This Week in Sound: Ring Out in Muffled Tones

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the September 12, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet). And check out the [bonus U.K. edition](https://disquiet.com/2022/09/13/this-week-in-sound-u-k/) of QE3 items.

▰ There’s a new feature of Toronto’s public transportation: “music inspired by the city’s buses and streetcars — songs that respond, in real time, to the routes they travel.” The app, named A More Beautiful Journey, was developed by Joseph Shabason (Destroyer, The War on Drugs, Diana), Dan Werb (Woodhands), and Amy Gottung (executive director of Toronto’s Long Winter Music and Arts Festival). Almost 30 artists produced material for the app. ➔ [cbc.ca](https://www.cbc.ca/arts/ttc-music-app-a-more-beautiful-journey-1.6575859)
[amorebeautifuljourney.ca](https://amorebeautifuljourney.ca/)

▰ “[A] team of MIT researchers has developed an artificial intelligence model that can detect Parkinson’s from reading a person’s nocturnal breathing patterns. The AI model in combination with a new device can discern the severity of someone’s Parkinson’s disease and track the progression of disease over time.” ➔ [laboratoryequipment.com](https://www.laboratoryequipment.com/589499-MIT-Model-Can-Detect-Parkinson-s-from-Breathing-Pattern/)

▰ The musician James Blake’s new release is a “collaboration with the A.I.-powered app Endel, as part of its selection of real-time, personalized sonic environments.” ➔ [newyorker.com](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/night-life/james-blake-and-endel-wind-down)

▰ Phillips, which long ago hired Scanner to make music for an alarm clock that simulates the light of sunrise, has made “a bookshelf speaker with LED lighting on the back that integrates with Philips’ Ambilight TVs to create an ambient light experience around your content.” ➔ [androidauthority.com](https://www.androidauthority.com/philips-fidelio-fs1-3207145/)

▰ NPR shares audio of the “quietest place on Earth,” Haleakalā National Park on the Hawaiian island of Maui. One hopes this doesn’t radically increase tourism. ➔ [npr.org](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/25/1119484767/experience-the-quietest-place-on-earth)

▰ Spotify is said to be introducing an audiobook feature. The company purchased the audiobook firm Findaway late last year. A few thoughts: (1) It’d be nice if audiobook apps let us also play music while we’re reading, and maybe Spotify can sort this out and even normalize it. (2) These could be new productions, as a means to distinguish its properties from those of other companies. (3) It could lead to a viable threat to Amazon-owned Audible’s strong grip on the audiobook industry. (4) Given the time commitment required for audiobooks, it could lead to a substantial reduction by existing Spotify users of the amount of music they listen to. ➔ [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/08/spotify-begin-testing-audiobooks-very-soon/)

▰ This looks sorta like an April Fool’s joke, but a special VR mic is designed to bring higher-resolution mouth sounds to the purported metaverse: “Inside the mutalk is a microphone and Bluetooth hardware which picks up the user’s voice and transmits it wirelessly to other devices like a smartphone or a gaming console. What differentiates it from other wireless microphones is that the mutalk traps and contains all of the sounds coming out of the user’s mouth, or at least most of them, as it’s promised to reduce the intensity of high-frequency sounds (voices) by about 30-decibels.” ➔ [shiftall.net](https://en.shiftall.net/products/mutalk), [gizmodo.com](https://gizmodo.com/muzzle-microphone-headset-mutalk-noise-isolating-ar-vr-1849511121)

Resonating with Tolkien

A note on the new Amazon Prime TV series

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This following bit of dialog occurs in episode two of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the new Tolkien TV series on Amazon Prime. I suspect this will not be the last we’ll hear of “resonating” — and that, in fact, the subject may explain the so-called “Chladni figures” that appear in the show’s opening credits. In this back and forth, Elrond is an elf visiting the land of the dwarves, and Disa is a dwarf princess, wife of Elrond’s old friend, Prince Durin. (There’s been a third episode, but I haven’t watched yet.)

>Elrond: How did you two first become acquainted?
>
>Disa: I was resonating a freshly opened chamber, fairly confident we were onto a sizable silver deposit …
>
>Elrond: “Resonating?” I’ve not heard of resonating.
>
>Disa: It’s when we sing to the stone. You see, a mountain’s like a person. It’ s a long and ever-changing story made of countless small parts. Earth and ore, air and water. Sing to it properly, each of those parts will reflect your song back to you, telling you its story, showing you what might be hidden, where to mine, where to tunnel, and … and where to leave the mountain untouched.

I’d recognized the Chladni figures — acoustic experiments dating to the late 1700s that occur when, for example, sand resonates with a bowed surface — when I first saw the opening credits. A friend pointed me to [this thread on Twitter](https://twitter.com/LiterallyAKing/status/1569059332611870722?s=20&t=J6QsKgfxN90dSRzUioaNrA) by game designer and teacher Alexander King, who unpacks the imagery.

YouTube is full of Chladni videos. Here are a few especially good ones:

Sound Ledger¹ (QE2, Noise in Pune & Houston)

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

7/16ths: The thickness in inches of the leather pad used to muffle Big Ben for Queen Elizabeth’s funeral procession.

