Martinshorn (n) siren, ambulance siren
The key sound effect that defines European city from American city is the Martinshorn. That's the emergency siren that you can hear wailing in the background as escaped convicts, maligned heroes, and angry cartoon dogs bust their way through cityscapes that the director promises are not Hollywood sets - nor the mean streets of Toronto. In Germany, this siren is called the Martinshorn after the original German manufacturer.
We live right by a hospital, so I have become fairly well acquainted with the Martinshorn. Luckily Germans wouldn't dare be so rude as to have accidents after 8PM, so it has yet to disturb my sleep. However, even though I hear the Martinshorn drifting through my windows many times a day, a lifetime of BBC dramas and cold war movies has instilled the siren into my head as a sound effect that is shorthand for an across-the-pond "somewhere else." So when I am sitting in my apartment reading or cooking or conjugating German verbs and I hear a Martinshorn, my first instinct is to ask myself who is forcing me to watch Run Lola Run again.
The other thing that the Europeans really have down to an art is its effective use of the Doppler Effect. Yes, science nerds, that's the one where sound waves whose point of origin is moving towards you hit your ears close together, sounding high pitched and then ringing deeper and lower as the source gets farther away and the sound waves hit farther apart. Come on guys, these are Ms. Frizzle basics. North American sirens apparently are on the Doppler Effect bandwagon as well. But the Europeans seem to really have the hang of the directional benefits of a siren rather than just the ear-splitting-loudness-and-temporary-deafness part, and so the Martinshorn sounds totally different depending on whether it is coming towards you or heading away. Maybe it didn't help Manni - but as a pedestrian who isn't stuck in a film with a soundtrack like a late nineties rave, I definitely feel a lot safer crossing the street.
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