Personal Soundtrack 3.0

More from Neal Stephenson's Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Raising the bar for adaptive video-game music: Your favorite composer is digitally resurrected near you in the Singularity, and proceeds to improvise a score to accompany your avatar’s actions. This passage connects with one much earlier in the book, when [we first come across](https://disquiet.com/2019/06/09/the-hell-of-it/) the music of a band called Pompitus Bombasticus, and the story digresses into various examples of how the music we listen to informs our perceptions at the time we are listening. This is the opposite of a spoiler. There was zero doubt at the moment Pompitus Bombasticus was introduced into what the book calls Meatspace that a parallel, or mirror, rendition wouldn’t surface later in the virtual/digital world. (From Neal Stephenson’s new novel, *Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell*, at roughly 55% of the way in. I’m occasionally collating observations about sound in the book as I make my way through its nearly 900 pages. See, previously: [“The Hell of It.](https://disquiet.com/2019/06/09/the-hell-of-it/))

The Analog Singularity

A phrase for our transitional time

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The phrase [“First Posthumous Track”](https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/mac-miller-first-posthumous-track-time.html) feels uniquely 2019. It also feels like some analog process akin to the Singularity, witnessing celebrity as it beatifies into its purest form. I’m reminded of the extended period of time when I used to dutifully report to Twitter each morning every music/sound-related obituary I came across. I felt like once someone dies, their music becomes electronic music by definition.

This Week in Sound: Silent Tires + Speech2Face + …

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

**Don’t Tread:** Despite the fact that sounds are being added to electric and hybrid cars to compensate for how quiet they are, Bridgestone has produced a new tire, the Turanza QuietTrack, [designed to muffle the familiar noise of rubber on tarmac](https://www.wired.com/story/bridgestone-turanza-quiettrack-tire/). Soon enough we’ll be adding electronic tire sounds to compensate for the newly quiet tires. Then perhaps we’ll replace car horns with what sounds like a parent screaming in the middle of the night upon stepping on a Lego tire.

**Visage Thing:** MIT researchers report they can deduce what your face looks like from what your voice sounds like: “The paper, [‘Speech2Face: Learning the Face Behind a Voice,’](https://www.fastcompany.com/90357561/this-ai-guesses-human-faces-based-only-on-their-voices) explains how they took a dataset made up of millions of clips from YouTube and created a neural network-based model that learns vocal attributes associated with facial features from the videos. Now, when the system hears a new sound bite, the AI can use what it’s learned to guess what the face might look like.” (Via the Twitter account of [Robin James](https://twitter.com/doctaj/status/1136983700690866177), who appears to be understandably skeptical about this announcement.) Of perhaps more interest is the Fast Company article’s focus on the way “Voice privacy has taken a backseat to the push to regulate face recognition.”

**Nay, Robot:** The FCC appears to have taken steps to [stem the tide of robocalls](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fcc-just-voted-stop-scourge-150649442.html). Whether the actions will have an impact is yet to be seen. I have worried that robocalls will be impossible to regulate due to some obscenely broad interpretation of free speech. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. Nor should you be able to contribute to a denial-of-service attack on the household phone by loading it down with scam pitches and spoofed numbers.

**Not OK:** Apparently when the band Radiohead declined to pay a ransom, [someone posted 18 hours of bootlegged rarities](https://www.nme.com/news/music/radiohead-ok-computer-reddit-sessions-leak-ransom-2505305) from their *OK Computer* recording sessions. (Update: Radiohead then went ahead and put the whole thing online, temporarily, at [radiohead.bandcamp.com](https://radiohead.bandcamp.com/).)

**To Beep:** To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing, Fast Company has been running a series of stories on 50 related subjects, such as Tang and Velcro. The eighth such story is about [“the birth of the electronic beep”](https://www.fastcompany.com/90361076/the-birth-of-the-electronic-beep-the-most-ubiquitous-sound-design-in-the-world?): “The CBS News special devoted to the launch and impact of Sputnik opened with 18 seconds of the recorded beep.’Until two days ago,’ said anchor Douglas Edwards, ‘that sound had never been heard on this Earth. Suddenly, it has become as much a part of 20th century life as the whirr of your vacuum cleaner.'”

**Fly in a Wall:** A prototype sound proofing material has been derived from [“the tiny sound absorbent scales found on the wings of a giant species of moth,”](https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/june/moth-study.html) the African Cabbage Tree Emperor.

**Two to Tango:** The video game Dance Dance Revolution turns 20 this year. According to the New York Times, [there are now only two remaining DDR machines at Manhattan arcades](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/arts/dance-dance-revolution.html). The newspaper’s scrolling photo essay takes readers to the scenes. (Via Simon Carless’ excellent [Video Game Deep Cuts weekly email newsletter](https://tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts).)