1043: Number of noise complaints filed with police during the Ganesh Festival held in Pune, India, between August 31 to September 10.

2000: The fine, in dollars, for noise pollution in Houston, up from $1000 as of new rules passed in May

________
¹Footnotes

Elizabeth: [theguardian.com](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge). Ganesh: [hindustantimes.com](https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/pune-news/ganesh-festival-2022-1-043-noise-pollution-complaints-recorded-by-pune-police-101662833950258.html). Houston: [houstonchronicle.com](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/New-nighttime-noise-rules-take-effect-in-Houston-17424688.php)

*Originally published in the September 12, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

Listening in Absence with Stephen Vitiello

21 years after the fall of the Twin Towers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you spent a lot of time in New York City, especially Manhattan, prior to September 11, 2001, the loss of the Twin Towers was literally disorienting, in a very basic way — beyond matters of global destabilization, war, the loss of human life, and impacts on society, it was disorienting at a simple, practical level. Streets are just far enough apart in Manhattan that you can’t quite make out the one above or below you from a given corner. When they were still standing, the Twin Towers meant that when you emerged from the subway, you often had a very clear sense of which way was south. In the hustle and bustle of that very busy city, knowing where you are offers a primal comfort.

Stephen Vitiello’s recordings of the creak and motion of Tower One were made in 1999 during an artist residency there. They contained very simple sounds that offered a primal discomfort, one that spoke to innate anxiety about vertiginousness and the fragility of human life.

His audio documented a different sort of critical moment from 9/11, recorded as it was amid the impact of Hurricane Floyd. Two years later, the sounds would take on a new meaning, as they provided an unforeseen, unintended homage to a suddenly imaginary quadrant of air — what was once a room 91 floors up from Wall Street was now just empty space. In the years since, Vitiello’s recording is often more associated with 9/11 than with Floyd.

I [spoke with Vitiello in 2011](https://disquiet.com/2011/09/08/stephen-vitiello-wtc-911-floyd/), on the 10th anniversary of the fall of the towers, and when the occasion occurs each year, I think to mention it here. The article is titled [“In the Echo of No Towers,”](https://disquiet.com/2011/09/08/stephen-vitiello-wtc-911-floyd/) a nod to Art Spiegelman’s comics.

Following the events of 9/11, Vitiello initially said he had no intention of ever playing the audio again. In our conversation, he explained how he was encouraged during a subsequent event at the Kitchen to reconsider: “The feedback I got from the audience was that I had to keep them accessible but just to be careful about how they were contextualized. I took that to heart.”

twitter.com/disquiet: Old Haunts, New Screens

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, 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.

▰ Thinking about the main venues I spent time in habitually after I got outta college and moved around the country a bit:

– Knitting Factory (Houston St., NYC)
– Old Ironsides (Sacramento)
– The Palms (Davis)
– Mermaid Lounge (New Orleans)
– Luggage Store Gallery (San Francisco)

Tons of others. These are just the ones that came to feel like home.

Old Ironsides is still around, as is the Luggage Store Gallery. The Knitting Factory now has multiple venues. The Mermaid Lounge is long gone. The Palms moved to Winters 20 years ago and more recently changed management.

▰ I saw that Bill Frisell, David Hidalgo, and Marc Ribot, among others, played on Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s recent album, *Raise the Roof*. Has anyone seen any footage from those sessions online with them in it? I’d love to check it out. Thanks.

▰ But some of my favorite Twitter accounts are “bots”:
[@InstrumentBot](https://twitter.com/InstrumentBot), [@GraphicScoreBot](https://twitter.com/GraphicScoreBot)

▰ This is the 15th time I’ve gotten a call today from what is clearly a scam where they need my Amazon information because someone has (the story goes) accessed my account. If I don’t answer the call, they call back. If I do, and express any doubt, they hang up. And call again. (I’ve blocked the call numerous times, but it does nothing.)

▰ I’ve been really coming around to the Deluge, but I frequently hit this moment where I think, “Why don’t I just plug a couple MIDI devices into my laptop?” (Of course, then I need to attach my audio interface, as well.)

▰ The upgraded OLED display for the
Synthstrom Deluge looks cool. But does it include an emulation of the OG, 4-character screen? :)

▰ Spent about 20 minutes over lunch setting up [serialosc](https://monome.org/docs/serialosc/setup/) on my Mac. Worked like a charm, just one reboot. Been only using my Monome Grid with my Norns Shield (and, previously, Fates). Time to get it going with my laptop again.

▰ Today’s office

▰ Afternoon quartet for jet plane, passing firetruck, distant additional emergency vehicle, and enthusiastic neighborhood canine

▰ Outdoors is chamber music when there are a bunch of loud obvious sounds, like dogs barking and emergency vehicles passing. But when the focused immediacy dissipates, it’s no longer chamber music. Instead, it’s orchestral: rich, wide, deep. Hushed, yes, but orchestral nonetheless.