201: number of dialects (from 288 cities) reported to be supported by the voice recognition technology of the company iFlytek
4,000: distance, in kilometers, that the sound of airguns, used in oil and gas exploration underwater, can travel
147,000,000,000: estimate annual cost, in euros, of noise pollution, per France’s Environmental Transition Agency (aka ADEME)
Sources: dialects (techinasia.com), airguns (phys.org), noise (lemonde.fr)
Looks like someone was voted off the island
On Sundays 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.
▰ This 9-minute jam is pretty heavy, even by guitarist Eivind Aarset’s standards, like hearing Dark Magus emerge from Black Sabbath. It’s a new trio, teaming Aarset with drummer Audun Kleive and keyboardist Ståle Storløkken. According to Kleive: “We are currently building our repertoire further.” Eric Furst replied on Mastodon: “It’s a bit like a black hole posting that they are ‘currently in the process of becoming more massive.’”
▰ Some deep interstellar drones from Kamil Kowalczyk, born in Poland and based in Scotland:
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▰ There’s a new album, Mosaic, due out in December from Fennesz, and its excellent opening track, “Heliconia,” is a shoegaze expanse you can really get lost in over the course of its 9+ minutes.
[bandcamp width=641 height=340 album=2055523443 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will 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.
▰ gluten-free breadboarding
▰ Still not sure why audiobook players don’t let you also listen to music
▰ Been doing this thing with TV ads lately where I unmute for the last second or, at most, two seconds (the now normalized ad countdown makes this easy), and seeing — that is, hearing — what makes the final sonic impression, and then trying gauge the extent to which advertisers are doing anything in that final moment to catch the ear of and appeal to vigilant ad-muters
▰ Friday morning hold-music dancing-in-place
▰ In the middle of reading too many books. As matters of gluttony go, it’s a lesser of numerous evils. I did finish reading a short graphic novel, Old Dog: Operations, an anthology by various writers and artists building out the world and lore introduced a year ago in Declan Shalvey’s Old Dog [Redact One]. I was going to type “mythos,” and then sorted “lore” as the more common word these days, and then wondered when lore overtook mythos, but according to the data in Google Books Ngram, lore was always ahead of mythos.
This went out to paid This Week in Sound subscribers as a thank you
