News, essays, reviews, surveillance
3,000,000: Number of views of one TikTok video parodying EV sound.
37: Number of countries collaborating to tackle underwater noise pollution.
30: Number of seconds of recording from which someone’s voice can be cloned.
Sources: EV (fastcompany.com; tiktok.com), underwater (nature.org), clone (saturdayeveningpost.com)
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the June 20, 2025, 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.
▰ WATER LOGGED: “A fiscal watchdog is taking the city’s public art authority to task for spending tens of thousands of dollars on a phone line that allowed people to listen to recorded sounds of the Bow River. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation issued a freedom of information request to the city in 2024, revealing that the Reconnecting to the Bow public art project cost taxpayers $65,194.” You can check it out at calgaryartsdevelopment.com. Story via calgaryherald.com.
▰ BLIND BIRDING: “Shah, who lost his sight in a childhood injury, was one of 11 blind people who tracked and identified more than two dozen bird species Sunday as part of an inaugural, nationwide effort to get those who are blind or visually impaired into birding. The day-long, blind birder bird-a-thon drew more than 200 participants who counted 200 species at parks, gardens and backyards in 34 states, including California, Florida, Idaho, Texas, Montana, Pennsylvania and New York.
“‘I loved it,’ Shah, a lawyer who lives near Northwest Washington, said about his two hours of birding. ‘I’ve never done this before and to be able to differentiate the birds based on their sound and identify them was big. I always thought birding was about seeing or watching birds, but I realized it’s also about listening to birds.’” Dana Hedgpeth, in the Washington Post, profiled blind birders.
▰ PISS TAKE: Using machine learning to find information in … urination: “One medical test significantly benefiting from AI is sound-based uroflowmetry (SU). This innovative technique seeks to estimate urinary flow patterns during bladder emptying based on the sound generated by urine striking the water surface in a toilet bowl. SU emerges as a remote and proactive alternative to uroflowmetry (UF), a standard clinical test performed by urologists to detect issues associated with urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), such as obstructions or voiding dysfunctions.” At nature.com.
▰ COLD FRONT: “Samsung’s latest smart fridges now support multi-voice recognition powered by the company’s Bixby assistant, which can be used to bring up personalized information on the built-in smart displays based upon which member of a household is speaking.” Via The Verge.
▰ AI? NAY: “Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) is taking a hard stance on generative AI. Today, the organization announced that any film using generative AI would not be eligible for Outstanding Use of Sound Design at its annual Golden Reel Awards. Per TheWrap, this is the first time any professional film organization has made a move like this” Per The AV Club.
▰ GRACE NOTES: (1) Words’ Worth: Tom Gauld had a funny comic about the sound of fountain pens. ▰ (2) Whirs’ Worth: The Washington Post had a multimedia piece about the sounds of electric vehicles. ▰ (3) Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is the Green Warbler (“a rapid rushing warble, often from thick cover”). (4) Mama Cassian: How the sound of Andor was created (an interview with Margit Pfeiffer, the show’s supervising sound editor).
▰ Credit Due: Thanks, Mike Rhode (Gauld, EVs) and Rich Pettus (MPSE, Star Wars).
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ The TV has a remote and the remote has a mic, so I queried it with “Pump Up the Volume” and, of course, this simply made the TV raise its volume level
▰ Going to see Elvis Costello this week. The tour is of the “early songs,” which apparently restricts itself to merely the first 11 albums (1977–1986).
▰ A friend mentioned having played a “url” show, which I initially figured to be a typo for an “irl” (in real life) show, but it turned out to have been a livestreaming show. I like clearly paralleled typology: There are URL shows and there are IRL shows (and, of course, hybrids).
▰ I had noticed that many shows on this current Elvis Costello tour had, thus far, opened with either “I Hope You’re Happy Now” or “Mystery Dance,” and most featured both, and I thought little of it, but when he sang them here in San Francisco, I realized the first was a sign that you weren’t quite getting what you thought you asked for, and the second includes the phrase “Don’t bury me ’cause I’m not dead yet.”
▰ Exploring some old Mario games, circa 2001-ish. It’s like going back to some summer camp I forgot I’d attended.
▰ A new installment of the Frame by Frame comic series I’ve been doing with illustrator Hannes Pasqualini should appear this coming week. Here’s a sneak peek. Meanwhile, the previous ones are at disquiet.com/fxf.
▰ The wind is prelude. When you hear it blowing, you step outside to confirm that, yes, the Golden Gate Bridge is again singing, and somehow the bridge’s song sounds the same (droning, unearthly) and different (today: steadier, thinner, more persistent, higher-pitched), and you can’t believe this remains a thing.
▰ Finished reading one book this week, Stephen King’s The Long Walk. I think it’s the only Stephen King novel I’ve finished reading, aside from The Green Mile, which I bought when it was first serialized as tiny little paperbacks — and I’m not entirely sure I finished that one.
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Matthew Wilcock has this ongoing series of sonified videos, on Instagram, of vehicular activity that are fantastic, turning streets and highways and even parking lots into piano rolls. And he’s also done table tennis and pedestrian intersections. (Thanks, Lowell Goss!) ▰ Bruce Levenstein said, on Bluesky, what many of us non-UK folks think: “it’s 2025. i want to pay for access to BBC iPlayer.” ▰ Mahlen Morris provided, on Mastodon, a run-through of resources for what the Golden Gate Bridge sounds like when it’s singing.
