Ultrasonic Sensors ≠ Ears

Ears to the Street

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Increasingly, our devices — large and small alike — can be said to have senses: a variety of inputs that contribute to a mosaic awareness of the world in which they are put to use. It takes a lot of different technologies to make a car smart, or at least “smart.” The automotive manufacturer [Tesla has announced](https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision) that it’s dispensing with one of them: the “ultrasonic” sensors that were a part of the namesake cars’ safety sensory array. And this isn’t the first such functional excision, either, [according to Engadget](https://www.engadget.com/tesla-losing-ultrasonic-sensors-camera-only-system-131503260.html): “Last year, Tesla started phasing out radar sensors in favor of vision-only Autopilot, tweeting at the time that ‘vision has much more precision [than radar].’” [Car & Driver](https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36542541/tesla-model-3-model-y-pure-vision/) weighed in at the time: “Other automakers use radar for their adaptive cruise control systems, and they benefit by being able to operate in inclement weather and direct sunlight.” (Back in 2015, [per electrek.co](https://electrek.co/2017/03/09/tesla-ultrasonic-sensors-patent/), Tesla filed a patent, [“Hidden Ultrasonic Sensor Assembly,”](https://www.scribd.com/document/341341242/Tesla-US-patent-20170059697-a-1) for “new ways to disguise the sensors,” reportedly so they wouldn’t mar the cars’ exterior design.) The cars will now rely on visual data for maneuvering, it appears: “It’s part of the company’s shift towards its camera-only Tesla Vision driver-assist tech,” per [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/5/23388770/tesla-ultrasonic-sensors-uss-model-3-y-s-x-radar).

There is a Kabuki quality to patent images, in that they can seem informative while exposing very little.

I’m intrigued by the idea that a compute-intensive device, especially one concerned with machine proprioception, becomes more capable by limiting the variety of data sources it draws upon. Car drivers generally know that sound plays an important role in gauging things like the quality of a road, the disposition of the weather, the proximity of nearby vehicles, and even the state of the vehicle itself. That said, ultrasonic sensors aren’t truly ear-like; the functionality is [more usefully akin to echolocation](https://www.bjultrasonic.com/how-do-ultrasonic-sensors-work/), in that they emit signals and then gauge the response as a means to map physical spaces.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that the long imminent likelihood of autonomous automobiles may not be all that imminent after all: [“Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere.”](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere#xj4y7vzkg) In the print edition, the magazine notes — as an admirable act of editorial contrition — an earlier headline from the headier days of mid-2015, right around the time of that sensor-disguising patent: [“Scared of Self-Driving Cars? They’re a Lot Closer Than You Think.”](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/scared-of-self-driving-cars-they-re-a-lot-closer-than-you-think#xj4y7vzkg) Apparently the magazine’s proximity sensors also needed an upgrade.

twitter.com/disquiet: MacArthur, Twitch, “Layla”

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the past week at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet), which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.

▰ Chance sequential YouTube correlations are my jam, such as this pairing of a video blogger displaying some mods to the 2012 Playstation game Journey and the teaser for the upcoming Evgueni Galperine album on ECM.

▰ Tired: Needing captions during British crime dramas on TV

Wired: Needing realtime jargon explanations for British crime novels

▰ Amazing! Among the new slate of MacArthur Fellows are both Ikue Mori and Tomeka Reid!

▰ Going through some old paperbacks and it’s like oh yeah here’s a Barron Storey illustration, and oh here’s an Edward Gorey. (And yes their names go together well, perchance.)

▰ The way Slack keeps telling me there are new messages in threads when there aren’t is the most boring ghost story ever

▰ I’ve had some ridiculous beep going on my laptop for days, and I think I finally figured out it was a random Twitch screen open in a browser tab

▰ Another note while reading what (I think) is my first British crime novel: characters are continuously sizing up each other based on their accents

▰ Me watching the trailer to this new show The Stranger:

Foreboding tone: Not bad.

Based on a true story: Oy, so much of this. Whatever.

Missing persons plot: Seriously, again?

Shot of a cassette recorder on top of a map: I’m in. Goes to the top of the queue. Weekend sorted.

