studio journal – Page 7

EV Car Wash

It's a wet one

November 19, 2024November 20, 2024 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Just as the car pulled into the low-rent automatic wash attached to the gas station and wrapping around and behind the snack shop, I pulled my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and hit the big red record button. Not documented here are the interior’s colorful flashing lights, which seemed to exist solely to heighten the mechanized entertainment factor, but the sounds tell enough of the story, beginning with the high-pressure drone of the commercial cavern, proceeding through foam and the thick Lovecraftian tongues that lapped at the windshield, past the oversized brushes, and through the final rinse and drying cycles, followed by the fade-out as the car emerged back into society, just at the start of end-of-day rush hour. This was my first time through a car wash in an electric vehicle — meaning there were no particular sounds emitted by the car itself throughout — and my first time in a car wash in a very long time. A decade, maybe two? The denouement at the end was almost complete when I hit the stop — actually, “Done” — button. (Recorded November 19, 2024, on an iPhone 13 Pro.)

It’s also on freesound.org.

“Flesh Noise”

The chatter was like rainfall

September 30, 2024September 29, 2024 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I had a few hours to spare so I grabbed a table at a hotel downtown where I passed, far too easily, as a participant of the ongoing professional conference. The wifi required a room number and a corresponding name, but my phone worked fine as a modem. Quite suddenly, an hour and a half into my stint, myriad doors opened and the hallway was packed with actual conference participants, marked by shiny lanyards and purpose-built smiles. The chatter was like rainfall, like a rushing stream, like a flock of chatty birds — dense, rapid, and unintelligible. I recorded 45 seconds. This isn’t white noise (too slow) or brown noise (too shrill). It’s flesh noise.

Humorously, both my laptop and my phone recognized the presence of human speech in the recording, and the Voice Memos app registered this with the little speech bubble icon, which signals that a transcription is available. I wondered what marvel might await, as I went to click on the button. Perhaps the processing power of my five-year-old laptop would be able to discern multiple individual streams of conversation from the tightly packed, overlapping speech. I was disappointed if not surprised. The transcription yielded merely “…..” — an extended ellipsis.

A Subsumed Cacophony

Standing on a city corner on a Thursday afternoon

September 27, 2024September 27, 2024 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A city is often a cacophonous space. Of course, cacophony comes in many forms. The roar of the ocean can feel cacophonous, as can the intensity of surrounding bug life in the wild. The cacophony of the city is unique from those other forms because the noise comes not from manifest dense uniformity but from myriad distinct, often unidentifiable sources acting as if at once. All this was running through my mind as I stood on a corner in San Francisco listening as hotel workers were engaged in a lively strike halfway down the block. The noise of their activity joined with that of passing foot and automobile traffic to create something that was at once noisier than a normal Thursday afternoon, and yet also that perpetuated the city’s ability to absorb all sounds into one sound. No matter the sounds, it was the sound of the city.

(The image is a reworking of a public domain photo via Wikipedia of a 1956 strike.)