I spent all of my mornings this past week writing about sound in video games, and in the process, I kept coming back to the Nintendo GameCube, which led me to think in particular about gaming in the early 2000s, since the GameCube debuted in 2001.
My subject was, and remains currently, the contemplative aspects of video games and video game sound, notably when one is encouraged — or acts on the instinct — to pause without hitting pause, to situate oneself in a virtual space and observe, especially by listening, to the digital world in which one and one’s on-screen counterpart(s) are engaged. Think of this practice as gaming transcendentalism. In our time of highly popular long-form gaming videos that document digital environments, it’s a fascinating subject that brings media archiving into the realm of the somatic.
Throughout this writing I’ve been doing, an inevitable reference point, for me, has been Cory Arcangel’s classic media art piece, the deeply reflective Super Mario Clouds, which he created in 2002 (and which was featured two years later in the Whitney Biennial). This despite the fact that Super Mario Clouds is, in fact, entirely silent.
For the work, Arcangel took a cartridge of the game Super Mario Bros. and hacked it to remove everything but the blue sky and the cartoonish white clouds. Absent are Mario, and his various obstacles, and even Koji Kondo’s musical score. All that remains are a static sky and those passing clouds, which tellingly resemble thought balloons.
Super Mario Bros. ran on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), aka the Family Computer (Famicon), and was the very first Super Mario game. It came out in 1985, two years after the NES debuted. What may be useful to note is that Arcangel was born in May 1978, so he was about seven and a half years of age when Super Mario Bros. appeared. An impressionable phase of one’s life, to say the least.
While reading up on the topic, I checked out, among other resources, the Whitney Museum’s archive, its online catalog, video of Super Mario Bros. gameplay, and the Whitney page for the Arcangel work, which includes the following description and question:
“By tweaking the game’s code, the artist erased all of the sound and visual elements except the iconic scrolling clouds. On a formal level, the project is reminiscent of paintings that push representation toward abstraction: how many elements can be removed before the ability to discern the source is lost?“
And then I made my way to Arcangel’s own website, which has a page dedicated to Super Mario Clouds, displaying his hacked cartridge — and including a link to his own version/remix of the original Super Mario Bros. software.
I downloaded the Zip file, de-archived it, and recognized the file’s suffix, .nes, from the ROMs for old NES games. We live in the golden age of cheap small portable game consoles that allow one to play outdated video games, so on the chance it might work, I popped the microSD card out of my Anbernic RG35XXSP, a small, clamshell device that pointedly resembles a Game Boy Advance SP. I put the SD card into my laptop, dragged the .nes ROM (file name: arcangel-super-mario-clouds.nes) into the folder titled FC (for Famicon), safely ejected the microSD card, and slid it back into the slot on my SP.
On his website, Arcangel notes that Super Mario Clouds remains, to some degree, a work in progress: “I still need 2 get around 2 cleaning up all the different versions of this code.” So, I wasn’t even sure if his ROM would run, or if it might even freeze up my SP. I turned on the Anbernic, found my way through the menus to the arcangel-super-mario-clouds.nes file, and hit play — and it worked, immediately. The screen turned blue as the brightest day of summer, and the little white clouds began to pass by slowly from right to left.
The dimensions of the image, however, left wide black spaces on either side of the screen, and I recalled that Arcangel’s site had a note that read “Dims: Dimensions variable.” Taking that allowance as a cue, I went through the menus in the alternate firmware I’d installed on my Anbernic SP (in essence, I was running modded software on modded firmware), made a few changes to the arcane settings, and Super Mario Clouds proceeded to fill the screen from edge to edge.
This is when I had the urge to record a long, continuous segment, 10 minutes, to share online. Though Super Mario Clouds is, of course, itself silent — the absence of sound being one of myriad ways Arcangel chiseled his work from larger, more complex source material — that silence speaks to the contemplative opportunities inherent in video games.
I also recalled that game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario, had, early on in his work at Nintendo, been tasked with finding a creative reuse of thousands of abandoned arcade consoles originally designed for a failed game called Radar Scope (1980). In Radar Scope, the screen shows an image that goes off toward a distant horizon, providing a sense of three-dimensional play. Miyamoto dispensed with 3D, and embraced the creative constraint of merely two dimensions. The result was Miyamoto’s first classic (of many), Donkey Kong (1981). There’s a connection to be drawn between Miyamoto’s reduction of the arcade game format to two dimensions, and Arcangel’s further reduction of Miyamoto’s original Mario game to merely its backdrop.
Now, on the one hand, my video of Super Mario Clouds on a modern handheld is, like Arcangel’s original work, entirely silent. On the other hand, the piece’s elegance and its (virtual) environmental focus make it part and parcel of the gaming transcendentalism that I happen to explore mostly through video game sound. To reinforce this point, I almost edited my video to a length of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, following John Cage’s template, but then I decided that 10 minutes allowed for a more immersive experience.
This is the “tube layout” for an ancient stereo console that someone left out on the street. The sticker, undated, was on an inside wall of the piece of furniture. When I complain about how absurd dealing with metadata of audio files continues to be, I like to remind myself that the past had its own difficulties and complexities.
