Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 101

Sound Ledger¹ (Hearing Aid Edition)

30: Age at which 1/5th of Americans have suffered damage to their hearing

12.5: Estimated percentage of Americans experiencing hearing loss between age 6 and 19

14: Rise between 2017 and 2021 in percentage of new customers of Phonak hearing aids between ages of 22 and 54

. . .

Footnotes: nytimes.com.

Junto Profile: Kel Smith (aka Suss Müsik)

This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s your name? My name is Kel Smith, although I’m better known among Disquiet Junto participants as Suss Müsik. The project started in 2016 as a vehicle to create what I then called “post-classical ambient minimalism for crepuscular airports.” I also record in a music project called Egret Zero, collaborating with the very talented guitarist Wm. Wolfgang Allen. As midlife crises go, making strange music is deeply satisfying and relatively benign.

Where are you located? I currently live with Mrs. Suss Müsik in Pennsylvania (USA), located between Philadelphia and New York City. I once lived in Baltimore, went to art school in Italy, got married in Greece, and from 2007 through 2018 traveled extensively for work. (This is how I gained my expertise in crepuscular airports).

What is your musical activity? In a recent piece on CKRL, roughly translated from French, I was described as a sound artist “with a mind haunted by the numbers.” That’s about as good a description of Suss Müsik as I’ve ever heard or read.

I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between machines and human capability. In a way, Suss Müsik is the distant product of research I conducted for a book I wrote in 2013 called Digital Outcasts. My work at that time detailed the historical significance of disability on today’s design innovation. During the period of writing this book, I interviewed subjects with disabilities who achieved a high level of acclimation using tools they personally designed or retrofitted.

Looking back, I now recognize the inevitability that these influences would have in formulating my creative practice — especially a sonic discipline that blends science and art. Much of Suss Müsik’s output is generated by handmade electroacoustic instrumentation. Some devices are built from archaic consumer technologies (like 1990’s hard drive enclosures), while others are custom-designed and manufactured via 3D-printing or other methods.

Conceptually, I enjoy the ironic duality that results when limits are extended and redefined: the reclamation of outdated machines being repurposed for a new use, for example, or the digital replication of sonic behaviors native to acoustic instruments (such as when we hear breath through a flute or the abrasive scrape of a violin bow). A large component of Suss Müsik’s aesthetic lies in the existent tension between these formative states.

As my mechanical skills have grown, the devices have gradually become more consistently reliable in performance. Similarly, I’d like to think that my compositional techniques have grown sharper. The current version of Suss Müsik is less ambient and more minimal in parts, yet still crepuscular.

What is one good musical habit? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: “I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.”

I think it’s important to consciously expose ourselves to new ideas, new philosophies, new ways of working, and new forms of sonic expression. At the height of Suss Müsik’s ambient phase, I started taking djembe lessons. One wouldn’t necessarily imagine African drumming as being in the same family as ambient soundscapes, but both musical disciplines address the corporeal body as a conduit; a vehicle through which our understanding of time and space can be temporarily suspended. There’s always a richness to be uncovered whenever we explore new things, even if the benefit is revealed in the form of a happy surprise.

Participating in the Disquiet Junto has been a genuinely rewarding experience. I’m thankful to be a part of this network of talented individuals, many of whom have provided sincere encouragement that has elevated my practice. Somewhere along the path of my 160+ Junto projects, I feel I’ve learned a bit about making creative choices within a timestamp of four minutes.

More important, though, is the opportunity to return the favor with Junto participants via weekly projects or the Disquiet Slack channel. It takes zero effort to offer a bit of positive feedback, yet the impact can be transformative. It’s as if we have this safe, secret little snow-globe of creative energy that crosses geographic and demographic boundaries—a bit of stability, perhaps, in times of turbulence. As I’ve grown old(er), I’ve learned to appreciate that dynamic and avoid taking it for granted.

One technical item (and I’m sure everyone already knows this): it took me way too long to discover the importance of a good set of headphones. For too long, I could never figure out why my mixes sounded so tinny compared to everything else I heard. I recommend the Audio Technica brand.

What are your online locations? To date, the Suss Müsik discography features eight proper “albums” and a handful of EP-length releases. Some of it makes me wince today, especially the way they were recorded, but I accept that as part of my learning journey. More than a few Junto projects have been reworked for release; in fact, one album titled Ex Post Facto is nearly all former Junto offerings. All Suss Müsik releases are available in the usual places: Bandcamp, Spotify, etc. The latest (and arguably best) is New Hopes, released in 2022.

