An Elegy for the Foghorn

By scholar Jennifer Lucy Allan

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Jennifer Lucy Allan recently completed a PhD focused on the social and cultural history of the foghorn. A new BBC Radio 4 piece this week gives us glimpses into both what she’s learned along the way, and how she learned it. “Life, Death and the Foghorn” take us through the real life consequences of fog, as well as the poetry the horns inspire, how a generation raised in the horns’ growing absence copes with their faded glory, and how a composer can employ them as an instrument.

A lot is packed into the half hour, and we’re left with the clear impression there is far more in store. I’m hopeful Allan’s dissertation will make it to book form. One highlight of the BBC broadcast is hearing her converse with a former seaman who can’t quite comprehend the nostalgia and affection that we landlubbers associate with the foghorns. To him, they are an indelible reminder of the majority of his nearest career-ending (and, one imagines, life-threatening) experiences at sea.

Listen at [bbc.co.uk](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000l8p1). The piece was uploaded yesterday, Tuesday, June 28. It’s unclear for how long it will be available in streaming form. If the foghorns have taught us anything, it’s that nothing lasts forever. More from Allan at [jenniferlucyallan.co.uk](https://jenniferlucyallan.co.uk/).

Tennis for the Blind

Thanks to the imagination of Håkan Lidbo

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The always inventive Håkan Lidbo has conjured up a proposed tennis “game concept” for the blind and vision-impaired. The game, called Invisiball (note the double l), is played in a highly prepared physical space, one in which sounds simulate the presence of a physical ball. That is, the sounds don’t help locate a ball in physical space. The sounds are the ball, simulating travel within three-dimensional space.

Lidbo explains in detail:

>InvisiBall is a game concept for two persons. It’s a game played in a dark room, on a court with loudspeakers in the 4 corners, blindfolded or by blind people. The ball is represented by a tone, mimicking earthly gravity. If the racket, that plays a tone depending on it’s position in height, hit the ball at the right pitch, depth and left/right-orientation, it will fly back to the other player. The referee is a musical robot voice that also keep track of the score – and the whole game is built around music that change with the score between the players. With some training the players can serve, return, smash or lob the “ball” – and even bounce it on the ground. As the ball is invisible the game has a 3d visual interface for the audience. The game serves a training tool for those who have to adapt to a life without eye sight, due to illness or accident – and for us who can see, better understanding the challenges and possibilities of training our hearing sense.

Sound and sports are on people’s minds right now due to the attempts by various professional leagues, including Major League Baseball, to provide some verisimilutude of live, in-person events when the pandemic has required severe restrictions. Baseball is going cross-platform by employing sounds from an official, long-running video game series, *MLB The Show*. (The game’s title is interesting in this context, suggesting an awareness that baseball is, in fact, a show, long before it was, aside from some cardboard cut-out audience members, only a show.) A player on the Milwaukee Brewers has commented that [“pure silence was tough for some guys”](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet/letters/this-week-in-sound-wonky-skulls) before sounds were added.

In Lidbo’s Invisiball, however, sound isn’t merely a backdrop that serves a utility purpose. Sound is the game, the framing conceit, the underlying structure, and the focus of the players’ attention. Lidbo collaborated with Magnus Frenning and Jonatan Liljedahl, who developed and programmed Invisiball, and by “young blind swedes.” It was supported by the PTS Innovation Prize (which aims “to promote digital inclusion”).

Video published to Lidbo’s [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luveiFlj3aQ). More from him and about Invisiball at [hakanlidbo.com](https://www.hakanlidbo.com/invisiball). Last month I wrote about his [“hat for social distancing.”](https://disquiet.com/2020/06/05/lidbo-corona-hat/)

Current Listens: Total Hassell, Davachi’s Organs

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is my weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ Much of my week’s listening involved playing the new Jon Hassell on repeat, enjoying the pre-release privacy a bit before meaning accrues around it after the set reaches a broader audience. *Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)* was released on Friday to an audience awaiting its portal-like function, how it opens a window into the Fourth World, and it is everything they might hope for, filled with glitchy atmospherics, futurist fusion, and field recordings from alternate realms.

▰ The minimalist setup of Russian musician Pavel Milyakov derives transcendent techno from live manipulation of held guitar drones. It’s part of the excellent Patch Notes video series from Fact magazine, and this time it in fact does include patch notes, if you want details of what Milyakov is up to.

▰ Sarah Davachi’s next album, *Cantus, Descant*, isn’t due out unil mid-September, but the first track, with an accompanying video, is already online. The album appears to be a collection of music for organs, and was recorded on a variety of them in Amsterdam, Chicago, Vancouver, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles. The initial track, “Station II,” is a series of slowly evolving chords that overlap, layer, and transition with an eerie grace.

▰ As the name suggests, the *exp​[​MTL]* EP from Vigi Beats is experimental: brief sketches of how beat music could be. All but one is under two minutes in length. The five tracks, labeled A through E, pursue alternately frantic and loungy beatcraft, breaking pre-existing recordings in the service of forging artfully erratic new ones.

This Week in Sound: Windows on the World

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the July 20, 2020, 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.

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

THIS WEEK IN SOUND

▰ “Sonic aesthetic moralism has been taken up by NIMBYs opposing affordable development, suburbanites in defense of their decision to live far from the city core, urban planners rallying around pedestrian-friendly street design, public-health officials citing the physiological effects of noise, and environmentalists advocating for sustainable building practices”: Kate Wagner takes admirable issue with the perceived concepts of “good” and “bad” noise. (Thanks, George Kelly!)
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/the-struggle-for-the-urban-soundscape/614044/](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/the-struggle-for-the-urban-soundscape/614044/)

▰ “The absence of noises, replaced in parks by the sounds of leaves crunching under shoes or birds creating their own symphonies, is what draws so many of us to them,” says a director of the National Parks Conservation Association, in an article by Jenny Morber, referring to natural silences “values” that are “under threat.”
[https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-is-noisy-these-groups-want-to-restore-the-quiet/](https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-is-noisy-these-groups-want-to-restore-the-quiet/)

▰ “Sound studies experts say that while LRADs and flash-bangs are worrisome tactical escalations that can permanently injure people by rupturing eardrums, they are rooted in the long, uncontested tradition of the state utilizing sound as a means of social, cultural and political control”: Luke Ottenhof on the use of sonic weapons by law enforcement.
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/us-police-sound-weapon-protests](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/us-police-sound-weapon-protests)

▰ “The game in Anaheim might well have had the loudest pregame boos in modern baseball history”: Sam Miller on what sports fan will miss beyond sports itself. (Via Dave Pell’s Next Draft)
[https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29417320/what-mlb-fans-lose-boo-houston-astros-opening-day](https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29417320/what-mlb-fans-lose-boo-houston-astros-opening-day)

▰ “When chickadees see a pygmy owl, they increase the number of “dee” notes and call “chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee.” Here, the number of sounds serves as an active anti-predation strategy.” Nice details in this piece by Andreas Nieder on the power of numbers among animals. (Thanks, Fari Bradley!)
[https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/animal-kingdom-power-of-the-number-instinct/](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/animal-kingdom-power-of-the-number-instinct/)

▰ “State Supreme Court Chief Justice Donald Beatty late Friday afternoon ordered state judges and magistrates to stop issuing ‘no-knock’ search warrants to police.” You must knock, or ring, before entering.
[https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article244152347.html](https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article244152347.html)

▰ Geoff Manaugh picked up that story about noise-cancelling windows, and ran with it, exhibiting characteristic extrapolative aplomb: “combine luxury frequency-reduction techniques with seismic wave-mitigation and perhaps you’ve just designed the future of architecture in global earthquake zones.” (Thanks, Thorsten Sideb0ard!)
[http://www.bldgblog.com/2020/07/structural-audio/](http://www.bldgblog.com/2020/07/structural-audio/)

▰ “A recent Stanford University study found the speech-to-text services used by Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and Apple for batch transcriptions misidentified the words of Black speakers at nearly double the rate of white speakers”: Jeff Link on racial bias in voice recognition. (I don’t know much about this website, which has a modest Facebook and Twitter following, but the piece is well-researched.)
[https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/racial-bias-speech-recognition-systems](https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/racial-bias-speech-recognition-systems)