▰ I thought I’d heard “Layla” too often for it to ever be further re-contextualized, but I’m currently hearing it as hold music and was reminded that it begins: “What’ll you do when you get lonely / And nobody’s waiting by your side?”

An Apparition in Middlesbrough

Otherwise known as an art installation

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just last week I mentioned the story of an American Airlines flight emitting “bizarre” noise on its intercom. Now shoppers in British town of Middlesbrough “thought they were hearing things when speakers linked to the CCTV system started to make seemingly nonsensical broadcasts.” The audio included morning greetings and an unidentified voice of authority saying, “We intend to unite and level up across the whole of our United Kingdom.”

As it turned out, this wasn’t an unidentifiable phenomena, but [an installation by Olivia Louvel](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/boris-johnson-middlesbrough-speakers-cctv-113806873.html/), a French-born artist pursuing a PhD ([“investigating the interplay of voice and sculpture”](https://www.olivialouvel.com/about)) at the University of Brighton: “On dedicated sites in the centre of town passers-by will hear political slogans, news headlines — read by the AI voice ‘Kate’ — and the sounds of protest, reflecting the current state of political affairs in Britain.” More from Louvel at [olivialouvel.com](https://www.olivialouvel.com/).

Album Club

Like a book club, now in the Disquiet Junto Slack

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Over in the Disquiet Junto Slack, we’re going to try having an album club, which is like a book club but for, you know, albums.

The plan is to rotate through moderators, and each moderator will propose the record for their session. There will be both a scheduled “group listen” and then discussion in a Junto Slack channel dedicated to Album Club — or #album-club. You don’t have to do the group listen to participate in the discussion, and you don’t have to participate in the discussion to do the group listen.

The first Disquiet Junto album club record is … Dettinger’s Intershop, released by the Kompakt label in 1999. From the Bandcamp description:

>Intershop is one of our most renowned pre-millennium offerings, a surprise best seller and a style-defining predecessor of the then-nascent pop ambient genre. A massive fan favorite even after 16 years, it was originally released on CD only and held seven masterfully crafted cuts introducing the listener to a new blueprint for electronic music. Wayfaring somewhere in between field recordings, pop stylings and dreamy textures, sonics like these were simply unheard of: indeed latching onto early ambient experiments from artists like Wolfgang Voigt, but taking a different path to pop epiphany, Dettinger carved out a niche on his own that was soon to become the breeding ground for a whole generation of ambient-minded artists.

The album was selected by Jet (aka Michael Upton), who will moderate the discussion and who shared this memory when proposing the selection on the Junto Slack:

>In 1999 I flew to Europe and kicked about for almost 6 months. I went to the Kompakt shop in Köln and picked up this and Jan Jelinek’s first album as Gramm. The Gramm album is 55 minutes, so I’m subjecting you to the shorter one. I travelled across Europe by train, listening to this on Discman, and I loved it (the whole experience). So, yeah, I thought rather than pick a new release, I’d go with something I have a pretty nostalgic attachment to and which I happily listen to >20 years on.

The group listen will occur at 1pm Pacific this Saturday, October 15. Here’s a handy way to figure out when that is wherever you will be at the time:

[everytimezone.com/s/d41d16e1](https://everytimezone.com/s/d41d16e1)

You can find the album here, among other places:

[dettinger.bandcamp.com/album/intershop](https://dettinger.bandcamp.com/album/intershop)

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism

The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 17, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 13, 2022.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the [llllllll.co discussion thread.](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/)

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism
The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

Step 1: Think about what a genre means, where it begins, where it ends, what makes a genre a genre.

Step 2: Familiarize yourself with the concept of magical realism, most often associated with the fiction of such authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Hoffman, and Haruki Murakami, among others.

Step 3: Imagine what “digital magical realism” would sound like, were it the name of a genre.

Step 4: Record a piece of music that sounds like what you think “digital magical realism” sounds like.

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “sleeping person floating horizontally above suburban home, night, streetlight, highly realistic photograph.”

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0563” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0563” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/)

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 17, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 13, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Probably not as long as a novel.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0563” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 562nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Digital Magical Realism (The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?) — at: https://disquiet.com/0563/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/)

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “sleeping person floating horizontally above suburban home, night, streetlight, highly realistic photograph.”