There is a Suss Müsik website that I don’t update nearly as often as I should. People do find me via the contact form, so I suppose it must be doing its job. A number of Junto participants have indicated that they enjoy the written texts that accompany Suss Müsik contributions, so it’s nice to have them all in one place as a sort of archive.

Egret Zero releases are also available on Bandcamp. My favorite is Exploring Shackleton, mostly because it has a photo of my grandfather on the cover and got a nice review.

Soundcloud is sort of the Suss Müsik sandbox: Junto projects, failed experiments, etc. I’ve been considering some form of exit, but for now it’s still in the portfolio.

For those who enjoy seeing digital instruments pushed beyond the precipice of functionality, Suss Müsik offers a YouTube channel and an Instagram presence.

I’ve long since given up on Facebook and Twitter as vehicles for omphaloskepsis.

What was a particularly meaningful Junto Project? I love all my sonic children, but not equally. I have a soft spot for Junto 0247, because it was my first. I still fondly remember how surprised and delighted I was upon receiving a positive response. I also really like my contribution for Junto 0334, mostly because the text I wrote for it actually happened (more or less), and I recall Junto 0320 being a particularly fun assignment. But if I had to pick just one, it would be a sentimental favorite: Junto 0454, a numerically encoded tribute to my then-five-year-old niece.

Your mention of a good pair of headphones suggests a question, which is what advice do you have for people looking to listen back to their own music more critically? Listening back to some old Suss Müsik recordings, I’m often dismayed at how busy a lot of them sound. There were good ideas in there, but they were buried in excessive instrumentation (you know your mixes are too thick when you have a track for “tambourine #3”) and effects (reverb-erb-erb-erb). Sometimes we have to examine our work critically in order to fairly assess it, and for that it means removing the clutter. I’ve subsequently imposed limits on myself when reworking old material, allowing more dry space to let things breathe a bit. I believe this intention to reduce complexity has been a benefit to my overall creative practice. Whenever something doesn’t seem to be working, I always ask myself: “What doesn’t need to be here? What can be removed?”

People don’t act on the invitation to provide feedback as often as they might. Do you have any advice for people who are hesitant to do so? It’s a tricky dynamic I’ve observed in my non-Suss Müsik world as well: there are always one or two contributors who have no hesitation in providing feedback, and others who choose to be more passive. I believe these tendencies are the result of the confidence heuristic, a psychology term to describe how people are more willing to provide feedback when they feel their contributions are assertive or persuasive. I think the most important thing to remember is that it’s okay to be selective in how or when we offer feedback; sometimes people simply don’t feel up to it, and that’s fine. For those who have a tentative yearning to be part of the discussion, I’d say: use your reticence as a strength. Be sincere, be constructive, be open to dialogue. And for those who receive feedback, always remember this: even if you don’t agree, there may be a finer point in there worth investigating. It’s all subjective anyway, so be nice. As Pere Ubu’s David Thomas once wrote: “Artists can produce anything they want. And people can like whatever they want. That’s why there’s always disappointment on both sides.”

Cower Corner

When I tell people I am incredibly sports illiterate and depend on the kindness of strangers and the patience of friends to help me navigate the peculiar subset of the multiverse where I ended up living — one where “A team beat another team” somehow qualifies as breaking news — I often have to clarify the depth of my lack of informedness. My statements to this effect can be taken to mean that I only follow one sport, or just watch occasional games and don’t subscribe to “packages,” or stopped after baseball and football and don’t pay attention to those other sports, whatever they may be. Proving one’s lack of knowledge is a version of proving a negative — which is to say, difficult at best. When I do find sports-things of sonic interest, like the noise at stadiums (remember the vuvuzela’s 15 minutes of fame?) or a purported lip-reading scandal in the NFL, I pay close attention.

There may not be a true vacuum in the universe, but the part of my brain where actual sports-stuff is supposed to be stored comes awfully close. And the virtuous circle of this newsletter is that people who know things about things about which I know nothing send me sound-related things from those realms (and then I share them more widely). Readers who are into sports or practice law or perform surgery or carry guns as part of their livelihood — or simply make their homes places where I do not — send me emails (and social media messages) with tasty factoids about how sound operates in those (alien-to-me to varying degrees) spheres. For which I am thankful. (So keep ’em coming.) 

