TWiS: “370 Consistent Acoustic Features of Healing Music”This Week in Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 9, 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.

▰ Will Power: As described by Engadget’s Daniel Cooper, this collaboration between Mercedes-AMG and musician will.i.am sound kind of incredible: “MBUX SOUND DRIVE works by pairing musical elements in a song with ten inputs taken from the car. Start the car and all you get is the track’s bed, so to speak, looping in the background waiting for you to get moving. Push on the accelerator at low speeds and it’ll add some bass reverb to the song, while turning the steering wheel gets you extra effects or the chorus loop kicking in. It’s only when you open the car up on a clear highway and the main music and lyrics will start blasting, rewarding you for moving along. And then, when you’re coasting toward a stop light, the lead vocal and melody will peel away, returning you to the far less intrusive backing track.”

▰ Grateful Dead: Few publications unpack the memeosphere of the internet — which is not to be mistaken for the internet as a whole, a fact that many unpackers of the mesosphere seem to forget — with the intelligence of the Garbage Day email newsletter, which managed to take the meta-humor of a video about sound being accidentally posted without sound, and then consider it as evidence of the so-called “dead internet” theory. See, despite the original post having failed conceptually: “It has 30 million ‘views’ and almost two thousand retweets. And the hundreds of replies beneath the video are all from other verified novelty accounts promoting their own content.”

▰ Doctor’s Notes: “Doctors at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine have now identified the distinct acoustic features of healing music. Based on a ‘healing music dataset’ of 165 pieces of music recommended by experts, they extracted 370 consistent acoustic features of healing music that transcend genre, and they validated their ability to positively shape emotional states. The work has ‘implications for the development of artificial intelligence models for identifying therapeutic music, particularly in contexts where access to professional expertise may be limited,’ they write.” —The always interesting proto.life email newsletter summarized the findings of research published in General Psychiatry.

▰ QUICK NOTES: Fine Tuning: TWiS reader Miles Anderson helpfully suggested, via email, that the Roy Lichtenstein painting/sculpture I wrote about in the previous issue of This Week in Sound might, in fact, depict 93.9FM (which is to say, the dial is set a smidge to the left of 94 rather than to the right), which would be WNYC. ▰ Sound Off: This mask that lets you talk without being overheard has to (somewhat ironically) be seen to be believed. It’s the “Silent Mask” from Skyted, a company whose name sounds like if the TED Talks took over SkyMall, which is in essence what the mask looks like. ▰ Wipe Out: “The radar and antenna were damaged. Manila later said that China also used a long-range acoustic device that temporarily caused severe discomfort and weakness to some Filipino crew, but there was no evidence of this on the ship we were on” — that’s a side note from a New York Times piece about the impact experienced from Chinese military water cannons. ▰ Say Meow Meow: Princeton professor of music Gavin Steingo has a book coming out in March titled Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity, and I’ll be reading it for sure. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ : Two others on my ever-growing list: A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous by Caspar Henderson, and Listen: On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber, both recently reviewed by Mythili G. Rao. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Only Waiting for This Moment to Arise: The Shriek of the Week is the blackbird — and better yet, the birder behind the Shriek of the Week is now letting non-paying readers access the full posts. ▰ Horn Dogs: Two Australian professors try to sort out what characteristics make for the best didgeridoo.

On the Line

Some favorite recent sentences

/ By Marc Weidenbaum 
"Her own sound was singular, in life as in print. If you called her, as I often did while working with her as a fact checker, a decade ago, and then as an editor’s assistant, you got used to waiting out a dozen rings and the answering-machine greeting — she screened the old-fashioned way — followed by the sudden burst of that rich, deliberate voice picking the conversation up midstream.

That is Alexandra Schwartz memorializing the late critic Joan Acocella, who died on Sunday, in The New Yorker.

. . .

"He cut the tape, built a loop, excised the guitar, slowed it all to a narcotized pace, and played along, augmenting the phrases where he saw fit."

