Author: Marc Weidenbaum

▰ ROOTS MUSIC: Call it “phonosynthesis,” as scientists confirm that sounds can improve the growth of fungus, per the New York Times: “Playing sound to Trichoderma harzianum, a green microscopic fungus that defends tree roots from pathogens, led to growth rates seven times as fast as those of fungus grown in the sound of silence. If the laboratory findings can be replicated in nature, then sound could be an unexpected new tool for improving the health of forests, encouraging beneficial microbes to take root and thrive.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ SCREEN OFF: One thing I love about the Diary section of the London Review of Books is it often doesn’t announce its topic. It’ll just say “Diary” at the top, along with the entry’s author’s name, and unless you read the piece, you might not know what it’s about, and when you begin to read, you don’t necessarily know what’s ahead. A Diary by Dani Garavelli earlier this month waits until its second paragraph to introduce the topic at hand, movie theaters, and while you might guess it’s about their decline, it doesn’t get around to that for a spell. Eventually we do get around to the introduction of sound in the 1920s and ‘30s, and eventually to the unfortunate results of haphazard cost-cutting decades later. With one theater, by way of example: “They simply dropped a wall from the circle downwards and then divided what they had behind that into two more cinemas. There was no soundproofing: you could quite often hear the film in the neighbouring auditorium.”

▰ BOTTOMS UP: Noni Hazlehurst was a presenter on the longrunning Australian TV series Play School from 1978 to 2011. I hadn’t heard about the show until she was interviewed by the Guardian. Here she describes an inflatable raft that caused what she says was the most chaotic thing to ever happen on the show’s set: “Now, the thing is, it’s meant to inflate in 30 seconds into a two-person rubber dinghy, which it did – but it made the most extraordinary farting sound that you’ve ever heard in your life. For a full 30 seconds. It exploded and just about knocked the whole set over. We were in absolute hysterics, to the point where someone wrote in and said we were obviously drunk. You couldn’t have written it. It was just so funny.”

▰ 21ST CENTURY FX: “I’ve never really used sound effects in comics much. I don’t like them. As a kid, they fascinated me, but after a certain age they started to take me out of the storytelling, so I’ve tried to avoid them. I was part of the generations that helped kill the sound effect and the thought balloon, I guess.” That’s the opening of a great consideration the sound effects (and related topics) of comics in the latest issue of Warren Ellis’ newsletter, Orbital Operations. There was also a heap of inventive sound in his recent audio drama, The Department of Midnight, which I need to get around to unpacking. 

▰ GRACE NOTES: Listen Up: Paranoia about whether or not smart devices are listening to us got a nudge when 404 Media shared a leak of an “active listening plan” that proposed to use “‘real-time intent data’ from smart device microphones to deliver ads to consumers.” ▰ No Fooling Around: A multimedia feature in the Guardian on life — especially sonic nocturnal life — during wartime: “people can see almost nothing in the darkness and so strain their ears to hear the noises that haunt them afterwards.” ▰ Punctured: Inconsistency is cited in research on the use of breath sounds in respiratory evaluations. ▰ Battle Bots: Robot vacuums across the country were hacked in the space of several days, [allowing] the attackers to not only control the robovacs, but use their speakers to hurl racial slurs and abusive comments at anyone nearby.” ▰ Just Browsing: A Chrome extension keeps alert for audio deep fakes.

Restaurants are getting noisier, and the noise gets harder for people to deal with as they age. Both those things are true, and they combine to make the situation even worse. Fortunately, in the wake of revised FDA regulations back in 2022, over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids are becoming available, dropping the price significantly (from the thousands of dollars to the hundreds), and increasing innovation in the marketplace. 

The new hearing health tools in Apple’s AirPods became the FDA’s first authorized OTC hearing aid software device, as announced last month. Without that regulation change, the situation would not have improved as quickly as it has. 

As Chris Welch reports in the Verge, the initial trio of Apple featues includes “clinical-grade hearing aid functionality, a hearing test, and more robust hearing protection.”

Rebecca Hamilton at Slate reports on the scale of need: “[J]ust 16 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 69 years who would benefit from hearing aids ever use them. Some 20 million go without.”

Pete Wells in the New York Times notes a particular use case that predates the hearing health additions: “What you may not know is that the AirPods Pro 2 already come with a setting that can turn up the volume on the voices of people you’re talking to and another one that tamps down background noise. Other earbud makers, including Sony, Samsung, Beyerdynamic and Soundcore, also offer functions meant to make conversation easier in noisy places.” Wells was a long time restaurant critic, so if anyone knows something about noisy rooms, it’s him.

Technology will help, but a major next step is going to require changes to cultural norms. Right now, AirPods and earbuds in general send a visual signal of isolation, that someone is paying attention to something other than the world around them. We’ll need to get comfortable sitting across from someone and not take the presence of their earbuds as a physical indication that they aren’t paying attention to us. No one sees a traditional hearing aid in someone’s ear and thinks they’ve checked out of the conversation, quite the contrary.

Related stories on the topic of things we put in our ears:

▰ Up to 11: For some with extreme hearing loss, the answer in the future may be an SCBI, or “spinal computer–brain interface,” which can “effectively convert sound into interpretable spinal cord stimulation patterns, offering a novel approach to sensory substitution for individuals with hearing loss.”

▰ Fungus Among Us: Mycelium is a fungus with manufacturing utility and reported antibiotic properties. Also, the fungus is the sole ingredient in a brand of earplugs made by Gob (gob.earth), a company based in San Francisco. “The result is a hypoallergenic earplug with a secure fit that moulds to the ear with a similar action as memory foam,” writes Ellen Eberhardt in Dezeen. The makers claim certain unique qualities: “Unlike traditional foam earplugs, which can muffle certain frequencies, our mycelium-based earplugs provide superior sound absorption while maintaining clarity and comfort.” 

▰ Ear Ache: A conservative political commentator was involved in a recent humorous kerfuffle. He reportedly attended a sports event wearing earplugs, and later was accused of editing the plug out of a selfie. Reminder: the year is 2024, and everything is political, including the perceived manliness of hearing protection.

▰ Say What?: “[Researchers] have found those who experience hearing loss are more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease later on. … But if hearing aids are prescribed right off the bat, the risk of diagnosis appears significantly dampened.” The chart below is from the latest issue of JAMA Neurology, published by the American Medical Association.