Hence this photo, sent by a friend in England, properly warning me in advance of my next visit. I feel vaguely relieved that (1) I wouldn’t be playing cricket in the first place (my hand-eye coordination is virtually non-existent) and (2) I am fully self-trained in acting accordingly when someone happens to scream “HEADS!” What fascinates me in particular about this sound-focused warning sign is the evident decision-making about emphasis. Someone put “STOP PLAYING IMMEDIATELY” in all-caps, whereas the actual safety measures (“cover your head and duck”) aren’t, and are left until the very end of the sentence. Fortunately, the signage is largely rhetorical. Its real purpose is likely the tiny print, the part that excuses the location from legal liability. Chances are most people will hear “HEADS!” and duck and cover (or as I think of it, cover and cower) before even identifying what the word means. Hearing is a key feature of humans’ built-in alarm system. It’s kept us safe for eons, even after we started throwing things at each other for sport. (Thanks, Susan Blue!)

Not Drowning, Waving

With one stark exception, I did well in school, both in terms of grades and a sense of engagement. The exception: languages other than English. In high school I did poorly in Spanish, French, and Latin, in that order. In college I was required to extend my disappointing entanglement with French. My sophomore year I ran into one of my French instructors outside the classroom — during class we only spoke French — and after some staring and nodding we came to an agreement that it was OK to speak in English if the sun was overhead and no other students were around. Also, were we to have spoken French I wouldn’t really have been able to say much of anything. After dual sighs of relief, we chatted a bit, and I witnessed an expression form on my teacher’s face: “Hey, this kid actually isn’t an idiot.” 

Fresh out of college, I enrolled in night classes in Japanese, and proceeded to do just as poorly. Much later in life, I worked in manga for five years and ended up vice president of multiple departments with dozens of employees, and I still couldn’t manage to pick up any of the language (scanlators, I salute you). The office language instructor had a familiar expression on his face when we ran into each other at a bar one night. 

I exist as, if nothing else, an exception to the idea that someone with a deep interest in music might have a natural inclination toward languages. (More to the point, I think the situation reflects how much writing — in English — I have running through my head at all times.) A big turning point for me in my writing about everyday sound was a trip I took to Tokyo in the mid-2000s, during which I maintained a detailed sound diary. It was all transportation, pachinko, ventilation, birds, device UX, entertainment, etc. Essentially none of it, when I look back, was about language. 

And now as part of my low-grade midlife crisis, I’ve decided to be perhaps the last person on the planet to install Duolingo on one’s phone. I still long for the idea of being able to have some facility with another language, and so I’ve been pondering which language to pursue. Returning to Japanese seems like a natural option. Given my eating habits and my neighborhood in San Francisco, Chinese is also a good idea, though I’m fairly confident more Chinese science fiction will be translated into English than I’ll ever have the time to read. Korean has, hands down, my favorite alphabet on the planet. However, the U.S. State Department tells me those are among the most difficult languages for a native English-speaker to learn, and I don’t think the government had even taken into consideration my well-documented deficiencies. Top of the list (inverse proportion to difficulty) are Romance languages, and a few others. Right below that set is a shorter set, which includes German, which is what I’m currently experimenting with on Duolingo. Germany has more than its share of electronic music, music-instrument makers, music in general, and contemporary art. If nothing else, I’d eventually gain access to the blogs of plenty of musicians and coders. And I’ve always coveted those tiny paperbacks with the yellow spines.

One of the reasons I did poorly with languages is because I do well with patterns. I’d find a pattern in a textbook, and make my way through the lesson quickly. For a while I’d earn solid As, until suddenly I didn’t. It was initially a struggle in Duolingo for me to actually pay attention to the words and to not memorize letter combinations (devoid of pronunciation or meaning) and collate them with their English equivalents. Fortunately, Duolingo reinforces reading with listening and — quite amazingly to me, when trying it for the first time — with speaking. You aren’t just queried to read or to type words or to click on buttons with words, but to identify them by ear and to say them aloud and have your words parsed by a machine and then rated as passing or failing.

Which brings me to the above interface. (This has gone long, so you may need to scroll up before proceeding.) When I first saw this list of options on my cellphone (the answers, by the way, are “Bruder,” “ich,” “mit,” and either “mein” or “meine,” I’m happy to say I actually know), I felt my old pattern habit kick in. The top waveform seemed to suggest two syllables, and the second and third suggested one syllable each. The fourth was ambiguous. This was all a distraction, for two reasons. The first reason is those waveforms are simply there for you to click on: You listen to the words, and then match them with their written English equivalents. Second, those waveforms don’t actually coordinate at all with what is spoken. They’re just different as a subtle means of distinction. It’s almost entirely decorative. I’m not sure anything would be lost if the waveforms all looked exactly the same, and in fact, if you’re prone to pattern-finding, then you might actually find a uniform interface more welcoming. 

There’s plenty to be said about the use of sound in the Duolingo app — the gamification-addled pings, the forgiving nature of the speech grading, the option to register when you’re not in a situation where you can speak, the humorous character voices — and presuming my interest remains as engaged as it has been, and I avoid the sad language-averse path I’ve repeated in the past, then I’ll have more notes to share in the future. Or I should say, die Zukunft.