That is Grayson Haver Currin writing about the process behind Brian Eno’s album Ambient 1: Music for Airports for Pitchfork’s Sunday review. 

. . .

"Now came an auditory impression. It must have been there all along, but I was only now processing it. Low voices, coming from the other side of the door. Footsteps, doors opening and closing. Beeps and electronic tones. Telephone sounds, hospital noises. The ordinary, busy clamour of a large institution. It could be a school, a government building, our own project. It didn't sound like the past."

That is from Permafrost, the first novel I’ve read by Alastair Reynolds. I’m currently 79% of the way through, according to my Kindle. It’ll likely be the first novel I finish reading in 2024, unless Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky comes to a close sooner. It’s a fantastic story of time travel, especially in terms of how it depicts perception, as shown here, when the protagonist is transported several decades into the past (more to the point, this being time travel, into “a” past). I’m a big fan of heavy in medias res storytelling — “hard science fiction” being a recognized subgenre, I kinda wish “hard in medias res science fiction” was a subgenre — and it’s an approach that is particularly useful in Permafrostbecause we experience the book with the same initial bewilderment that several characters experience in the scenarios they find themselves facing.

New Year, New Blogs

From Taylor Deupree and Marcus Fischer

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’m under no illusion that a practice initiated at the turn of the year will extend long enough to become a habit, whether diet, exercise, meditation, or phone-use diligence. Nonetheless, the green shoots of resolution-adjacent blogging are always a pleasure in early January — and by “blogging” I don’t solely mean writing posts on standalone websites, though I do prioritize them. A certain breed of email newsletter counts, as well, when the issues double as URL-specific posts, and — and this is key — there is an RSS feed to access them. I remain convinced that an RSS feed is an essential component of a blog — that, alternately, to require people to repeatedly visit your website of their own volition, and in the process for them to recall precisely where they left off reading the last time they were there, is simply too much to ask of a reader. It was too much to ask in the late 1990s, and in our cellphone-mediated, notification-riddled present, it is all the more so. RSS brings the writing to the reader, and in some ways isn’t that distinct from email. How different is the interface of my email application (Mimestream currently, in large part because it matches the keyboard shortcuts of the browser-based Gmail app) from that of an RSS reader (Feedly for me at the moment, though I am looking at options)?

And while writing is the core of blogging, there are other forms of self-expression. Blogs that are mostly pictures or math or music are still blogs. The key thing is that blogging is not about final drafts. Blogging is as much a public notepad as social media is at its best (to be clear, most of social media is social media at its worst). It’s not a magazine; it’s a journal.

Which is why I am happy to see several musicians take up newsletters recently, and to do so with sketches, rather than finished work, on their minds.

Taylor Deupree has started up The Imperfect, a series of studio journal entries, a recent issue of which includes a reflection on the whole notion of works-in-progress, especially the earliest stages: “notebooks. portable synths. voice memos,” he writes — all lower case. “we’ve got tools to capture and remember these ideas while they strike far away from or studios… but remembering to have those with you while on the go, or beside the bed, or in the car, is another challenge.” That issue includes a brief bit of gossamer ambience to listen to while you read it.

Likewise, Marcus Fischer, who records for Deupree’s record label, 12k, has launched Dust Breeding, porting over to it the vast archive of posts he made to a blog of that name a decade-plus ago. True to blogging, he isn’t quite sure where the revived Dust Breeding will lead: “This latest incarnation will be something different once again,” he writes. “What that will be, only time will tell. I thought of naming it something else but I’ve kind of grown attached to it.”

If you’ve recently started a blog related to sound or music, please let me know. Thanks.

. . .

Related: I loved this post from Molly White, highlighting a syndrome/tendency I have witnessed countless times — and reminded me of when I tried to sketch out a rudimentary publishing system in Perl, many years ago pre-WordPress (an exercise that did, indeed, negatively impact my output).