Author: Marc Weidenbaum

This Week in Sound: A Sonic Health Exam from 1857

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Note: I’m on vacation this week, so there may not be a TWiS email on Friday, November 25th.

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the November 22, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: [thisweekinsound.substack.com](https://thisweekinsound.substack.com).

▰ FINANCIAL HEALTH: In “Coin-Sound, or the Bruit d’Arain of Armand Trousseau,” Dr. Jesse Kraft describes a sonic “diagnostic test” involving coins [“to determine whether or not an individual suffers from a punctured lung.”](https://numismatics.org/pocketchange/trousseau/) Here’s some detail:

>“[A] coin is held flat against the side of the patient’s chest that is thought to be punctured, and tapped with a second coin. … With a stethoscope on the direct opposite side of the patient, if there is fluid or air in the pleural cavity, the practitioner will hear a sound resonate, as opposed to quickly mute. … The sound itself is not produced by the pressure of the air or fluid that has entered the pleural cavity, nor is it the sound from the coins themselves. Rather, the sound comes from tension that is created on the bounding walls of the pressurized cavity.”

The Trousseau reference in the title is the individual credited with having first “observed and described coin-sound,” around 1857. Trousseau (1801-1867) called it “bruit d’arain” which translates as “brazen noise.” Kraft, who earned a PhD in Americana Studies at the University of Delaware in 2019, is the Resolute Americana Assistant Curator of American Numismatics at American Numismatic Society. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ WAYNE MANOR-ISMS: When I worked in Japanese publishing, my duties and natural inclination involved manga, but I collaborated regularly with the anime side of the business. One thing that always struck me was — due to the industry’s prominence in its country of origin — just how well-known were the Japanese voice actors, stars in their own right. American anime fans — and more broadly animation fans — have steadily raised the profiles of voice actors here, even if few have achieved the national notoriety of their Japanese counterparts in terms of name recognition (putting aside movie and television stars who are hired by studios like Pixar to lend familiar voices to animated roles). One individual who stood high on the list of major talents was Kevin Conroy, who died earlier this month at age 66. Conroy portrayed Batman for 30 years in TV series, feature-length animated films, and video games, starting in 1992 with Batman: The Animated Series. As James Whitbrook notes, “Conroy even went on to play a live-action version of Bruce Wayne in the CW DC TV show crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths.” (And he was great in it.)

▰ ACT NATURALLY: “BookBaby, one of the leading players in the audiobook segment announced it has entered into a collaboration with Speechki to **create audiobooks using artificial intelligence-powered synthetic voice narration**. … Speechki [said they support 77 languages](https://goodereader.com/blog/audiobooks/bookbaby-and-speechki-collaborate-to-create-ai-voice-narrated-audiobooks) at the moment along with up to 50 synthetic voice actors.”

▰ BAD ROBOT: The **FCC has a plan to deal with “ringless voicemail spam”** that goes straight to one’s voice mailbox. [Writes Jon Fingas](https://www.engadget.com/fcc-ringless-voicemail-spam-crackdown-220755831.html): “The Federal Communications Commission has determined that these silent voicemails are covered by the same Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) rules that forbid robocalls without consent.”

▰ ENTRY LEVEL: Now **YouTube has its own start-up cue**, or sound logo, developed by the agency Antfood: “The initial idea behind the sound was to have something vibrant, engaging and easily recognizable, so that as soon as you hear it – even if you’re turned away from your TV or device – you know that something’s about to pop up on YouTube.” There’s more detail about the process at the official blog of YouTube in [a post by Andrew Lebov](https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/building-the-new-youtube-sound-one-note-at-a-time/).

▰ DEAD RINGER: We’ve pretty much all seen some thriller where a dead person’s eye or fingerprint is used to help the hero (or villain!) access something important. Real life has caught up with fiction, and is generally the case, things aren’t anywhere as easy as they seem. In fact, quote the contrary. Allison Engel writes on the difficulty that loved ones have accessing the accounts of their dead relatives: “**Face recognition, voice recognition and fingerprint recognition speed up access when someone’s alive but present tremendous barriers for survivors trying to wind down accounts.**” (You can read it for free, thanks to my [gift link](https://wapo.st/3ADchmg).)

