Street Fighter x the Visually Impaired

Accessibility and gaming

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Sound in video games isn’t merely about immersive reality. It can be a matter of life and death — for the player characters, that is, especially the ones operated by visually impaired gamers. The current beta version of *Street Fighter 6*, an update of the venerable franchise that originated as a 1987 arcade favorite, apparently has exceptionally inclusive accessibility options. Shown here is one of several in-game menu pages that allow for customizing the controls. “For visually impaired players,” writes Chris Moyse of [destructoid.com](https://www.destructoid.com/street-fighter-6-accessibility-options-for-visually-impaired-players-capcom/), “*Street Fighter 6* seemingly offers a custom sound deck, that not only offers up spoken signals for the game’s menu system and select screens but also features fully customizable sound options for the fight itself. Players can adjust the balance and sound applied to all manner of in-game commands — from accurately ascertaining distance, to whether a strike has connected or been blocked, Drive Gauge gain/burn, even when a player performs a jump attack, with alternate sounds if it ‘crossed-up’ the opponent.”

The image above is a screenshot I took from footage posted on Twitter by [@_REMless](https://twitter.com/_REMless/status/1577575151733903360?s=20&t=Vh5BNgQnld7RdNixoq_iaA) that was a source for Moyse’s article. A reply to the initial tweet reads: “As a totally blind person who loves the Street Fighter series, I think this is a great step forwards. The only thing missing would be voiced spoken menus.” Video gaming for the visually impaired is a real thing, and its ongoing development has ramifications for future interfaces in our increasingly technologically mediated world. (That’s a phrase I use a lot, and that I see variations of frequently in my reading. I sometimes wonder if it’ll ever get shortened to something like OITMW. Perhaps there’s already slang for the underlying phenomena. I learn most of my slang from words I fail to get right in the New York Times Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee.)

In Fast Company on Sound Logos

And what is the sound of Wikipedia?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Rob Walker for [a Fast Company story](https://www.fastcompany.com/90793298/why-wikipedia-wants-a-sound-logo) this week. He wrote about the Wikimedia Foundation’s current open call for “sound logos.” As he describes it, the connection of sound with branding is nothing new: “Jingles have been a staple of broadcast advertising from the beginning, and before that, traveling medicine shows were heavily musical.” I contributed some thoughts about the sizable breadth of Wikimedia’s creative brief — “both in terms of topic (‘the sound of all human knowledge’) and audience (presumably: everyone on the planet?)” — and he mentioned the recent Disquiet Junto music community project (the Junto is another effort of mine) in which participants contributed entries to the Wikimedia contest.

I think Wikimedia has a unique challenge ahead. While the name Wikipedia is widely recognized, Wikimedia isn’t, nor are the majority of its other activities, of which there are a dozen. (Have you used Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, or Wikidata recently?) I’m not even convinced that Wikipedia’s own visual logo is all that well known — that is, I’m not sure how many people would recognize it out of context. (Interestingly, as the Fast Company story notes, the Wikipedia visual logo — the jigsaw puzzle globe — was also the result of a contest, apparently won in 2003 by a 17-year-old, Paul Stansifer, who is now a software engineer at Google. The globe was then refined by someone else.)

The people entering the sound logo contest don’t have much to go on. Creative constraints are not just valuable but necessary. One of those is the audience for whom the logo is intended. Part of me wonders who truly has allegiance to Wikipedia. I wonder if it’s more the people who contribute to the ever-growing database of information than the people who use it. I’ve done some work for open-source projects, and the audience of participants in those efforts is often more “knowable” and central than are the actual end-users, which is a broader and more diffuse collection of loose cohorts. I’d recommend prioritizing practitioners — the people whose work fuels Wikipedia — because if the logo doesn’t register with them (or, worse, if it turns them off), then you have a serious problem to manage. (I loved the stage of the Marvel credit sequence logo when you heard the pages of comics flipping by during a montage of the company’s broad creative heritage. That spoke to a certain community, a certain subset of their audience. Perhaps tellingly, as the movies and TV shows continued to outpace the comics, the sound of the pages was removed.)

Read the full piece at [fastcompany.com](https://www.fastcompany.com/90793298/why-wikipedia-wants-a-sound-logo).

twitter.com/disquiet: Blue Angels, Grammarbots, Mastodon

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](https://disquiet.com/2022/10/07/if-you-make-music-please-consider/) in expanded form [or otherwise](https://disquiet.com/2022/10/07/polaroids-from-the-singularity-the-concept-of-hidden/) 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.

▰ I no longer set timers for work projects. I just work until a “spam likely” call appears on my phone, decline it, switch to another project, and await the next spam call. When I feel I’ve earned a break, I read the entertaining automated transcriptions of the spam calls.

▰ Tired: You study sound, so you must love fireworks [that cause stress-inducing disturbances and annoy domestic animals].

Wired: You study sound, so you must have a smart assistant in your home [that listens to everything everyone says and does].

