This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve taken a fresh start at my sound.tumblr.com account. This time I feel — as I suppose I have each time, for varying lengths of time — like I’ve finally sorted out how to manage it, what use to make of it. I’m pretty unsatisfied by simply reposting things without commentary. At the same time, Tumblr is even more like Twitter than it is like Facebook: it doesn’t seem to reward longer considerations of subject matter, and much of the collective participation happens through hashtags and through reposting. So, I’m now using Tumblr as a kind of linkblog, an “active delicio.us” as it were. It has a specific focus: entirely on my research on “the role of sound in the media landscape. That’s the realm of the class I’ve been teaching since 2012 at the Academy of Art in San Francisco (“Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds”). Everything that I post to sound.tumblr.com will be annotated, but only lightly, and I’m doubling down on the hashtags, so they’ll be of use to me for collation purposes. For the re-inauguration, I’ve updated the theme, just to tonally note that there’s been a shift.
Recent posts include the “ghost lap” of a race car, aftermarket activists undoing the sounds added to vehicles, Teju Cole’s ode to the vuvuzela (via Alexis Madrigal), and Yuri Suzuki’s new sounds for shoes.