This went out today as a weekly bonus — a thank-you to people who financially support This Week in Sound. It’s a supplement to the free Tuesday and Friday issues: an annotated playlist of recommended music. I wrote about (1) a drone by Bell Mechanical, (2) a preview of an album by Alfredo Costa Monteiro, and (3) a video by Modular Beat.
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the July 4, 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.
▰ IN A PICKLE: “Sports can produce all kinds of unpleasant noises: referees’ whistles, rancorous boos, vuvuzelas. But the most grating and disruptive sound in the entire athletic ecosystem right now may be the staccato pop-pop-popemanating from America’s rapidly multiplying pickleball courts. … The sound has brought on a nationwide scourge of frayed nerves and unneighborly clashes — and those, in turn, have elicited petitions and calls to the police and last-ditch lawsuits aimed at the local parks, private clubs and homeowners associations that rushed to open courts during the sport’s recent boom.” I love when sound pops up in areas I know nothing about, and sports is high on that list. That quote is from a New York Times story. For more, check out the “pickleball sound mitigation” website, pickleballsound.com.
▰ SHOP TALK: If you’re a fan of The Repair Ship, then you know Steven Fletcher, the multi-bespectacled clock specialist and all around wise tinkerer. What you may not know is … well, check out this video, in which he divulges some sonic intrigue from the set. And then check out the follow-up video. (And if you don’t know the show, do give it a try. It’s a testament to craftsmanship, to the emotional power of mementos, and to decency. And sometimes they work on alarm clocks and jukeboxes.)
▰ BASS IS THE PLACE: “Astronomers have detected a rumbling ‘cosmic bass note’of gravitational waves thought to be produced by the slow-motion mergers of supermassive black holes across the universe. The observations are the first detections of low-frequency ripples in the fabric of spacetime and promise to open a new window on the monster black holes lying at the centres of galaxies.” This builds on prior observations: “Until now, though, scientists have only been able to capture short ‘chirps’ of gravitational waves linked to mergers of black holes or neutron stars only slightly larger than the sun.” The image below is a widely circulated interpretation of the phenomenon by artist Aurore Simonnet for NANOGrav, or the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves. (Thanks, Neil Stringellow!)
▰ AIR FARE: The New York Times took a necessary look at the dangers of noise pollution: “A growing body of research shows that this kind of chronic noise — which rattles the neighborhood over 280 times a day, more than 105,000 each year — is not just annoying. It is a largely unrecognized health threat that is increasing the risk of hypertension, stroke and heart attacks worldwide, including for more than 100 million Americans.” The noise in that example is of passing jet planes. “Scientists believe that pronounced fluctuations in noise levels like this might compound the effects on the body. They suspect jarring sounds that break through the ambience — recurring jet engines, a pulsating leaf blower, or the brassy whistle of trains — are more detrimental to health than the continuous whirring of a busy roadway, even if the average decibel levels are comparable.”
▰ FOOD NOISE: We know about COVID’s sometime impact on smell and taste. How about losing your sense of “food noise” due to drugs like Ozempic, an obesity medicine? As it turns out, “food noise” isn’t noise like crunchy potato chips. It’s more like mental noise, shorthand for people who can’t “stop thinking about food.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ QUICK NOTES: Line of Fire: It’s well into fireworks time as I type this, but here’s a reminder that fireworks can serve up psychological harm to veterans and pets alike. ▰ Going Under: If you’re wondering about the underwater acoustics angle on the horrifying OceanGate disaster, then check out this Twitter thread.(Thanks, Philip Sherburne!) ▰ Up Up and Away: If the Audium ceiling in the piece below strikes your fancy, definitely check out the “hanging concert hall,” or Sonic Sphere, at the Shed in New York. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Do Panic: The Shriek of the Week is the Green Sandpiper — “a loud, panicky chooweet or choo-wit-wit, repeated over and over.” ▰ We All Scream: CBS Mornings covered the widely deployed “Wilhelm scream” the original recording of which was recently discovered. (Thanks, Daniel Raffel!) ▰ Bird Roll Call: Volunteers documenting all the birds in Acadia National Park. (Thanks, Rich!) ▰ World Music: I was happy to see that Janet Cardiff, one of my favorite contemporary sound artists, recommended one of my favorite books, Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World; I trust she enjoyed the part about Erwin Schrödinger’s misophonia. ▰ Any Wheels Bad: The Croatian city of Dubrovnik has banned wheeled suitcases due to “locals irritated by the click-clack noise [on their] cobbled streets.”
500: Number of noise complaints submitted by just one Queens, New York, resident (quite amazingly, the person’s last name is “Detering”)
30: Number of years it took for a recently observed “‘cosmic bass note’ of gravitational waves” to pass by Earth
25: Percent of polled Texans near crypto mining operations who expressed concern about noise pollution
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been experimenting with posting brief field recordings (audio and video) on Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. Part of this is just a matter of feeding the algorithm. There’s some value to making the sort of social media you want to see in the world. Part of this is just social engineering — you’ll attract and disinterest the parties you’d want to, respectively. Part of it is functionally algorithmic: to some degree, the systems will send you material related to what you yourself do. By putting out field recordings, the boomerang that is the algorithm may send some back. Part of it is just getting a sense for how such material functions in social media: how does relative silence, the quiet noise of daily life, as expressed in field recordings, sit within the largely exaggerated modes of Instagram and TikTok? How do captions, hashtags, and location IDs — not to mention the decision-making inherent in framing and editing — shape the otherwise mundane material?
I’ve been doing these for 30 seconds each. That is long enough to encourage spending the time, and short enough — especially for people not accustomed to listening to everyday sound — to not discourage engagement. It’s long enough to allow for some variation, and short enough to allow for choosing start and end points that isolate the underlying tone of a given space and time.
The Audium is a longstanding space for experimental, immersive sound in San Francisco. The venue was originally housed in an old building in the Richmond District, opening in 1967 after over a decade of planning and one-off performances, and it has been closer to the City Hall area, on Bush Street, since 1975. The Audium’s small auditorium has no windows. When the concert begins, the lights are fully turned off. Aside from dimly glowing arrows on the floor that direct toward the exit, it is pitch black; you can’t see your own hands, let along the person seated next to you. I attended an evening concert there on Saturday, July 1: a revisitation of a 1969 work by cofounder Stan Shaff (the other founder was Doug McEachern), with Shaff’s son, David Shaff, performing. The piece was an hour long. It consisted of mostly real-world sounds — sirens, horns, bells, balloons, traffic — being moved around the room’s 176 individual speakers, and transformed in the process: filtered, slowed, garbled, dissected. In addition, one heard fantastical abstractions and bits of found media, what seemed at times like soundtracks to TV shows and commercials. There was a 10-minute intermission halfway through the concert. I shot this short video during the break as part of my ongoing series of 30-second field recordings (I’ve been posting these vertical videos at instagram.com/dsqt and tiktok.com/@disquiet.com). I’m always interested in chatter when the combined verbalization transcends communication and becomes a matter of texture, tonality, and rhythm. I was especially keen here to witness whether the specific circumstances in any way impacted the way people spoke, both individually and collectively — did they perhaps hear themselves, in this tiny room, as source audio for an intimate, spatial performance like the one we were all there to experience?
