Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

This Week in Sound: “Vigilance in Response to Noise Playback”

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 23, 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.

▰ BIG FLOCK: Noise pollution has numerous impacts on nature, including making birds flock together: “Why might birds become more social when exposed to noise? The researchers have a few ideas. One possibility is that since traffic noise makes it more difficult to hear the approach of predators, the birds seek safety in numbers. Indeed, studies of other species have noted increased vigilance in response to noise playback. … Another possibility is that the increased social behavior acts as a buffer to the stress of noise pollution. Scientists have measured increased stress hormones in response to noise in some species. Being more social may mediate the effects of noise-induced stress.”

▰ CITIZEN WATCH: A biodiversity effort in Rwanda focuses on birds — and bird song: “At present, the first ever Rwandan citizen science initiative, which has been running since 2021, focuses on equipping young students, many from rural communities, with the skills to observe, audio record, and scientifically label birds by their sounds, songs, and calls. … By using affordable sound recording equipment aimed at entry-level citizen scientists, participants are trained in audio-data collection, verification, preparation, and storage for both higher-level scientists and other citizen scientists. Currently, different existing teams deployed across birding hotspots in Rwanda are divided into categories, including recordists and verifiers.”

▰ I, ME, MINE: It’s quite incredible how much control people playing games have to personalize the environments and interfaces that define those games, case in point this list of eight mods for Minecraft, all related to sound, such as “effects like realistic reverb, attenuation, and simulated sound absorption,” and “increased variety of sounds that can occur when you’re exploring a specific biome or region,” and “higher-quality, rain, thunder, and other atmospheric and immersive sounds in-game,” and a detailed ability “to disable any default sound within the game through a custom settings menu.” 

▰ QUICK NOTES: Turn It Up: The voice AI company ElevenLabs has gained an $80M investment. ▰ On the Make: AI vocal deepfakes hit the presidential primary New Hampshire. ▰ Read It: Google Chrome for Android now has a “text-to-speech” feature. ▰ Outboard Motor: If your listening habits are as technologically mediated as mine, then you may appreciate the idea that a synthesizer musician, Richard Brewster, can identify unused outputs from the circuitry of a commercial product and then devise an extension module to take advantage of them. ▰ Soup Sound: What you hear matters when you eat. ▰ Head Games: The more I read about Apple’s new VR goggles, the more I wonder how many of the interface advancements in other Apple products, such as the “Spatial audio follows head movements” setting in MacOS, were developed in tandem. ▰ Great Shakes: The Shriek of the Week is the Great Tit, of whose noise-making we’re told, “It’s all very confusing to the human ear, and one credible explanation for their extensive repertoire is that it’s designed to be confusing — to other great tits.” ▰ Smart Alecs: An upgrade of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, could come with a subscription price. ▰ Beat It: The perception of rhythm is inherent in being human. (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!) ▰ Sing-Along: A car with a built-in karaoke machine. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

Sound Ledger: Leaf Blowers, Brussels

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

66%: In a 2-1 vote, a township council in New Jersey voted to ban gas leaf blowers

$200: The price for third and subsequent violations

30: The speed limit, in kilometers per hour (just shy of in miles) in Brussels, as of three years ago, making the city considerably quieter 

Sources: blower (patch.com), speed (brusselstimes.com)

On the Line

Some favorite recent sentences

/ By Marc Weidenbaum 
"There’s no sound I don’t like. They’re all good."

That is a quote from an 11-year-old, named Aissam Dam, who was born deaf and gained hearing late last year as the first person to “get gene therapy in the United States for congenital deafness.” (gift link). “The studies, researchers said, mark a new frontier for gene therapy which, until now, had steered clear of hearing loss.”

. . .

"She pauses, and reaches for the glass of water by her side. Meanwhile, London tests the window frames one by one; rattles the glass, checking for entry points. But London, for the moment, is staying outside. While Alison sips, raindrops pebble the windows, an invisible benediction because the blinds have been pulled down. But the sound paints the picture nonetheless: a relentless battery, as if Monochrome were under siege, and down to its last supplies."

That is from Mick Herron’s latest novel, The Secret Hours, which isn’t, per se, part of his ongoing Slow Horses contemporary spy series (also an Apple TV series, which I haven’t managed to really get into, despite my having read all the books — in fact, every book he’s written), but does take place in the same world, with many overlapping characters. (Alison is a spy being interrogated about activity in Berlin decades earlier, around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Monochrome is the name of the intelligence forensic project under the auspices of which the interview is taking place.) I’d argue this is maybe the best starting point for readers who are new to him, though of course the various revelations will mean more to those who are familiar with his vast ensemble of colorful — and tellingly colorless — spies. And as if that above paragraph doesn’t do a good enough job of setting the scene, the very next paragraph opens with a line that draws the reader right back into the room, as it does Alison: “There is a faint click as glass meets tabletop again.”

. . .

"Despite the rhetoric of immersion, I think that surround sound systems are never about 'self loss' (immersion) but rather the 'lost self' (the impossible maze); the methodology sends the listener on an endlessly frustrated search for a 'sweet spot, as they continually fail to position themselves in response to sonic materials that never convincingly fit into place."