▰ Disembodied voice: “If you would like to hold without music, please press 1.”

Me: 1

▰ I can pretty much tell how much I’ll like a random contemporary British TV crime drama from its theme music

▰ Ooh, Matthew Herbert did the music for *The Wonder*, the new Florence Pugh film

▰ Got to Queen Bee in the New York Times Spelling Bee on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, and woke up Monday wondering if that had just been a dream (apparently it hadn’t).

▰ Can’t believe I missed the word “cooing” in yesterday’s New York Times Spelling Bee

▰ There’s a graphic novel called *Forest Hills Bootleg Society*. When I first saw the title, I thought it was a real thing, and that I could return to the time in 1983 I saw Talking Heads in Forest Hills, Queens.

▰ “My AI could do that”

▰ I haven’t loved a Don DeLillo book in quite some time, but I’d be stoked for him to win the Nobel, because then we’d get a speech. I can only imagine what such a speech would contain.

▰ I know that by some measures I write a lot, but I think somehow managing to crash TextEdit was an unforeseen badge of honor.

▰ If you write and don’t think of yourself as “a writer,” I beg of you: pay a little attention to text underlined by automated grammarbots in red and please do feel comfortable ignoring much of what gets underlined in blue. In fact, as I was writing this, the grammarbot wanted me to remove the “of” in “beg of you.” Apparently the grammarbot doesn’t care for Elvis Presley.

▰ It’s almost like these grammarbots are trying to undo what little grammar people may have learned.

▰ I was gonna tweet something about the lovely foghorns but then the Blue Angels made my nervous system do things that are by no means healthy.

▰ Before the Blue Angels assaulted our peaceful neighborhood, I was gonna mention that while I’m not fluent in foghorn, I did comprehend what they were saying amid today’s marine layer: “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” (Not sure if they noted the quote is apocryphal.)

▰ Tired: Buying fancy new speakers.

Wired: Having a cold for a couple days and then your earache subsides.

▰ Tonight’s reading: a return to that period during the 1990s when I subsisted primarily on burritos and mini-comics.

▰ One of my favorite walls in the neighborhood

▰ I get a lot of linktree-style choose-your-platform things like this via email from music PR, and I’m fascinated by how often YouTube and YouTube Music aren’t listed, even if the music in question is on those platforms. (I trimmed the artist’s name off the top of this image.)

▰ There is [an FAQ](https://disquiet.com/junto) about the Disquiet Junto. If there are other questions, lemme know.

▰ Are you on Mastodon? I’m on Mastodon. I dig the underlying concept, though I can’t say I’ve connected with it much in practice. I’m at [post.lurk.org/web/@disquiet](https://post.lurk.org/web/@disquiet) — or something like that. Sharing links to Mastodon is a little peculiar, even self-defeating, but there you go.

▰ They’re called the Blue Angels because they appear out of the blue and force you to contemplate the afterlife

Polaroids from the Singularity: Flaming Tubas

Ongoing exploits with the DALL·E 2 Algorithm

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

*Werewolf by Night*, the new seasonal horror special from Marvel Studios, was directed by Michael Giacchino, the prolific film composer who has done a bunch of Marvel movies (among them *Doctor Strange*, *Spider-Man: Homecoming*, and *Thor: Love and Thunder*), and one of my favorite TV series of all times (*Fringe*), not to mention *Lost*, and *Alias*, and *Star Wars: Rogue One*, and *The Batman* (“the one with Robert Pattinson”) and a lot of Pixar. Needless to say, I was especially interested in how music would be situated in the one-hour, standalone show.

As it turned out, beyond the notable presence of a soprano voice (two are credited: Grace Davidson and Sumudu Jayatilaka) amid the orchestral score, the main things to make a sonic impression were diegetic — which is to say, they were sonic occurrences that appeared on-screen.

One was the presence of a *Wizard of Oz* tune, which felt almost inevitable, given the (largely) black and white nature of the film. (Fun fact: Giacchino did the theme music for *The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz* back in 2005.)

The other was a flaming tuba seen during a ritual procession. The next morning after watching it, I asked DALL·E 2 (the text-to-image tool founded on artificial intelligence: [labs.openai.com](https://labs.openai.com)) to produce some flaming tubas in a variety of styles. Shown here, clockwise from the upper left, is the prompt (“a tuba on fire”) in four styles: photograph, pixel art, Johannes Vermeer, 3D render.

One additional sonic fun-fact: all the vocalizations by Man-Thing in the episode were made by the film editor Jeffrey Ford, who has worked on a lot of Marvel movies (and Michael Mann’s *Public Enemies*, among other films).

If You Make Music Please Consider

Three suggestions

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you make music please consider:

1. Starting a blog that serves as a central archive of your activities

2. Starting a newsletter that once every season or so tells your listeners what you’re up to

3. Sticking with Bandcamp (etc.) for releases but using other tools for your blog and newsletter activity

I may expand on these in the future, but that’s the three-part suggestion in a nutshell.