These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the July 2, 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.
▰ COLD OPEN: When asked what I listen to, my usual response is to qualify that mostly I listen to the equivalent of refrigerators humming — so you can bet that I’m already deep into Nicola Twilley’s new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. It’s as full of hums as my record collection, and of tantalizing observations such as the following item, which appears as a footnote far into the volume: “This low hum actually vibrates around sixty hertz, due to minute fluctuations in the grid as utility companies respond to changes in demand. The result is an ever-shifting symphony of frequency vibrations that London’s Metropolitan Police began to record in 2005 for use in audio forensics. Because the hum is so omnipresent, inserting itself into most recordings, law enforcement can match the particular sixty-hertz fingerprint of UK-made recordings to its archive to arrive at an exact time stamp. Every time you open the fridge door (which the average household does 107 times per day, according to research conducted by LG), triggering its compressor to kick on, you’re helping create that particular second’s unique audio fingerprint.” The footnote is connected to a sentence observing that the hum of refrigerators has “slipped beneath our perception threshold to become the white noise of domestic life.”
▰ ANTI UP: “When considered on a national level, noise just doesn’t compete against other environmental problems for emotional intensity,” says Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes. He’s quoted in an article — originally in Undark, and then picked up by NPR — about a current lawsuit: “an anti-noise advocacy group, Quiet Communities, sued the Environmental Protection Agency for not doing its job to limit the loud sounds people are exposed to in everyday life. The group is now waiting to hear if it will be able to argue its case in front of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.” The piece, by Joanne Silberner, is a primer on the health threats inherent in noise:
- “noise increases the risk of death from coronary artery disease by about 5% for every 10 A-weighted decibel, or dBA, increases in traffic noise exposure”
- “Traffic noise in Western Europe causes the loss of 1.6 million healthy years of life annually.”
- “the last time EPA estimated noise exposure” was 1981
- “Planners have been routing highways through under-resourced neighborhoods for decades”
- The last time the EPA suggested any noise limits was in 1974, before the health effects were well known. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
Related, from the LA Times: “Pedestrians are twice as likely to be hit by an electric or hybrid car than by a vehicle that runs on gasoline or diesel. … [R]esearchers hypothesize that the relatively quiet operations of an electric vehicle is the key factor.”
▰ WAKE-UP CALL: I have on occasion found myself in a hotel room for which I was not the intended sort of guest, specifically those with oversized bathrooms with wide doors and wall to wall tile, designed for visitors in wheel chairs and with other support needs. Those showers, I’ve learned, are called “roll-in.” I have gotten them, in the past, when booking a room quite late — like the day before — at which point the hotel must have decided no one actually needing it is likely to arrive. New to me is the “hearing accessible” hotel room, such as one at a hotel south of where I live, in Menlo Park. I trust — or hope — that people who would benefit from such rooms are aware of them, and that they are becoming more common. This place advertises:
- strobe light
- TTY device doorbell
- ADA approved telephone
▰ ORIENT EXPRESS: How it is that fish know where sound comes from? (Starts at 9:21 in the podcast.) Due to how sound moves underwater, fish have evolved to hear differently than humans do. How exactly that functions, and why it has been a difficult topic to pursue, is the topic of a segment in the Nature Podcast. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
▰ SOUND BITES: Tone LoC: The Library of Congress, on how it preserves sound recordings (thanks, Mike Rhode!). ▰ Dive In: Tribeca Festival Immersive Curator Ana Brzezińska on learning to appreciate immersive sound. ▰ Bugged Out: Tips on how to deal with overwhelming cicada songs. ▰ Ray Ban: A StingRay device for spying on cellphones was up for sale (for $100,000) on eBay before it was reportedly taken down by the auction company. ▰ Horn Dog: This moose may love wind chimes as much as I do (Instagram). ▰ Hops to It: The magazine Print picked up the story about the Leffe sound brand: “Developed by recording the acoustics within the original Leffe Abbey in Belgium — home to monks since 1240 — the sound of a bursting balloon in the Abbey was transformed into a digital reverb, creating a unique and recognizable sonic signature.”