▰ VOLUME CONTROL: Spotify has continued to broaden its scope by adding audiobooks and podcasts to its app, making the service about more than “just” music. “Now, **Spotify is rolling out an update to the dedicated Anchor app on iPhone with a new feature it says can drastically improve the audio of your podcast** with just one click,” [writes Chance Miller](). It’s called “Podcast Audio Enhancement” and it can “reduce background noise and level your audio – supposedly so much so that podcasts can now be ‘recorded in a loud coffee shop, on the subway, or with babies crying in the background.’”

▰ BAD VIBES: Our **phones can sense a bridge span’s “unique vibrations”** and help reveal “hidden structural problems,” [writes Matt Simon](https://www.wired.com/story/your-phone-can-determine-if-a-bridge-is-busted/). (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!)

>Every bridge has its own “modal frequency,” or the way that vibrations propagate through it—then subsequently into your car and phone. (Tall buildings, which sway in the wind or during an earthquake, have modal frequencies too.) “Stiffness, mass, length—all these pieces of information are going to influence the modal frequency,” says Thomas Matarazzo, a structural and civil engineer at MIT and the United States Military Academy. “If we see a significant change in the physical properties of the bridge, then the modal frequencies will change.” Think of it like taking a bridge’s temperature—a change could be a symptom of some underlying disease.

▰ ALL HANDS: “Microsoft has made it easier for users of its video conferencing platform **Microsoft Teams to use sign language** through a new meeting experience called [‘Sign Language View.’](https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-teams-introduces-new-sign-language-feature)”

Sound Ledger¹ (Alexa in Decline)

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

$10,000,000,000: The amount Alexa is likely to cost Amazon this year alone

10,000: The number of jobs Amazon is reported to soon eliminate, including from the Alexa unit

8: The number years of years since the introduction of Amazon Alexa

________
¹Footnotes

[arstechnica.com](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/) + [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Alexa)

“‘Seeing’ Music from Manga”

Synesthesia thesis

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Many years ago, I spent a solid half decade publishing manga, eventually becoming the editor-in-chief of the U.S. edition of the magazine *Shonen Jump*. It was an amazing experience, one I treasure to this day. However, my work on manga rarely overlapped with my interest in sound.

Traveling to Japan for work over the years did give me the opportunity to attend concerts at Tokyo venues I’d otherwise never have even heard about. Also, there were times while preparing an issue of the magazine when we got to debate how to translate sound effects, or how to effectively help a young reader (this was back from 2004 to 2009, before manga was as mainstream as it became outside Japan) understand things like the vertical ellipses that signify an extended silent pause. Most of the shonen comics I worked on were about fighting (e.g., *Naruto*, *One Piece*), the main exception being, as one reader put it, “the one about moving stones around a board.” (The latter was a joke at the expense of *Hikaru no Go*, which was one of my favorite things we published.)

And so it was with great interest that I read a new academic study from two authors based at National Taiwan University, Taipei: [“‘Seeing’ music from manga: visualizing music with embodied mechanisms of musical experience.”](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470357220974707) The article looks specifically at how music is represented in manga (for the uninitiated, the word is both singular and plural, as is the norm in the Japanese language) that take music as their subject. Iju Hsu and Wen-Yu Chiang, the article’s authors, study such highly recommended series as *Nodame Cantabile* (about a classical music student ) and *Detroit Metal City* (the title is self-explanatory), among others.

