Disquiet

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the July 4, 2023, 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.

▰ IN A PICKLE: “Sports can produce all kinds of unpleasant noises: referees’ whistles, rancorous boos, vuvuzelas. But the most grating and disruptive sound in the entire athletic ecosystem right now may be the staccato pop-pop-popemanating from America’s rapidly multiplying pickleball courts. … The sound has brought on a nationwide scourge of frayed nerves and unneighborly clashes — and those, in turn, have elicited petitions and calls to the police and last-ditch lawsuits aimed at the local parks, private clubs and homeowners associations that rushed to open courts during the sport’s recent boom.” I love when sound pops up in areas I know nothing about, and sports is high on that list. That quote is from a New York Times story. For more, check out the “pickleball sound mitigation” website, pickleballsound.com.

▰ SHOP TALK: If you’re a fan of The Repair Ship, then you know Steven Fletcher, the multi-bespectacled clock specialist and all around wise tinkerer. What you may not know is … well, check out this video, in which he divulges some sonic intrigue from the set. And then check out the follow-up video. (And if you don’t know the show, do give it a try. It’s a testament to craftsmanship, to the emotional power of mementos, and to decency. And sometimes they work on alarm clocks and jukeboxes.)

▰ BASS IS THE PLACE: “Astronomers have detected a rumbling ‘cosmic bass note’of gravitational waves thought to be produced by the slow-motion mergers of supermassive black holes across the universe. The observations are the first detections of low-frequency ripples in the fabric of spacetime and promise to open a new window on the monster black holes lying at the centres of galaxies.” This builds on prior observations: “Until now, though, scientists have only been able to capture short ‘chirps’ of gravitational waves linked to mergers of black holes or neutron stars only slightly larger than the sun.” The image below is a widely circulated interpretation of the phenomenon by artist Aurore Simonnet for NANOGrav, or the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves. (Thanks, Neil Stringellow!)

▰ AIR FARE: The New York Times took a necessary look at the dangers of noise pollution: “A growing body of research shows that this kind of chronic noise — which rattles the neighborhood over 280 times a day, more than 105,000 each year — is not just annoying. It is a largely unrecognized health threat that is increasing the risk of hypertension, stroke and heart attacks worldwide, including for more than 100 million Americans.” The noise in that example is of passing jet planes. “Scientists believe that pronounced fluctuations in noise levels like this might compound the effects on the body. They suspect jarring sounds that break through the ambience — recurring jet engines, a pulsating leaf blower, or the brassy whistle of trains — are more detrimental to health than the continuous whirring of a busy roadway, even if the average decibel levels are comparable.”

▰ FOOD NOISE: We know about COVID’s sometime impact on smell and taste. How about losing your sense of “food noise” due to drugs like Ozempic, an obesity medicine? As it turns out, “food noise” isn’t noise like crunchy potato chips. It’s more like mental noise, shorthand for people who can’t “stop thinking about food.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ QUICK NOTES: Line of Fire: It’s well into fireworks time as I type this, but here’s a reminder that fireworks can serve up psychological harm to veterans and pets alike. ▰ Going Under: If you’re wondering about the underwater acoustics angle on the horrifying OceanGate disaster, then check out this Twitter thread.(Thanks, Philip Sherburne!) ▰ Up Up and Away: If the Audium ceiling in the piece below strikes your fancy, definitely check out the “hanging concert hall,” or Sonic Sphere, at the Shed in New York. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Do Panic: The Shriek of the Week is the Green Sandpiper — “a loud, panicky chooweet or choo-wit-wit, repeated over and over.” ▰ We All Scream: CBS Mornings covered the widely deployed “Wilhelm scream” the original recording of which was recently discovered. (Thanks, Daniel Raffel!) ▰ Bird Roll Call: Volunteers documenting all the birds in Acadia National Park. (Thanks, Rich!) ▰ World Music: I was happy to see that Janet Cardiff, one of my favorite contemporary sound artists, recommended one of my favorite books, Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World; I trust she enjoyed the part about Erwin Schrödinger’s misophonia. ▰ Any Wheels Bad: The Croatian city of Dubrovnik has banned wheeled suitcases due to “locals irritated by the click-clack noise [on their] cobbled streets.”