13: The disparity, in years, of life expectancy for individuals living in Denver, Colorado, based on where they live, due to factors including noise pollution.
14.4: The weight, in grams, of a tiny, wireless, battery-free device that can be implanted in songbirds to aid scientific study
184: The percentage increase in overall health of individuals exposed to the sounds of nature
*Originally published in the April 5, 2021, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter ([tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet)).*
The pandemic-period grocery deliveries are labeled with single words to ease the sorting of multiple-bag orders. Sometimes these words seem a little too close for comfort, the Algorithm surfacing in the physical world.
One of the great things about the slipstream patchwork that is modern music listening — not Spotify, or full albums on Bandcamp, but the individual work-in-progress tracks that make up, particularly, so much of YouTube, SoundCloud, and, to a degree, Vimeo — is you can witness in something approximating realtime the changes that occur to favorite musicians’ approaches. For example, Orbital Patterns (aka Michigan-based Abdul Allums) has added electric guitar to the mix, resulting in a radical evolution of timbres and textures. The guitar is heard here running through the synthesizer he’s slowly accumulated and adjusted as the months and videos have passed. Three different guitar samples are processed by three very different modules, resulting in a dreamy track that varies its hush with a sense of slow-motion abandon.
Video originally posted at [YouTube](https://youtu.be/g8RWOLHiUUc).
Apparently if you live at the aesthetic intersection of Korg Volca music equipment and Terry Gilliam’s *Brazil* (as I do), then the upcoming Loki TV series is for you. And, given the story line, there seems to be a bit of *Time Bandits* in the mix, for added Gilliam-ish goodness. And, how long until someone sorts out Volca firmware that supports video synthesis or some other visual output to make this image possible?
These are the sort of items I’d usually put in the This Week in Sound email newsletter ([tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet)), but I’ve been super busy, too busy for a new issue, and so at a friend’s suggestion I am initially noting some here.
▰ The team behind the audio for the Halo video games share process in an advance peek at *Halo Infinite*, due out later this year. It’s packed with interesting details, such as how the relative proximity of gunfire wasn’t a sufficient filter in earlier games, leading to innovation this time around: “The new Halo Infinite audio system detects all gun sounds frame by frame, and prioritizes them in a threat order to decide output sound volume for each gun.” To a degree this is a matter of noise and confusion reduction, and of audio as an informative aspect of user interface. It also maps to hearing’s role in self-preservation. Likewise, ambient noises are adjusted in-game to make them more lifelike: “A variety of factors feed into this system, combining gameplay states, time of day, location tracking, timers, and more, all working together to bring the environment to life. This gives us the ability to create a dynamic mix of ambient sounds that remains compelling and immersive the entire time you’re playing.”
[https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/inside-infinite-march-2021](https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/inside-infinite-march-2021)
And you have to check out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F75L97nVSYg) done as part of the sound design effort:
▰ Molly Moser reports on how high-speed frame-by-frame records of hummingbirds flying helped sort out how they emit their trademark hum. The tiny birds yielded terabytes of data: “Higher harmonic content throughout the wing stroke, they explain in the paper, results in a ‘buzz,’ while equivalent first and second harmonic content makes hummingbirds ‘hum,’ and dominant first harmonic content results in the softer ‘whoosh’ of larger birds.”
[https://www.osa-opn.org/home/newsroom/2021/](https://www.osa-opn.org/home/newsroom/2021/march/seeing_sound%E2%80%94how_hummingbirds_hum/)
▰ The digital civil rights group Access Now expresses concern that Spotify’s reported “mood-recognition features” could lead to “misgendering” and “discrimination,” reports Lilia Dergacheva. This is based on a patent “to detect emotion, age and gender using speech recognition algorithms.”
[https://sputniknews.com/science/202104021082522962-spotify-reportedly-asked-to-ditch-bid-to-predict-mood-gender-over-discrimination-privacy-concerns/](https://sputniknews.com/science/202104021082522962-spotify-reportedly-asked-to-ditch-bid-to-predict-mood-gender-over-discrimination-privacy-concerns/)
▰ People who require computers to speak for them deserve their own individualized voices that reflect “who they really are” — that’s the subject of a podcast episode from the Index Project featuring Rupal Patel, found of VocaliD.
[https://theindexproject.org/stories/podcast-restoring-lost-voices](https://theindexproject.org/stories/podcast-restoring-lost-voices)
▰ Grant Suneson of MSN Money’s 24/7 Wall Street lists the 25 jobs most likely to damage your hearing. Musicians rank at the bottom of the list. Higher up are surgeons, shoe and leather workers, gaming (aka gambling) service workers, and, at the top of the list, emergency medical technicians and paramedics.
[https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/these-24-jobs-could-ruin-your-hearing/ss-BB1feUL4](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/these-24-jobs-could-ruin-your-hearing/ss-BB1feUL4)
