A lightly annotated clipping service:
— Misophonia Home: At the New York Times, Barron H. Lerner, M.D., a professor at the NYU Langone Medical Center, writes about the condition that makes some individuals hypersensitive to specific sounds, often sounds associated with the human mouth. He discusses how the existence of the diagnosis is itself a source of comfort to sufferers, an idea that connects to something I often focus on in relation to noise pollution complaints: to the cultural context that makes noises seem louder or quieter. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/please-stop-making-that-noise/
— Aphex Activity: I was happy that Flavorwire’s Jesse Jarnow covered my proposed Selected Ambient Works Volume III, a playlist culled from the 173 tracks currently up on Aphex Twin’s rogue SoundCloud account. As Jarnow notes, one particularly effusive collation of Richard D. James’ off-label activity is a crowd-sourced effort to identify characteristics, such as era and source audio, for the numerous tracks. The hive mind’s tool of choice? A massively shared Google spreadsheet:</br? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11ouNaaVrNp60Ib34Kp0TO1n1XSc7-9DvfiZ9ZiTiD2c/edit?pli=1#gid=0 http://flavorwire.com/507391/alternate-routes-aphex-twin-gives-it-away-the-dude-sleeps
— Industrial Calendar: Whether with a whimper or a bang, it is as of yet unclear, but the “global music industry” has decided, as reported in Billboard, that Friday is now the official release date for record albums, in order to fight piracy. In the U.S. it has historically been Tuesdays, followed the next day by comic-book Wednesday. What effect this will have, aside from making lower-level record-industry employees work over the weekend playing whack-a-mole with piracy sites, is not clear. What effect this will have on the growing legion of musicians who post their releases as they see fit to Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and other such services, or who pre-sell through campaigns on Kickstarter and PledgeMusic and the like, is all the more unclear. Quite likely they’ll simply ignore it:http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/retail/6487290/industry-sets-friday-as-global-record-release-day
— Wikipedia Activism: At ArtNews, Robin Cembalest covers an effort by 600 volunteers to contribute to an “edit-a-thon” to significantly increase the presence of women artists on Wikipedia, among them Cosima von Bonin and Aviva Rahmani, both of whom work with sound. This is a tremendous effort, and one worth emulating in various fields and disciplines. (Found via Shane Myrbeck.) http://www.artnews.com/2014/02/06/art-and-feminism-wikipedia-editathon-creates-pages-for-women-artists/
This first appeared in the March 3, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
ASMR would drive the Misophonia guy nuts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb27NHO_ubg
Yeah, not a match made in heaven. In week 5 of my course we talk about the role of sound in product design, and there’s particularly interesting stuff about how people move stuff around in their mouths specifically to have a partially sonic pleasurable sensation.
I do that with hard candy, actually.. never thought about why.
I guess a bit the same way they engineer car doors to have a particularly ear-pleased SLAM to them.
Yeah, the door slam stuff doesn’t get nearly as much coverage as the “fake engine sounds for electric cars” stuff.