This Week in Sound: Star Wars Spoiler Edition

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One more item, lightly edited, from the February 7, 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.

. . .

I truly, personally, don’t give a hoot about spoilers — quite fittingly, at age 11 I saw the original *Star Wars* movie (later *A New Hope*) months after it came out, and I knew the entire story by heart, thanks to chatting with friends who had seen it, by the time I finally sat down and faced the screen, popcorn in hand, after being interviewed in the theater parking lot for a local radio station about the concept of people standing in long lines — but I will mention that there is a spoiler in This Week in Sound this week. It’s about the penultimate episode of the first (and only?) season *The Book of Boba Fett*, the TV series. I put it at the very end of this week’s issue of the newsletter, so you had to scroll past everything else if you wanted to read it, and it appears at the bottom of this post, after a (manga-style) vertical ellipsis. This item has nothing to do directly with the title of this week’s issue, “Aliens without Vocal Cords” (the title relates to [a Becky Chambers novel I’m reading](https://disquiet.com/2022/02/05/twitter-com-disquiet-archive-81-guitar-becky-chambers/)). I do find the spoiler situation somewhat ironic: we called these popular films “blockbusters,” and now we watch them at our convenience in the privacy of our homes. Star Wars was as indebted, even in the first movie, to the concept of serials as it was to Japanese cinema. Anyhow, yeah, spoiler down below. Way down below.

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▰ Why Luke Skywalker sounded that way in The Book of Boba Fett: “the vocal performance used program called Respeecher, collating archival material and recordings of Hamill’s performances as a young man and creating a soundbank to stitch new material together.” Awkward as the effect is at times, in combination with the improving deep fake visuals, it seems like within a decade we’ll have eternal actors at the full discretion of neural-network-commanding directors. At which point there will be a huge revival of Dogme 95, the vow of realistic filmmaking proposed in a 1995 manifesto by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.
[gizmodo.com](https://gizmodo.com/book-of-boba-fett-episode-6-luke-voice-hamill-1848491617)

This Week in Sound: AirTags Privacy, Nintendo Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the February 7, 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.

▰ Apple AirTags with the speakers deactivated are for sale on eBay and Etsy, raising concerns about stalking.
[pcmag.com](https://uk.pcmag.com/mobile-phone-accessories/138509/silent-airtags-with-speakers-removed-pop-up-on-etsy-ebay)

▰ The director of the Peacemaker TV series, James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad), explains on Twitter how to properly set the audio on your television. I’m not a huge fan, but I cosign his message: “Forget blue tooth, especially on a Mac, and go back to directly wiring in.”
[twitter.com/JamesGunn](https://twitter.com/JamesGunn/status/1488957124470321153)
(Via Peter Albrechtsen)

▰ I’m always ready for a reminiscence of the great Toshio Iwai audio game, Electroplankton — progenitor, as Andrew Liszewski writes, of “smartphone music-making apps.”
[gizmodo.com](https://gizmodo.com/i-miss-electroplankton-the-nintendo-ds-weird-and-wonde-1848437619)

▰ Thousands of videos collecting uploaded Nintendo game soundtracks have been disappearing from YouTube: “1,300 videos were removed last week and a further 2,200 were taken down on February 1,” reportedly. This may be related to the creation of an online Pokémon Sound Library.
[ign.com](https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-removed-thousands-of-music-tracks-from-youtube),
[soundlibrary.pokemon.co.jp](https://soundlibrary.pokemon.co.jp/en)
(Via Chris McAvoy)

▰ Looking ahead to a hybrid audiobook market that is part human-read and part advanced text-to-speech, as laid out by Sovan Mandal.
[goodereader.com](https://goodereader.com/blog/audiobooks/audiobooks-ai-and-humans-where-do-they-stand)

▰ “Tesla is recalling more than 817,000 vehicles in the U.S. because the seat belt reminder chimes may not sound when the vehicles are started and the driver hasn’t buckled up.”
[cnbc.com](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/03/tesla-recalls-over-800000-vehicles-for-seat-belt-chime-problem.html)

▰ Learn all about “topological acoustic transistors,” thanks to Charles Q. Choi’s overview. They utilize sound waves instead of electrons.
[spectrum.ieee.org](https://spectrum.ieee.org/topological-transistor-acoustic), [journals.aps.org](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.015501)
(Via Tom Whitwell)