*This was first published in the June 9, 2019, issue of the free weekly email newsletter [This Week in Sound](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet/).*

Dummy Jack

A modern fetish

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When I received an invitation from [hilobrow.com](http://www.hilobrow.com/) asking if I wanted to participate in one of its occasional Project:Object series, I knew immediately the identity of the object I’d want to write about: a little dummy jack made of plastic and metal.

The Hilobrow endeavor originated as Significant Objects, which its founders, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, have described as “a literary and anthropological experiment.” For each round of Project:Object, participants write about some item of interest to them, according to some theme. James Hannaham wrote about Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band’s 1978 album, *Meets King Pennett*, for a series on Political Objects. Annalee Newitz wrote about a remnant of a car bomb for a series on Illicit Objects. Ten years ago, William Gibson wrote about a military-industrial [ashtray](http://significantobjects.com/2009/10/02/hawk-ashtray/). The current series is Fetishes.

The essays are very short, around 500 words, so I’m not going to quote much of mine here. It begins *”Sometime around the turn of the millennium I was plagued by a very turn-of-the-millennium hassle: laptops that made unwelcome sounds when turned on.”* The full piece is at [hilobrow.com](http://www.hilobrow.com/2019/06/05/fetishes-22/).

This dummy jack object was in my possession when the first Significant Object series rolled out, and in some deep lizard brain pocket of my memory, it was already associated with the endeavor when I got the invitation. As I note in the essay, I have been incapable of sorting out why the Realistic tape recorder the jack originally accompanied came with it in the first place, what purpose it once served. I did reach out to some engineering-profession friends, and we didn’t arrive at any useful conclusions, except to the extent that the absence of an explanation burnished the object’s aura of mystery, which reinforced its value to me as a fetish.

I had recalled one old friend, the incredibly talented Jorge Colombo, used to employ a makeshift such object, forged from snipped headphones, to keep water out of his iPhone when drawing illustrations on his screen in inclement weather, so I asked him about the practice via email. He quickly replied:

>You are all correct about the dummy jacks, great memory. Rendered unnecessary once Apple move headset orifices to iPhone bottoms (before that the main problem was shooting photos in the rain) but I still have some.

And he shared this photo of his collection:

I was fully aware that the dummy jack as a concept has an understood purpose: making a connection or interrupting a signal without introducing a new signal. Shortly after I submitted my Hilobrow Project:Object essay for publication, I happened to obtain a new (to me) module for my synthesizer, and I was reminded me of this utility. A [detailed survey](http://doudoroff.com/cold-mac/) of the device’s functionality included two references to means by which a dummy cable (which is to say, a cable used as a dummy jack, in that half of it isn’t plugged into anything) can have an impact on the circuitry. For example:

>Tip: if you want an inverted copy of a signal–such as a gate stream–but you want it in the positive voltage domain (0-5v), use these same patch approaches, but insert a dummy cable in LEFT to defeat the -5V offset. Voila!

Voila, indeed.

In any case, I love the Project:Object series, and it was [a thrill to participate](http://www.hilobrow.com/2019/06/05/fetishes-22/). There are 25 contributors in all for the Fetish series, and these include [Kenneth Goldsmith](http://www.hilobrow.com/2019/04/23/fetishes-8/), [Beth Lisick](http://www.hilobrow.com/2019/04/05/fetishes-2/), and [Shawn Wolfe](http://www.hilobrow.com/2019/05/29/fetishes-20/). Read the introduction and check out the full index at [hilobrow.com](http://www.hilobrow.com/2019/04/01/fetishes-intro/).

The Hell of It

Listening to Neal Stephenson

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As I type this, I am 43% of the way through the new novel by Neal Stephenson, *Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell*. It is a Singularity story, which is to say it tells of someone whose brain is scanned and uploaded to a computer system, and what happens as a result. (Side note: It’s always “uploaded,” isn’t it? The word suggests a higher plane of existence is assumed for post-human experience. As the book’s subtitle seems to imply, however, we may be wrong about such linguistically entrenched correlations.)

There is a lot of sound in the book, like when, while still on this mortal plane, the protagonist asks himself: “if there was an afterlife, either old-school analog or newfangled digital–if we lived on as spirits or were reconstructed as digital simulations of our own brains–would we still like music?”

Or when exploring the nuances necessary in producing political disinformation: “Whoever had produced this counterfeit had completely nailed the sound: you could hear chairs scraping, shutters clicking, fingers pounding laptop keyboards, people’s cell phones going off, all conveying the sense that a hundred journalists were crammed into the room.”

Or an extended sequence exploring how the music we listen to on headphones alters our perception of reality. The subject is an imaginary band with the awesome name Pompitus Bombasticus. (It brings to mind William Gibson’s 1989 [“Rocket Radio” essay](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkkmxx/essential-reading-rocket-radio), about how “The Walkman changed the way we understand cities.”)

Or what his newly digital avatar experiences upon awakening for the first time in the brave new world of the computer: “to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.”

Of course, the key word there is not “hiss” but “inchoate.” I still have 57% of the book to go. We’ll see what comes of it.