This Week in Sound: Nuromuscular Signals + AI Drummer +

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the August 11, 2019, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter [This Week in Sound](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.

**Head Gear:** A device called AlterEgo can hear when you talk to yourself. “The technology involves a system of sensors that detect the [minuscule neuromuscular signals](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/device-can-hear-voice-inside-your-head-180972785/) sent by the brain to the vocal cords and muscles of the throat and tongue. These signals are sent out whenever we speak to ourselves silently, even if we make no sounds. The device feeds the signals through an A.I., which ‘reads’ them and turns them into words. The user hears the A.I.’s responses through a microphone that conducts sound through the bones of the skull and ear, making them silent to others. Users can also respond out loud using artificial voice technology.” (via subtopes)

**Intelligent Drum Music:** “Sony is the latest company to dip its toes into AI-powered music. The company revealed this week that its researchers have created [a machine learning model that can create kick-drum tracking](https://www.engadget.com/2019/08/05/sony-kickdrum-machine-learning-artifical-intelligence/).” Fun fact: “In order to train the AI system, Sony’s researchers compiled data from 665 different songs from a wide range of genres including pop, rock and electronica.” If they’d only gone for one more, they coulda given Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward a run for the heavy-metal money. More at [google.com](https://sites.google.com/view/drum-generation).

**Virtual Hassle:** “In scripted media like a pre-rendered 2D video, you always know where sound should come from — the audio levels for each channel never change from one viewing to the next. Even a 3D game has a workable level of complexity thanks to the predetermined parameters of the environment. With VR, there are simply too many variables to create perfect, realistic sound from every perspective.” And how [a new algorithm](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/296223-new-algorithm-could-make-vr-sound-more-realistichttps://www.extremetech.com/extreme/296223-new-algorithm-could-make-vr-sound-more-realistic) from Stanford researchers may fix that. (via the Institute for the Future)

**Earworm Autopsy:** “I like the sound of instruments when they’re not perfectly in tune. It’s more interesting, this feeling of humanness that comes through when things aren’t perfect, or when a sound has a subtle sourness to it.” That’s composer Nicholas Britell in [a great Vulture interview](https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/succession-nicholas-britell-piano-theme-song.html) about his theme for HBO’s TV series *Succession*.

**Et Tu, Skype?:** Reportedly: “[Microsoft contractors are listening to conversations between users on Skype](https://www.macrumors.com/2019/08/07/microsoft-contractors-listening-skype/) who use its translation feature, according to Motherboard. This is done only if users are performing a translation function in Skype and not during any other typical Skype voice or video call.” More at [windowscentral.com](https://www.windowscentral.com/some-skype-calls-are-reportedly-listened-microsoft-contractors-including-phone-sex-and-full).

**Smarter Phone:** How do you hide where you are? Funny you should ask: “sophisticated products have started to emerge that [add noise near a device’s microphones to mask sound](https://gcn.com/articles/2019/08/01/audio-masking-smartphone-security.aspx) in vicinity of the device.” (via subtopes)

**TV Talk:** Kalev Leetaru, a Forbes contributor, visualizes the consistency of the number of words per minute spoken on TV news: “The timeline below shows the average number of words spoken per second on CNN by day from July 2, 2009 to June 30, 2019, looking only at its captioned airtime. Over the past decade [this rate has remained remarkably steady](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/08/07/how-fast-do-people-speak-on-television-news/), decreasing ever so slightly through early 2015 and slowly edging back up ever since.” (via Sean Zdenek)

**Secret Hideout:** “After selecting the way I’d like to feel in an app (I believe I chose ‘energize’), I lie down on a leather pad, don headphones, and close my eyes, listening to a soothing world beat with a strong Om undercurrent. Ross is a big believer in the healing power of color and sound. (Her team went so far as to develop an installation at Milan that demonstrated how just sitting in different rooms can affect your core physiology.) For 15 minutes [I wonder what I’m doing, wasting time on this silly bed](https://www.fastcompany.com/90378288/exclusive-a-first-look-inside-googles-top-secret-design-lab). Then I stand up, eyes suddenly alert with a skip in my step.” Mark Wilson of Fast Company describes a visit to Google’s “top-secret design lab.” (The Ross is Ivy Ross, “vice president and head of hardware design.”)