That is musician Mark Fell in his book Structure and Synthesis: The Anatomy of Practice (2022). I interviewed Fell live (via Zoom) on stage as part of the Algorithmic Art Assembly back in March, the year of its publication. I had only a brief bit of time to absorb the book in advance of the event, so I’ve been reading it more concertedly this month, a heady start to this still new year.

Sounds About Sunday

A sonic journal

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The second day of the weekend was a lazy one, and I kept an occasional sound journal as it proceeded:

▰ Crackling of ice in coffee that itself has sat overnight in the fridge. This isn’t the first sound in the morning, but it’s among them, and it’s a sound I most focus on. Also, the warp-core-powering-down sound that the fridge emits when it’s opened for the first time after eight or nine hours.

▰ The inside temperature at home was 65º Fahrenheit come morning, just after 7am. That’s warm relative to the norm lately, so I opened a window to the street. I like opening the window early in the day. Moments after I returned to the dining room table, an electric car went by, reminding me of some writing I’ve been working on about living in a city, San Francisco, seemingly at times — and then at others not — overcome by driverless cars. It’s like a written Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, except listening not looking, and in place of Mount Fuji is the restrained white noise of a passing electric vehicle that almost certainly has no one in the literal driver’s seat. File under “slim book ideas” (also: “virtuous procrastination”). I’ve read it’s healthy to step outside early in the morning, and I find just opening the window can be useful — reminds you of life beyond the space capsule of home, lets the world in a bit physically and, thus, mentally.

▰ A friend reminded me of an album by an old favorite, leading me to look for the instrumental version of a favorite track, leading me to realize how uninteresting much of the band’s music is without the vocalist, and wondering when those tools remove the voice, how many associated overtones go missing, and if in fact that is what makes such machine-ferreted instrumentals come up short, expectations-wise.

▰ A link from a notable musician’s record label’s promotional wing pops up in an email, just an animated GIF that, when clicked on, takes you to a WeTransfer page, the download from which is a single MP3 file with a two-character title that plays some Shepard tones slightly out of sync with each other. The file has no metadata. This is PR in 2024. I suppose it worked, as I have noted it here.

▰ Bad news about a friend hit a Slack while I was doing dishes, listening to an audiobook through Bluetooth earbuds. I wonder sometimes what I miss out on by not doing social media on the weekend, and this is an example. I might not know until Monday that such has happened to so-and-so. I don’t currently consider Slack as part of the excised weekend activity, though I do keep participation low between Friday night and Monday morning. This news arrives in a DM thread, and each time a message comes through in response, every member of the thread is named as part of the text-to-speech announcement. It’s quite an awkward and unintended UX moment.

▰ I’m still listening to an audiobook while doing household chores. A simple set of rags changed my home life, as have audiobooks. I’m prone to tell young people right out of college that their best friend in apartments of their own is a few bags of cloth diapers. Anyhow, the audiobook is good, but the gaps in the sound let other activities through, even with noise cancellation on, leading me to wonder why I can’t add white noise to fill the void. I wonder why, as I often do, I can’t listen to music while listening to an audiobook on the same device. I then think about video games that let you replace the songs curated as part of the game with your own selection of tracks. I then realize I have lost track of the audiobook, and I hit the rewind button several times.

▰ I hear another message from Slack read out loud while the audiobook is playing, confirming that my phone can play two sounds when it wants to. The two voices overlap. A bug that suggests a feature.

▰ Headlines in the day’s local paper about a victory by a local sports team help me understand the hooting I heard the night prior when I took a pre-dinner walk, not all the way to the ocean but close.

On Repeat: Muller, He Can Jog, Meredith

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Michael Muller has an album due out from Deutsche Grammophon that is all collaborations, among them: Danny Paul Grody, Chuck Johnson, Vestals, Ilyas Ahmed, Jonathan Sielaff, Douglas McCombs, Rama Parwata, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Hania Rani, Jon Porras, and Clarice Jensen. The first single, with Jensen, is all Rhodes pads courtesy of Muller and striated cello lines from Jensen. If the repeated-phrasing-with-slight-variations of Nils Frahm’s post-classical work is up your alley, then this is way up your alley. It is certainly up mine. More to come. The album is Mirror Music, due out March 1, and this track is “Mirror 10.”

▰ The Audiobulb record label has put out a large-scale compilation of music with interrelated parts based on shared resources, and that also serves a depiction of the community that has flowered as a result of the label. The release comes as a pair of sets titled Audiobulb Plays He Can Jog – Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, He Can Jog being the musician Erik Schoster who organized it. A highlight is by the Audiobulb label’s founder himself, David Newman, who records as Austici. It’s fascinating exploration of folk and orchestral tonalities, with field recordings and light processing rendering a rich, fully formed atmospheric environment. More details at Schoster’s website.

https://ab-hecanjog.bandcamp.com/track/aeroelastic-autistici

▰ The End We Start From is the latest film score from Scottish composer Anna Meredith, and if you’re in for lush, dense orchestration (“Make a Wish”), pulsing minimalism (“Little World”), and industrial backdrops (“Taking It All In,” “Birth”), it’s all here. Meredith previously score Living with Yourself and Eighth Grade. It’s on the major streaming services. This is the rising swell of “Waterfall”: