Author: Marc Weidenbaum

This Week in Sound: Entrainment, Radio, Fungi

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the February 20, 2024, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ THAT’S ENTRAINMENT: To answer the question as to whether electronic music might inherently “alter the consciousness” of listeners, “researchers used electroencephalography, which measures electrical activity in the brain via electrodes attached to the scalp, to gauge the participants’ neural entrainment to the music.” As described in New Scientist, the effort, which explored the concept of “entrainment,” may have medical applications, such as for therapy and in intensive care units. “Entrainment occurs when synchronisation arises between an external rhythmic stimuli, such as electronic music, and the firing of neurons in the brain.” (Thanks, Paolo Salvagione!)

▰ ADIOS, RADIO: “Who in the world steals a radio tower?” asks the station manager of a radio station, WJLX in Jasper, Alabama. He asks because the station’s tower has gone missing: “The tower, all 190 feet of it, had vanished — its 3,500 pounds of spindly steel beams possibly sliced into pieces and dragged away earlier this month by thieves, the police said. … There are, however, some precedents in Alabama. In 2021, the police in Dothan arrested a man who had stolen a 30-foot aluminum trailer with a collapsible radio tower that reached up to 100 feet. And in the summer of 2013, the police in Talladega said that a 75-foot steel radio tower and other equipment had been stolen from a broadcasting group.”

▰ QUICK NOTES: Vitamin Z: Scientists are exploring the role of zinc in causing and addressing hearing loss. ▰ Roots Music: “A pair of experiments has found that fungus grows much more quickly when it’s blasted with an 80 decibel tone, compared to fungus that receives the silent treatment.” ▰ Physics Ed: The discussion of newly confirmed “second sound” (thanks to everyone who sent this — along with related — links to me) in fluid dynamics made me think about the first and second cracks in coffee roasting. ▰ Root, Root, Root: For the first time, a woman is the lead voice in Major League Baseball play-by-play: Jenny Cavnar of the A’s. ▰ Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is that of the wren, “one of our tiniest and yet loudest resident songbirds.” ▰ Don’t Worry, Be Haptic: Learn about vibrational suits, which translate music (and sound in general) into full-body experiences. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Cry It Out: Exploring how infant marmosets use sound to communicate to caregivers.

Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

82,000,000: Number of people in the U.S. who listen to AM radio monthly

20: Number of microphones used to capture sounds in a house in the film Zone of Interest

266: Percent increase in sperm mobility as a result of ultrasound treatment

Source: Radio: nytimes.com. Zone: variety.com. Sperm: newscientist.com.

On the Line: Two Poems and a Film

Some favorite recent sentences

/ By Marc Weidenbaum 
"The spaces
between
things began
speaking. So it was

I understood I
was now
to remain
silent."

That is the opening of a poem, “Upon the Furthest Slope You Know,” by Jorie Graham in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. Later she says of something “almost” said by the wind: “Listen to it / when it speaks to you – it is / the next world.”

. . .

"Almost every artistic direction and decision was guided by the sound. The construction of the shot was not so much the point of view of where he fell but where the music is looking from."

That is Justine Triet, director of the film, Anatomy of a Fall, speaking to the LA Times of the influence of a steel band cover of a 50 Cent song on her movie. 

. . .

"... I felt most  
myself when I was least loved. Cast into  
the night like a half-formed sound, I was falling  
toward sleep when I heard a faint  
rustling as if it were calling from a distant world, 
near enough to startle me awake."

That is from “Shadow Study,” a poem by Jennifer S. Cheng published by The Atlantic.

Visiting The Visitors

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I spent the final afternoon of this three-day weekend on the floor of a dark gallery at SFMOMA, yet again (I’ve officially lost track) basking in the wonder of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors in all its simultaneous nine-screen glory (two screens shown here).

On Celtic Frost

Which I wrote about for Hilobrow

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I was invited by editor Heather Quinlan to write a short essay for the ongoing “Mösh Your Enthusiasm” series — topic: “metal records from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema)” — running at hilobrow.com. I wrote about a song by the band Celtic Frost dating from 1987. Read the full piece on the Hilobrow website.

I don’t usually do dedications of this sort, but I added a shout-out at the end of the piece to an old — and long-deceased — friend of mine, Eric Engelhardt, one of my closest friends from high school, who died in 2007, barely into his 40s. I remember wandering around an amusement park in Los Angeles with him toward the end of his life — before his ailments had been discerned — and finding myself at the top of a staircase, looking back down toward him, as he took it one step at a time, pausing now and then. I’d never had more energy than Eric in my entire life until that moment, and I knew then something was wrong. I also know the corner where I was standing in San Francisco when I got the call on my cellphone that he had died, and I find myself still avoiding it. I couldn’t attend Eric’s funeral in New York because there was a terrible rainstorm the night prior and I was stuck at the San Francisco airport, where all flights had been summarily cancelled. Eric had a ferocious affection for metal, and his love for music in general had an enormous impact on me at an age when such impact can set the course of one’s entire life. (Fun fact: Eric, an accomplished puppeteer, built the original Pepe the King Prawn for the Muppets.)

My Celtic Frost tribute is the 15th in the Mösh Your Enthusiasm series at Hilowbrow, so there are another 10 to come. (For the purposes of Disquiet.com’s emphasis on electronic music: the drum machine on “One in Their Pride,” so seemingly out of place on a metal album, was absolutely addictive to me when I first heard it. And still is.) Below are the first two paragraphs:

Much marks the Swiss doom metal band Celtic Frost’s 1987 album, Into the Pandemonium, as strange. The record is a powerful assemblage of rock mysticism, all occult caterwauling, angular solos, battle-ready drums, and arrangement wizardry. It’s the sort of thing that, at proper volume, promises to tap into the very fabric of myth — or at least lend a climactic soundtrack to a weekend Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

And no track on Into the Pandemonium embraces the band’s strangeness quite like its choice of a 12” single, a song that melds Sprechstimme narrative, Greek chorus portent, and louche metal: “I Won’t Dance.” And that’s saying something, since the album opens with a peculiar cover of “Mexican Radio” (Wall of Voodoo’s novel new wave hit from five years prior) and the single also highlighted “One in Their Pride,” which threads Apollo mission vocal samples, a screeching string section, and an admirably stark drum machine beat.

And the song:

And the other song I mention:

Full piece at hilobrow.com.