**Going Quiet:** “I knew I had a problem when I started wearing headphones around my apartment,” begins Joel Pavelski’s GQ story about taking [a “month-long sound fast.”](https://www.gq.com/story/what-happens-during-a-month-long-sound-fast) First he had to hit rock bottom, which happened when his shower speaker broke: “I stopped and listened while my breathing went slowly back to normal. The shaky, queasy feeling went away. And, after a moment or two, my own thoughts rushed into the void. For a few brief, blissful minutes I re-acquainted myself with my internal monologue. It felt like a phone conversation with a friend that I hadn’t talked to in years.” Of course, once you stop using headphones, you don’t stop listening. Some might say that’s when you actually start.

**/ / A GOOGOL OF BLOGS**

Reading the web

As always, if you have a blog related to sound or music, let me know. Both this week’s entries are from Australia, per chance.

**Reel Life:** Jason Richardson picks up the story (from last week’s This Week in Sound issue) of Sony’s purchase of the Milan Records movie-soundtrack label, with observations about fellow students in TV production, specifically their habit of [“adding soundtrack-style music to their own lives for feeling of being part of a movie.”](https://bassling.blogspot.com/2019/08/following-soundtracks.html)

**Sound Flâneur:** The sound artist Tristan Louth-Robins has renewed his blogging vows with a lengthy update on his creative pursuits, including his great [Fleurieu Sound Map](https://tristanlouthrobins.wordpress.com/2019/08/07/communique-1-a-new-start-for-the-blog/), shown above.

Did Someone Say Circuit Bent Smoke Alarms?

Better yet: "circuit bent smoke alarm ... ringtones"?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Dylan Sheridan recognizes that the ubiquitous line of defense against residential fires is, in fact, a low-grade computer chip that sounds like a (very) early arcade video game. In Sheridan’s capable and purposeful mishandling, the generic smoke detector is transformed into a device for stuttering, glitchy, gloriously broken noise. The shrill sound of the alarm, designed to be annoying so as to cut through all other noises and alert the human ear to the presence of danger, is here rendered raw material for playful, ebullient noodling. As John Zorn is to the duck call, Diamanda Galás to the human throat, and Adrian Belew to the guitar, so is Dylan Sheridan to the smoke alarm.

This all was accomplished through circuit bending, the trial and error process of getting the inner guts of devices to do things they weren’t intended to through experimental rewiring and other techniques. As for the results of Sheridan’s fiddling, they sound alternately like anxious geese (“call_6”), cartoon geese (“call_7”), Morse code (“call_13”), a balloon losing air post-singularity (“call_17”), the world’s most shrill grindcore singer (“msg_9”), and actual video games (“call_8,” “call_14,” and numerous others).

No doubt aware that these sounds might not be all that enjoyable at length, Sheridan has limited them to the dimensions of ringtones. The meatiest of the 26 tracks on the album *Circuit Bent Smoke Alarms – Ringtone Collection* is just 22 seconds long. The majority are under 10 seconds. And many are so brief that the Bandcamp website registers them at a length of 0.

The album is available for whatever price the user chooses at [dylansheridan.bandcamp.com](https://dylansheridan.bandcamp.com/album/circuit-bent-smoke-alarms-ringtone-collection). The above image accompanied the release on Bandcamp. More from Sheridan at [dylansheridan.com](https://dylansheridan.com). (And many thanks to Danny Clay for recommending this album to me.)

The Festival’s Metronome

A Q&A with Cake's John McCrea

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“We played a show I think in Kansas City with him a long time ago, and the audiences were weirdly friendly with each other. There was a sense of nobody’s making a huge compromise to attend. So that’s something, right? Also, I think that there are musical similarities, but not too many. It’s horrible going to these rock festivals sometimes with the skateboards and the tattoos, and it’s like the same beat for hours and hours and hours. I don’t think that happens at all with a Ben Folds-Cake evening. That’s something I feel strongly about. Whether it’s electronic music or any kind of genre, I just want there to be different beats. My brain sort of shuts down a little bit if it’s duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh the whole time. That’s something a lot of rock bands are guilty of not changing up enough.”

That’s John McCrea of the band Cake in a new interview I did for [sactownmag.com](http://www.sactownmag.com/August-September-2019/John-McCrea-Q&A/). The question was “For the second summer in a row, Cake is touring with singer-songwriter Ben Folds. How did the idea of co-headlining concerts with him come to be?”

“My brain sort of shuts down a little bit if it’s duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh the whole time.” I enjoyed transcribing that bit.

The version online of the Q&A is slightly expanded from the one in the print edition. (Illustration from the article by Jason Malmberg.)

Disquiet Junto in Bern, Switzerland

Exploring "rauschen" as part of Musikfestival Bern (9/11-15)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’m excited to announce that the Disquiet Junto music community is teaming up with the Musikfestival Bern, which runs from September 11 through 15 in Switzerland. We’ll be doing a sequence of weekly projects exploring the theme of this year’s festival, which is “rauschen.” From the festival’s program:

>It could be the rustling of leaves, the sighing of the wind, the buzz of traffic, the burbling of streams, the susurration of a forest… And it could be the sound of Bern… Most likely the whole world. Only in music do we suppress the idea of “rauschen”, a word that can only be inadequately translated as noise – it’s not welcome, most of the time. The Musikfestival Bern in 2019 places it and many other acoustic phenomena on the concert hall stage with songs, installations, microtones and electronics, allowing for all kinds of unexpected sonic exhilaration.

Also from the program:

More on the festival at [musikfestivalbern.ch](https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/).

Transforming the Acoustic

August 8 at the Center for New Music (SF)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I caught all three sets this past Thursday night at the Center for New Music here in San Francisco: two duets and one solo performance, all of them focused on the same underlying interaction, specifically the electronic transformation of acoustic sounds.

Above are the headliners, Ted Moore (electronics) and Tom Weeks (saxophone). Moore was visiting from Chicago. The remaining four fifths of the evening’s performers were all local to the area. Take a moment to note how Weeks is playing his saxophone. A lot of what Moore seemed to be doing was matching and approximating Weeks’ own playing style: the brash tones, the stop’n’start phrasing, the gritty timbres. What was all wind and saliva from Weeks was scratchy, urgent white noise from Moore.

Here is half the opening act, William Winant, who performed on various pieces of percussion (including his own cartoonishly rubbery cheeks), with Chris Brown offstage doing the processing of Winant’s sounds. When the show began, Winant walked from the audience up to his drum kit, carrying a glass of water. It seemed very casual, an impression reinforced by his shorts and sneakers. However, as quickly became clear after he began playing, the water wasn’t for him. It was used to soften up and make squeaky a small hand drum he had as part of his kit. Brown’s efforts felt especially effective when they didn’t merely echo or exaggerate Winant’s playing, but regenerated it in high fidelity, as if in some other, totally imaginary space, a zone larger and more formidable than the small room in which the concert was actually physically occurring. In a way, the fact that Brown was not in view improved the work, creating more of a procedural void (a gap of cause and effect) between what Winant was enacting and what we were hearing.

And here is the middle act, Alexandra Buschman-Román, who provided both the acoustic element (a quite powerful voice, here sublimated into whispers and quickly muttered phrases) and the electronic (a noise table packed with sonic gadgetry). I don’t have a shot of it, but one thing Buschman-Román did was to amplify yet muddy her voice by putting the microphone in the fleshy part of her neck, where it meets her jaw. The result was highly unfamiliar, and highly memorable.

Concert listing at the Center for New Music’s website, [centerfornewmusic.com](https://centerfornewmusic.com/calendar/ted-moore-tom-weeks/).