Sound Ledger¹ (Fish, AI, Krause)

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

21: Number of species of fish that depend on hearing

29: Percentage of of executives who have observed AI bias in voice technologies

5,000: Number of hours of audio culled to achieve the material in Bernie Krause’s current exhibit at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts

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¹Footnotes: Fish: [theguardian.com](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/feb/19/fish-acoustic-communication-sex-food-researchers). AI: [venturebeat.com](https://venturebeat.com/2022/02/14/report-29-of-execs-have-observed-ai-bias-in-voice-technologies/). Exhibit: [townandcountrymag.com](https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a39078695/great-animal-orchestra-art-exhibition/).

*Originally published in the February 21, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

RIYL

lists, everyday sound, ellipses

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

RIYL the Dark Noise setting on iOS’ Background Sounds feature, motel HVAC, rinse cycle

RIYL distant sirens, your neighbor’s smoke alarm, the pneumatic brakes of public buses

RIYL recently doused campfire, failing muffler, skateboard on fresh tarmac

RIYL parade noise from a dozen stories down through double pane glass, collegial honks between delivery van drivers, house music heard via the sonic bleed of nearby headphones

RIYL unseen wind chimes, metronomic alert of a truck backing up, thunderous applause following a performance you didn’t particularly appreciate

RIYL low grade tinnitus, vinyl surface noise, an orchestra tuning up for the first concert of the season

RIYL the way your brain loops fragments of an otherwise forgotten song, the ringing of bells attached to the front door of your favorite Chinese restaurant, laptop fan noise

RIYL the jingle at the end of the New York Times online crossword when muted quickly because you’re at the library, the polite yet urgent knock on a restroom door, skis crossing stone and dirt beneath the final vestiges of melting snow

RIYL rain pummeling so hard you hear it from inside the movie theater, a voice on a public address system so ancient that you know it’d be unintelligible even if you spoke the language, rumble of the hallway floor being waxed just outside the doctor’s waiting room

twitter.com/disquiet: Halftime, Vinyl, Hexagons

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, 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 in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s 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.

▰ Me a chapter into Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet: Oh yeah, “literary fiction” means lots of description where other books would have, you know, plots.

Me halfway through Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet: I’m reading this more and more slowly to absorb every single tiny little detail.

There’s an entire chapter narrated essentially from the perspective of a flea that inadvertently helps carry the plague to England. (Structured a bit like the end of Rogue One, come to think of it.)

▰ You want glitch? Watch YouTube’s auto captions try to keep up with the rapping during the halftime show.

▰ Finished watching Mr. In-between last night, and besides enjoying it very much, I now have a third favorite final moment in a TV series’ final episode (two others that come to mind: The Shield and Damages).

▰ Today: writing, phone, reading, Zoom, sorting, seventh chords, writing

▰ The Batman makes sense when I think of it as a sequel to Cosmopolis. (Likewise: Batman Begins as a sequel to American Psycho.)

▰ There are two dawns: the one outside the living room window, and the one when my laptop turns off Dark Mode.

▰ I truly don’t always think I’m gonna hold onto my vinyl. I look at that space along the wall and think: a proper piano could fit there.

▰ It’s been weird getting the Disquiet Junto projects out shortly after midnight, rather than late in the day. I have a ghost pain, where it’s 4pm or 5pm on Thursday and I … have nothing to do on the Junto, ’cause it’s already out. I like it, but I still need to get used to it. It’s vaguely related to how I usually just carry a backpack with me, ’cause if I don’t, I spent half the time I’m away from home wondering where my backpack is. Better an empty backpack than a ghost backpack.

▰ When I was a kid and I’d get on a plane, I’d look down from the sky and mentally project hexagons across the landscape.

▰ This week #DisquietJunto participants make music by exploring the number 23. This has meant:

  • 23/x rhythms
  • toying with Psalm 23
  • Tarot divination
  • 23-bar beats
  • 23% probability
  • 529-second (23²) tracks
  • and more

▰ And that covers it. Some proposed weekend diversions:

  • Play a video game by ear.
  • Watch a favorite movie action sequence with the sound off.
  • Watch the same movie sequence with the sound off, and with a favorite song played very very loud.

The Sonic Set Design of Kimi

Cliff Martinez's new score is killer.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cliff Martinez, one of the essential soundtrack collaborators of movie director Steven Soderbergh (ever since *Sex, Lies, and Videotape* back in 1989), has scored *Kimi*, Soderbergh’s most recent film. In it, Zoë Kravitz plays a remote tech worker who stumbles on what appears to be a violent assault while doing her desk job, which involves listening to audio recorded by domestic digital assistants. Kimi is not the name of Kravitz’ character. She is Angela. Kimi is the feminized brand of devices — à la Alexa, Cortana, and, of course, Siri — that drives the film’s plot.

*Kimi* is very much inspired by classic Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, notably *Rear Window* (1954), though rather than a physical injury, it’s a kind of agoraphobia that keeps Angela stuck at home in Seattle. (The name Kimi seems like a nod to Kim Novak, the actress who appeared alongside *Rear Window* star Jimmy Stewart in 1958’s *Vertigo*.) Angela’s home is a brick-walled industrial loft from which she keeps a wary eye on the pandemic-era outside world. Soderbergh explores the physicality of the residential space throughout the movie, right up to almost the very last minute. Angela’s loft resembles the workshop of Harry Caul, the investigator played by Gene Hackman in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film *The Conversation*, which was also obsessed with technological eavesdropping. (It’s almost a joke that a building that felt low-rent in 1974 feels downright enviable today.) The camera guides us through the open plan while Martinez’s music alternates between narrative tool, window into the emotional state of Kravitz’s character, and pure sonic set design.

This is one of Martinez’s best scores. It beautifully merges a chamber orchestral palette (actively engaging with the legacy of Bernard Herrmann’s famed Hitchcock cues) with synthesized lines, making the most of the quietude allowed by modern digital production — the same digital realm that allows a device like Kimi to exist in the first place.

My favorite cue from *Kimi* is “Watch the Spray,” in which what at first seems to be a violin solo quickly reveals itself as a synthesized melody, one that remains expertly intertwined with the underlying symphonic bed. If there’s something eerie to that combination of strings and synthesizer, it’s arguably because the machine-made sounds of Martinez’s score serve as a parallel to how the Kimi devices are insinuated into people’s everyday lives.