Are You Experienced?: This diagram from the article maps “how music is transformed into visualized music”

The article, which came out in the recent volume 21 of the journal *Visual Communication*, explores visual metaphors for sound in various manners, notably the Visual Metaphor Identification Procedure, or VISMIP. Another approach explores “six embodied mechanisms that induce emotion.” In the words of the authors: “this study sheds light on our overall understanding of audio-visual cross-modality, musical experience, metaphor and embodied experience.” It’s dense stuff, and I’m still making my way through it for a second time — and beginning to explore the trove of articles and books cited as references. *(Thanks, Gene Kannenberg Jr. and Bart Beaty!)*

More on the Deadly Silence of Andor

Vacuum tube

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Head Banger: Andor’s Bix feels the noize

When I wrote about the sonic torture in the “Nobody’s Listening!” episode of the Star Wars TV series Andor back at the start of the month, I postulated that before opting for the audience hearing nothing at all while rebel-adjacent character Bix succumbs to imperial punishment, the creative team on the show perhaps might have tried [“to recreate — to imitate — what Bix hears.”](https://disquiet.com/2022/11/04/imperial-death-rattle/) And of course, leaving it to our imaginations, which is where the episode landed, was the best of all possible decisions.

And it turns out that, indeed, the Andor crew did try to fill the void first. This is per an interview at [slashfilm.com](https://www.slashfilm.com/1092938/andors-sound-team-came-up-with-a-horrifying-torture-sound-but-scrapping-it-was-the-most-effective-choice-exclusive/), which spoke with David Acord, the supervising sound editor on Andor. Acord explained:

>“When that scene came up, it was like, ‘Oh, okay, well…’ It’s daunting, for sure, that we had to come up with a sound that is, ‘What’s the sound that would literally be used to torture somebody with?’ So we came up with a lot of ideas of, “What do these creatures sound like that they’re emulating?” Or maybe it’s, we come up with a more surrealistic thing of, ‘What does the sound make the characters feel like? What is that sound?’ And ultimately, it was Tony who said, ‘No, we don’t want to hear it. The audience doesn’t hear it, and let Adria Arjona carry that scene.’”

In Acord’s anecdote, Tony is the series’ creator, Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Rogue One). Arjona (Good Omens, Irma Vep) plays Bix. And carry it — abetted by the silence — she certainly does.

Scratch Pad: Pirie, Mastodon, AI

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media during the preceding week. I tend to think of social media — Twitter especially, though I’m taking a break, and Facebook to a degree, and increasingly [Mastodon](https://post.lurk.org/@disquiet) — as my public scratch pad. It’s informative to revisit a week of thinking out loud in public. Also, knowing you’ll revisit what you say pulls in the reins a bit, in a good way.

▰ Just an occasional reminder that my inbox is certainly open to new music releases for potential review, but I simply can’t respond personally to them all due to the sheer amount of inbound communication. Follow-up emails don’t help, I assure you.

▰ Mastodon has retired the term “toot,” per Dell Cameron at [Gizmodo](https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-toot-retired-twitter-tweet-equivalent-1849786221). I think it’s a good move. Per my earlier comments (which preceded the announcement, about which — to be clear — I knew nothing in advance), this helps reinforce that Mastodon isn’t just a Twitter replacement. It’s something else. (I mentioned this [back in early May](https://disquiet.com/2022/05/02/how-i-got-from-mastodont-to-mastodon/), when I wrote that people would maybe less often confuse Mastodon’s posts with Twitter’s tweets if Mastodon didn’t refer to its posts as “toots.”)

▰ Person 1: The problem with AI is it’s too easy. Those images you post look great, but they’re too easy. It’s gonna take over because it requires no effort.

Person 2: I had to do several rounds of coaxing the prompts each time, and I learn a bit more each time I do it. There’s a lot of trial and error, and paying attention.

Person 1: That’s the problem with AI: it takes too much work. It won’t take off until it gets easier.

▰ If you’ve done any Disquiet Junto projects and wanna be on a Mastodon list (I’ve not yet experimented with Mastodon lists), lemme know and I’ll put one together.

▰ A local cemetery is advertising on television. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a television ad for a cemetery before.

▰ “A low down disturbing pest / But, as of now, I’m gonna pluck this pest off my chest” —The Fat Boys’ [“Trouble!”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PowrdHySIXY) (which samples Sam and Dave’s “Hold On! I’m a Comin'”)

▰ The subtitles in this TV show, *Karen Pirie*, keep saying how the car’s handbrake “croaks.” Is that a Britishism, or a car thing, or a British car thing? (I’m illiterate in all three.)