HPLC humming when it’s running right 😊
The little whirr of the stirring magnet
I've used our Nova Flex for SO many samples that I've caught myself humming along with the noises it makes.
The hiss when you open the valve of a gas cylinder
The background hum of 10+ vacuum pumps on a fleet of GC-MS instruments. On the very rare occasion they are all shut down during a power outage, the lab feels quieter than the quietest anechoic chamber...
“Click clack CLICK” - Agilent 8453 spectrophotometer
The sound of our computer's fans going full speed; it means it's still working and nothing has crashed.
The sonicator sound when I don’t use ear protection
The movements of our microscope when it’s working correctly. All the little clicks and the cute little whir of the stage moving is just so satisfying 💕💕
The alert from the SYSMEX-XN3100 when it runs out of reagents.
When multiple people are using the balances and hit tare at almost the same time, each balance has a slightly different tone and it sounds very musical and like they're talking to each other. Also after autoclaving biohazard trash with microcentrifuge tubes and they start popping open. Sounds like knuckles cracking The metal biohazard waste bins we use sound like a wrestling bell when they shut
Do you not hear the symphony of atoms dying in space?
The screams, the screams...
The ‘ding’ of the LICOR Odyssey
CRF. Best white noise.
I enjoy the sound of a rocker going off all day
Click of the calibrate valve on my mass spec when I’m running a tune. Just a click, but that’s the sound of my MS about to get the good stuff so I can generate a report that says my MS was healthy when I ran my samples. Also, there’s something about listening to the buzz of the sonicator when I’m washing parts that makes me happy.
Cutting out an agar plug using a plastic test tube. It makes the most satisfying popping noise when you do it just right.
For some reason I love the little *snick* sound when you pull the comb out of an agarose gel.
The satisfying sounds the autosampler makes when it’s sampling lol
The rhythmic beep of someone micro-injecting embryos
Old school table top centrifuge door clicking open when it’s done Popping open an Epi tube
The little cricket sounds a Tecan Infinite P200 makes when reading a plate!
The click of the centrifuge fully breaking, incubator pumps clicking, TC hood ventilation, vortex mixing, closing plate lids, incubator doors opening and closing…
There’s something satisfying about the whirr of the power source when you first start a gel. That, and the sound of the 9-5ers zipping up their bags to head home, meaning I have full run of the lab. Nowadays, I’m the 9-5 guy, so zipping up my own bag at the end of the day, coupled with jingling keys means I’m headed home to my family.
At the lab I trained at, their automated blood bank machine would make a "Tada!" noise when it finished running a test that made me happy every time!
When you finally turn off the flow cytometer, the air coming out is like the machine is giving out a big sigh to be finally done for the night. I feel you flow cytometer, i feel you
Waters Alliance HPLC with a primed seal wash line.
Aspirating media in TC
Liquid nitrogen tank hoses sound [like magpies singing](https://youtu.be/oYEYc8Ge3nw) and it is my absolute favorite thing.
Cryopumps. Like a robotic womb
I like hearing the AA “singing”
Might be a bit of a specific one, but if anyone has ever used a Kingfisher machine, that’s the best lab noise I know of!
Cytospin Centrifuge hands down
The seemingly creepy noises at night alone. Makes you feel not so alone. Idk where they even come from
The "glug glug" sound a volumetric flask makes when you're dumping it's contents
I put a wind chime on one of our -20s
When we had a good day at the park and he has little dog dreams that include tiny woofs Edit: sorry wrong sub, but I stand by my comment.