These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the February 7, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet).
As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.
▰ Apple AirTags with the speakers deactivated are for sale on eBay and Etsy, raising concerns about stalking.
pcmag.com
▰ The director of the Peacemaker TV series, James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad), explains on Twitter how to properly set the audio on your television. I’m not a huge fan, but I cosign his message: “Forget blue tooth, especially on a Mac, and go back to directly wiring in.”
twitter.com/JamesGunn
(Via Peter Albrechtsen)
▰ I’m always ready for a reminiscence of the great Toshio Iwai audio game, Electroplankton — progenitor, as Andrew Liszewski writes, of “smartphone music-making apps.”
gizmodo.com
▰ Thousands of videos collecting uploaded Nintendo game soundtracks have been disappearing from YouTube: “1,300 videos were removed last week and a further 2,200 were taken down on February 1,” reportedly. This may be related to the creation of an online Pokémon Sound Library.
ign.com,
soundlibrary.pokemon.co.jp
(Via Chris McAvoy)
▰ Looking ahead to a hybrid audiobook market that is part human-read and part advanced text-to-speech, as laid out by Sovan Mandal.
goodereader.com
▰ “Tesla is recalling more than 817,000 vehicles in the U.S. because the seat belt reminder chimes may not sound when the vehicles are started and the driver hasn’t buckled up.”
cnbc.com
▰ Learn all about “topological acoustic transistors,” thanks to Charles Q. Choi’s overview. They utilize sound waves instead of electrons.
spectrum.ieee.org, journals.aps.org
(Via Tom Whitwell)
▰ A study of acoustics at elderly care facilities explains how regulations may focus on an insufficient range of variables, notably emphasizing reverberation time over noise, especially in open plan settings.
acousticbulletin.com
▰ An apartment block in the Birmingham, England’s Gay Village will have sealed windows to avoid noise complaints. “According to the plans ’49 out of the 456 units would have sealed windows; 35 units would be fully sealed and 14 units partially sealed where the units are positioned at the corners with windows facing away from The Fox pub.'”
bbc.com
▰ Useful tool: “A command-line tool to automatically download all releases purchased with a Bandcamp account.”
framagit.org
(Via Saga)
▰ Wired lists gadgets and software that might help with tinnitus.
wired.com