▰ A study of acoustics at elderly care facilities explains how regulations may focus on an insufficient range of variables, notably emphasizing reverberation time over noise, especially in open plan settings.
[acousticbulletin.com](https://www.acousticbulletin.com/new-study-c50-should-be-included-in-standards-for-elderly-care-facilities)

▰ An apartment block in the Birmingham, England’s Gay Village will have sealed windows to avoid noise complaints. “According to the plans ’49 out of the 456 units would have sealed windows; 35 units would be fully sealed and 14 units partially sealed where the units are positioned at the corners with windows facing away from The Fox pub.'”
[bbc.com](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-60246353)

▰ Useful tool: “A command-line tool to automatically download all releases purchased with a Bandcamp account.”
[framagit.org](https://framagit.org/Ezwen/bandcamp-collection-downloader)
(Via Saga)

▰ Wired lists gadgets and software that might help with tinnitus.
[wired.com](https://www.wired.com/story/how-tech-can-help-you-cope-with-tinnitus/)

Sound Ledger¹ (Eno, Cage, Trucks)

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

**1:** The percent of income musicians are encouraged to donate toward climate issues, as formulated by Brian Eno’s EarthPercent.

**2640:** The year when an ongoing concert of John Cage’s music will end. It began in September 2001.

**9,000:** The amount of money, in $U.S., one person made in 2019 reporting idling trucks for emissions and noise pollution. The individual, George Pakenham, “lobbied the city of New York to create the Citizen Air Complaint Program.”

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¹Footnotes: EarthPercent: [earthpercent.com](https://earthpercent.com/). Cage: [latimes.com](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-02-04/john-cage-organ-slow-as-possible-halberstadt-germany). Idling: [motorbiscuit.com](https://www.motorbiscuit.com/you-can-make-thousands-of-dollars-reporting-idling-trucks/).

*Originally published in the February 7, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

Paper Cuts

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A portrait of the nascent social graph, back in the age of paper and petroleum products. This bit of marketing research was slipped inside a David Bowie 12″ of mine from back in 1997, “I’m Afraid of Americans.”

twitter.com/disquiet: Archive 81, guitar, Becky Chambers

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](https://twitter.com/disquiet), which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up in [expanded form](https://disquiet.com/2022/02/02/the-virtuous-cycle-of-an-email-newsletter/) or [otherwise](https://disquiet.com/2022/02/04/new-mantra-if-you-need-one/) 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 watching *Archive 81* last night: This score is very much my jam.

Me looking at IMDB this morning over breakfast: Oh, of course it’s the great Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury.

▰ One benefit of watching the TV series *Archive 81* is that the score gives you lots of opportunities to identify chords and practice arpeggios (on guitar late at night in my case).

▰ Revisited a favorite trio set: Ginger Baker, Bill Frisell, and Charlie Haden in sublime sync on *Going Back Home*. It’s from 1994 but YouTubeMusic lists it as 2010 and doesn’t even note the personnel, par for the streaming course. The internet is dark void filled with neglected riches. (I own a copy, but it’s in a box somewhere. Physical music has its own considerable shortcomings.)

▰ Hey, got the [This Week in Sound](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet) email out five Mondays in a row. Let’s see how February goes.

▰ I try to find half an hour a day for guitar practice. It adds up, the vague sense of facility, like realizing how to build any given chord up from any given note on the fretboard, and thus having more choices for phrasing and voicing. Slow and steady, and there’s no race. (There’s nothing I am less skilled in, and less capable at, that I do habitually than practice guitar. In a learning-a-language sense, I’m maybe in third grade. And, like, we moved from another country at the start of the semester.)

▰ Been testing out the absurdity of the Algorithm. Starting each Monday with an odd-for-me string of searches (e.g., “Icelandic geriatric care,” “aardvark husbandry,” “yacht piracy jurisprudence”), and then seeing what news and products end up surfacing as the week proceeds.

▰ A third of the way through this Becky Chambers novel, and still very much enjoying it.

▰ Question: 🦻 If you use earbuds, when you choose to have just one earbud in, [which ear do you put it in](https://twitter.com/disquiet/status/1489747814833737730) relative to whether you’re right- or left-handed? (Sorry that’s a complicated formulation for a question.) 🎧 Thanks.

▰ Have a good weekend.

– Get started on that sound journal you’ve been intending to do.
– Send a Bandcamp Gift Card to a streaming-addicted friend or relative.
– Walk around your neighborhood listening to the score from a favorite movie.

See you Monday. Or maybe Tuesday.