Author: Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the July 25, 2023, 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.

▰ SOUND OF SILENCE: Every once in a while, there is a story that so many people send me, I don’t just include it; I also find myself considering what made it stand out (see: smithsonianmag.com, nytimes.com [gift], jhu.edu). One such story is a recently published study that reveals that “we literally hear silence,” in the words of Chaz Firestone, a co-author of the study who is based at Johns Hopkins University. In essence, “While the study offers no insight into how our brains might be processing silence, the results suggest that people perceive silence as its own type of ‘sound,’ not just as a gap between noises.” The one thing I’m trying to understand in this research is what we mean by “silence,” because much of the coverage of the new study persists in treating silence as a blank, whereas much modern sound theory of silence derives from the sense that, as John Cage explored, there is no such thing as silence. The study, in contrast, consistently refers to silence as “nothing” and as “absences of sound.”

▰ WE ALL SCREAM: “I listened. And there it was. That tinny little sound twinkling somewhere nearby” — Souvankham Thammavongsa, the Laotian Canadian poet and short story writer, remembered a youth in thrall of the ice cream truck for The New Yorker. “When you hear an ice-cream truck on your street, it means that someone has thought of you. It means that someone thinks you deserve something good in the world, and you don’t have to imagine that for yourself all by yourself.” … Somewhat related: Nissan has made a zero-emission ice cream van; the promotional video leaves it ambiguous as to whether it plays a tune. It’s got to, right?

▰ TUNE IN: There’s a fantastic essay by Carmel Raz, a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, on the history of the tuning fork, and how it connects to conceptions of the “vibratory nature” of human brain and nervous system. She writes: “To summarize, the popular reception of 18th-century vibrating nerve theory seemingly depended to a large extent on two attributes that were closely associated with music. First and foremost was the well-known fact that music — regarded as consisting, physically, of nothing more than sonorous vibrations — can fundamentally alter our emotions. The idea that the mental changes brought about by music might somehow relate to material changes in the nerves in response to sound thus seemed highly intuitive. The second attribute was the phenomenon of sympathetic resonance, which — since at least the Renaissance — was intimately linked with, and often paradigmatically demonstrated by, sound. Vernacular understandings of vibrating nerve theory thus conflated music’s powerful effects on the mind with an acoustic phenomenon familiar from the domain of music to account for a diverse range of cognitive and affective experiences.” Raz’s piece, “Of Sound Minds and Tuning Forks: Neuroscience’s Vibratory Histories,” is from the freely available multi-author collection The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future. (Below image: a 19th-century photo, from the article, illustrating an individual reportedly struck by “catalepsy” due to the massive tuning fork.)

▰ CORDLESS: So, Marc, is there a sound angle on the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike? Why yes, there is. What follows is National Association of Voice Actors president Tim Friedlander (Record of Ragnarok, One Punch Man) speaking at a Comic-Con panel this weekend:

“As a human voice actor, I can walk into a room and get a script that says something that I didn’t either agree to say or something that I would never say, I personally have that ability to walk out of that room,” Friedlander said. With AI cloning the voices of actors, however, “We’ve lost control over what our voice could possibly say,” he said.

There’s a related recent story about “NSFW mods for open-world classic Skyrim” who used “AI tools to clone the voices of the game’s original actors.”

▰ TURBO APPEAL: The car maker Renault hired famed synthesizer musician Jean-Michel Jarre to develop sounds for its vehicles. There are some short films about the collaboration (fortunately, for monolingual me, with English subtitles). Jarre talks about the importance of symbolizing “mobility,” in contrast with “speed.” Andrea Cera, another composer on the project, discusses challenges, such as suggesting mobility without being too aggressive. Industry films like these are, of course, promotional, but you can still get a sense of an organization’s approach from details. (Via synthtopia.com)

▰ QUICK NOTES: On Call: Meet the woman who composed a ubiquitous bit of hold music. (Thanks, Brian Biggs!) ▰ Live Rail: There’s a 90-minute film by Vincent Woo, Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride, made from a camera affixed to one of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit trains; I love this bit of description from an sfgate.com story on it: “finally, there’s the sound: a dull, grinding hum, constant but endlessly modulating.” ▰ Three of a Perfect Pair: A new approach to “decomposing” sound to its core components looks at three elements: sines, transients, and noises (article and video — thanks, Glenn Sogge!).▰ Club Sandwich: Check out this playlist of binaural — that is, recorded as if by two ears on either side of your head — documents of jazz kissas (or jazz cafes) in Japan by the indefatigable Craig Mod: youtube.com (via kottke.org — thanks, Scott Fletcher!) ▰ Screen Time: A list of five films that “put sound in the spotlight”includes two I know nothing about, and will be checking out: The Wolf’s Call(2019) and The Stone Tape (1972). ▰ Cheerio, Siri: Two more British voices have been added to Siri, bringing the total to four. ▰ Rock Steady: YouTube is thankfully adding a tool that can provide stable volume between tracks from different sources. ▰ Twice Is Nice: Audiobook revenue has shown double digit increase for the 11th straight year.