Author: Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 9, 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.

▰ Will Power: As described by Engadget’s Daniel Cooper, this collaboration between Mercedes-AMG and musician will.i.am sound kind of incredible: “MBUX SOUND DRIVE works by pairing musical elements in a song with ten inputs taken from the car. Start the car and all you get is the track’s bed, so to speak, looping in the background waiting for you to get moving. Push on the accelerator at low speeds and it’ll add some bass reverb to the song, while turning the steering wheel gets you extra effects or the chorus loop kicking in. It’s only when you open the car up on a clear highway and the main music and lyrics will start blasting, rewarding you for moving along. And then, when you’re coasting toward a stop light, the lead vocal and melody will peel away, returning you to the far less intrusive backing track.”

▰ Grateful Dead: Few publications unpack the memeosphere of the internet — which is not to be mistaken for the internet as a whole, a fact that many unpackers of the mesosphere seem to forget — with the intelligence of the Garbage Day email newsletter, which managed to take the meta-humor of a video about sound being accidentally posted without sound, and then consider it as evidence of the so-called “dead internet” theory. See, despite the original post having failed conceptually: “It has 30 million ‘views’ and almost two thousand retweets. And the hundreds of replies beneath the video are all from other verified novelty accounts promoting their own content.”

▰ Doctor’s Notes: “Doctors at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine have now identified the distinct acoustic features of healing music. Based on a ‘healing music dataset’ of 165 pieces of music recommended by experts, they extracted 370 consistent acoustic features of healing music that transcend genre, and they validated their ability to positively shape emotional states. The work has ‘implications for the development of artificial intelligence models for identifying therapeutic music, particularly in contexts where access to professional expertise may be limited,’ they write.” —The always interesting proto.life email newsletter summarized the findings of research published in General Psychiatry.

▰ QUICK NOTES: Fine Tuning: TWiS reader Miles Anderson helpfully suggested, via email, that the Roy Lichtenstein painting/sculpture I wrote about in the previous issue of This Week in Sound might, in fact, depict 93.9FM (which is to say, the dial is set a smidge to the left of 94 rather than to the right), which would be WNYC. ▰ Sound Off: This mask that lets you talk without being overheard has to (somewhat ironically) be seen to be believed. It’s the “Silent Mask” from Skyted, a company whose name sounds like if the TED Talks took over SkyMall, which is in essence what the mask looks like. ▰ Wipe Out: “The radar and antenna were damaged. Manila later said that China also used a long-range acoustic device that temporarily caused severe discomfort and weakness to some Filipino crew, but there was no evidence of this on the ship we were on” — that’s a side note from a New York Times piece about the impact experienced from Chinese military water cannons. ▰ Say Meow Meow: Princeton professor of music Gavin Steingo has a book coming out in March titled Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity, and I’ll be reading it for sure. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ : Two others on my ever-growing list: A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous by Caspar Henderson, and Listen: On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber, both recently reviewed by Mythili G. Rao. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Only Waiting for This Moment to Arise: The Shriek of the Week is the blackbird — and better yet, the birder behind the Shriek of the Week is now letting non-paying readers access the full posts. ▰ Horn Dogs: Two Australian professors try to sort out what characteristics make for the best didgeridoo.