This Week in Sound: School Acoustics, Sound Eclipse, BAFTA Bully Pulpit

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the March 21, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound ([tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet)).

As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.

▰ “Sound Eclipse is a new prototype device that aims to give city dwellers a chance to fight back against the noise and reopen their windows. Designed by Moscow-based industrial design firm Kristil&Shamina, it’s a noise-canceling orb that’s meant to hang elegantly in a window, with the smooth black curves of a high-end stereo.” The device produces sound that canels out what the device’s microphone receives. It can reportedly lower volume by up to 15 decibels. ➔ [fastcompany.com](https://www.fastcompany.com/90732480/sick-of-constant-sirens-and-construction-noise-this-sleek-window-gadget-could-block-it-out)

▰ “[A]coustics is equally as important as lighting or air quality, and perhaps even harder to get right. If you are cold you can put on another piece of clothing, or open a window if you are hot. But in the case of acoustic comfort, it is very complicated to change the room to make it more comfortable.” From an interview with Professor Arianna Astolfi, whose work led to the current acoustic standard for schools in Italy. ➔ [acousticbulletin.com](https://www.acousticbulletin.com/expert-interview-astolfi-uni115322)

▰ “I have a suggestion — perhaps next weekend don’t just go see a movie … go hear a movie.” That was Mark Mangini when he, Ron Bartlett, Theo Green, Mac Ruth and Doug Hemphill accepted the BAFTA sound award for Dune earlier this month.

▰ “We want to give people cues that are familiar, but also communicate electric power.” Car manufacturers are sorting out the right balance for the sounds that new electric vehicles are designed to emit. ➔ [freep.com](https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/mark-phelan/2022/03/19/electric-sports-muscle-cars-sounds/7079836001/)

▰ You need to complete this “interactive puzzle and sound toy brought to you by Google Developers” to reveal details about the company’s upcoming I/O 2022 event:

➔ [io.google/2022](https://io.google/2022/svd), [businesstoday.in](https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/google-teases-io-2022-with-a-puzzle-326322-2022-03-17)

▰ “Supporters of the crypto plant promised an expanded tax base and job creation. What residents say they got was the constant din from massive computers and equally massive cooling fans.” ➔ [washingtonpost.com](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/18/bitcoin-mining-noise-pollution-appalachia/)

▰ “Contrary to popular belief, roosters — this one included — do not just crow at dawn; they crow all day.” Ryan Kost on how a loud bird added one challenge atop so many others that define life in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. “Roosters, it so happens, are legal in San Francisco. (This is not the case in Oakland, or in the city of Portland, one of the epicenters of the urban farming craze.)” ➔ [sfchronicle.com](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/There-s-a-rooster-living-in-San-Francisco-s-17012697.php)

Sound Ledger¹ (Copters, Tropical Birds, Hearing Study)

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

300,000,000: The estimated number of participants in the recent Apple Hearing study to assess sound level measurements

99: The estimated percent of birds identified by sound, not eye, in dense tropical forests

7: The increase in helicopter traffic between 2018 and 2019 in the summer months in part of Long Island, leading to a “Stop the Chop” movement

________
¹Footnotes

Apple: [myhealthyapple.com](https://www.myhealthyapple.com/apple-researchers-publish-paper-outlining-data-collection-methods-and-more-for-the-apple-hearing-study/). Tropical: [kqed.org](https://www.kqed.org/science/1978710/heres-what-we-gain-from-preserving-natures-sounds). Chop: [easthamptonstar.com](https://www.easthamptonstar.com/villages/2022317/they-want-to-stop-chop).

*Originally published in the March 21, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

From Paper to Sound

In Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This paragraph is from early on in *Flaubert’s Parrot*, a novel by Julian Barnes that is so colorful and precise in its details that it reads like a European variant on the sort of observational detective work one expects from Paul Auster or Nicholson Baker. So far (I’m barely a quarter through), the book is like a highly sensitive Simenon protagonist trying to sort out the identity of a literary Maltese Falcon (minus any particular consequence, at least where I’m at in the book).

In this moment, Barnes (or the character narrating the book) is telling us, the reader, about a reproduction of a statue of the famed novelist (1821-1880, best known for *Madame Bovary*). Flaubert is long dead, as is his parrot, and Barnes is depicting a transmutation, a creative process, that ends in a state that the reader might not have expected: not with story, or novel, or memory, but with “sound” itself. The end of the line is not so much an anticlimax, in the William F. Buckley Jr. sense of the word, as it is a surprise.

No doubt this idea of human sound as a signature of our species is going to play a role as the book proceeds. We’re also told of the title subject: “The parrot, the articulate beast, a rare creature that makes human sounds.” Thus, sound is what we work toward, and what makes us human, and what provides a unique point of intersection with a beast that can imitate us. We’re listening to Flaubert’s parrot listen to us.