A lightly annotated clipping service:
Windup Bird: Why not participate in the Bird Audio Detection challenge, currently underway thanks to the Machine Listening Lab of Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the IEEE Signal Processing Society. “Detecting bird sounds in audio is an important task for automatic wildlife monitoring,” states the announcement post, which among other things introduces the concept of “automatic wildlife monitoring.” The deadline for participation is December, and there are two datasets — one of them from Chernobyl.
Kept Soundly: During a test run of a “fire suppression system” intended to keep safe the data systems of a Romanian bank, the extremely loud sound of gas canisters letting loose caused enough vibration to reportedly damage the bank’s hard drives, writes Andrada Fiscutean at Vice’s Motherboard.
(via Braulio Agnese)
No Love: A follow-up to last week’s piece about the tennis stadium where a newly installed roof kept out the rain but pumped up the volume: this time around it’s a tennis match during which, per the Associated Press, “a loud noise from a malfunctioning sound system interrupted a key point, resulting in a do-over.”
(via @BellyFullOfStar)
Excelsior, or Not: As Alexander Lu writes at comicsbeat.com, the current Marvel cinematic universe is peculiarly void of memorable scores. He looks into why, emphasizing the role of temp tracks. This isn’t the case with the Netflix TV series; the upcoming Luke Cage looks like it’s going to use hip-hop to maximum effect, thanks no doubt to Cheo Hodari Coker, a former music critic who also worked on the show Southland. Southland, famously, didn’t have a score at all, but it used the appearance of everyday music, like from passing cars and block parties, quite well. Perhaps things will improve when there’s a Dazzler movie. Or a Banshee one. Natalie Zutter weighed in the next day on the subject at tor.com.
(via Eric Searleman of the great superheronovels.com)
Paper Formats: Kristine Samson and Sanne Krogh Grogh have proposed a new academic format, the Audio Paper, “as appropriate for academic presentations.”
The Sound of Swiping: Tinder, the dating app, got a makeover in July. Mark Wilson at Fast Company Design reports on how the audio branding agency Listen gave it its own sounds, the app having previously relied on “stock sounds in the iOS library.”
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the September 16, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.