Hum a Few Bars

Sonic infrastructural forensics

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“Many of our electrical things, all around us, are constantly buzzing at 60 hertz, or a harmonic like 120 hertz. And what we’re hearing, or not hearing, is the electrical grid. The companies that manage our power, in my case, Con Edison in New York, are required by law to maintain that 60 hertz output” — thus Micah Loewinger explains the foundation of a fascinating audio forensics tool called ENF, which stands for electrical network frequency analysis. 

Essentially, there’s a record of slight variations in the electrical grid, and by mapping a recording’s underlying buzz against the historical record, sleuths can identify the date and time — “almost to the exact second,” reports Loewinger — that something was taped. It’s an intriguing story about evidence hiding in plain sight, and about the way sounds that we take for granted contain meaning. 

Listen to the full episode (transcript also available), which aired recently as part of the WNYC show On the Media (and which, as a bonus, opens with another sound-related story: an update on “The Unending Mystery of Havana Syndrome”). (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

Sonic Verbs

From the This Week in Sound email newsletter

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of the introduction of each issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter I swap in a new sonic verb. This is the latest in my occasionally updated list of the words I’ve used. If you have a favorite you don’t see here, let me know. Thanks.

babble, bang, bawl, bay, blow, bombinate, burble, burr, buzz, cackle, cantillate, cheep, chirm, chirp, chirr, chirrup, chitter, churr, clang, clatter, coo, crack, crackle, croak, croon, crunch, ding, drone, echo, echolocate, fizzle, gasp, groan, growl, gurgle, harmonize, hiss, hoot, howl, hum, intone, jingle, keen, mewl, moan, mumble, murmur, mutter, nasalize, oscillate, outgribe, pop, psithurate , purr, rattle, resound, ring, roar, rumble, rustle, scream, screech, shout, shriek, sibilate, sigh, sign, sneeze, sniffle, snore, sough, splat, squall, squeak, squeal, squish, susurrate, swish, thud, toot, thrum, thwack, twang, trill, ululate, vibrate, wail, warble, wheeze, whiffle, whimper, whine, whir, whisper, whistle, yell, yelp

Out of Shape

A new documentary from photographer and director Anton Corbijn

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Photographer Anton Corbijn has shot some of the most memorable album covers in the history of popular music, many resulting from lengthy collaborations with bands like U2 and Depeche Mode. He has 850 credits on Discogs. And now he has made a documentary about an even greater contribution to the visuals that package recorded music: the studio Hipgnosis, the lengthy discography of which includes Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, and Peter Gabriel’s first three solo albums, among many others.

The film also has the perfect title, Squaring the Circle. Perhaps he, or one of his many interviewees, will answer an underlying question: why has the square, one of the great skeuomorphisms of our time, persisted as the symbol for recorded music, long after 12” LPs, 7” singles, and CDs have been supplanted by cloud-based streaming?

Scratch Pad: News, Noise, Nunito

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week (or in this case, the past two weeks). These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon).

▰ I signed up for the artifact.news service on my phone to check it out, and of the over 60 categories of news you are to select at least 10 from initially, music wasn’t included.

▰ Thought there was a plane flying overhead, and realized my laptop’s brown noise app had turned on

▰ Whenever someone mentions having “a part time person” as part of their project, I wonder what that entity is when it is not a person

▰ At night before I go to sleep I often record stray thoughts for morning using speech-to-text. Usually they’re comprehensible the next day. Sometimes they’re incomprehensible except as abstract song lyrics, such as what I am currently looking at: “How old I went to lock my love you got some.”

▰ Current writing font: Nunito.