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.