Scratch Pad: Muzak, Dreams, Scores

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week (or in this case, the past two weeks). These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon).

▰ I’ve read some great Chinese fables that characterize something akin to hell. None of them mentioned the piano rendition of “Living on a Prayer” playing in this restaurant while I wait for takeout.

▰ I experienced something this morning I wrote about a few weeks ago (in the context to a scene in a film), which was waking to an alarm I first experienced in my dream as something where my brain tried to insinuate the presence amid whatever narrative was unfolding, and eventually I woke to what was actually happening. In this case, the alarm in my dream first sounded like loud insect noise, until recognized what was actually happening.

▰ Can the new Pixel Tablet UX be installed on a Samsung Tablet (it doesn’t really matter, ’cause I 99% of the time just use the Samsung as a Duet extension of my MacBook).

▰ I’ve come to wonder if this electric car I’ve been driving turns off the fake engine noise when it hits a certain speed, and if there’s a speed when the sound of the car moving is quieter than the combination of a slower speed and the fake engine noise

▰ Nothing spoils a TV/movie thriller quite like rote music. If the director approves rote music, it undermines everything other decision they made.

Kelly Akashi’s Heart of the Matter

This is “Mirror Image” (2020), a sculpture by Kelly Akashi currently on display at the San Jose Museum of Art as part of a sizable solo exhibit. The artist brings a broad array of techniques to her work, including glass-blowing, candle-making, carpentry, and bronze. If I were constructing a docent tour of the Akashi show, I might ask the visitors to locate the sonic in this piece. Is the blown bubble a signifier of human breath? Is the hand signaling something in ASL?

As it turns out, the pedestal depicts the artist’s own echocardiogram. After learning this fact, you might recognize that the woodwork does, indeed, have an unusual cadence to it — an unusual shape, at least for pedestals, which tend toward the symmetrical rather than the lopsided. And then you might notice that the pulsing, the beating, is at the same time highly familiar, since it’s something we, as humans, have in common. Once you know what the pedestal is, those two secondary bulges, which signify the apex of heart beats, take on a somewhat discomforting significance, and draw further attention to the fragility of the glass bubble below that heavy, if delicately positioned, brass hand. The paired beats form a sort of mirror image, as does the connection between the two representations of mortality. The exhibit closes on May 21, 2023.

Speaking of bronze, I guess it is currently a thing. There’s quite a bit of bronze in the Kehinde Wiley exhibit currently at the De Young Museum here in San Francisco. The Wiley exhibit is titled “An Archaeology of Silence,” a term apparently from Michel Foucault, the late French philosopher. We’re informed that Foucault “used it to describe the action of making visible a socially repressed phenomenon.” This phrase has a social and political connotation in the context of Wiley’s art. In a sort of mirror image, it might also be applied to the more personal realm of intimacy inherent in Akashi’s. (The Wiley exhibit closes on October 15, 2023.)

Disquiet Junto Project 0593: The Charm

Project-Specific Note: You may contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. This week you can do a second one. Please see additional details in Step 5 below.

Answer to Frequent Question: You don’t need to have uploaded a duet in last week’s project to participate in this week’s third phase of the trio sequence.

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 15, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 11, 2023.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

Disquiet Junto Project 0593: The Charm
The Assignment: Record the second third of an asynchronous trio.

Please note: While this is the third part of a three-part project sequence, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which have occurred over the course of three consecutive weeks. 

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the third in a sequence that encourages and rewards asynchronous collaboration. This week you will be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0592). Note that you are finishing a trio: you’re creating the third part of what two previous musicians began. Please keep this in mind.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record an original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from. The majority are in this playlist:

And additional tracks may appear in the discussion:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0592-better-than-one/

(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up in or disappear from that playlist and discussion. Things are fluid on the internet.)

To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.

Note: It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original duet track as the basis for their trio.

It is strongly encouraged that you look through the above discussion on the Lines forum, because many tracks include additional contextual information there.

Step 3: Record a piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and it should be placed dead center between the left and right stereo channels. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it may be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.

Step 5: As with last week, you can contribute more than one track this week. You can do up to two total. If you choose to do a second, you should preferably try to use a duet track that no one else has used yet. The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0593” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0593” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0593-the-charm/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Stick to close the length of the track yours adds to.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 15, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 11, 2023.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 593rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, The Charm (The Assignment: Complete an asynchronous trio begun by two other musicians), at: https://disquiet.com/0593/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0593-the-charm/

TWiS Listening Post (0000)

Today I wrote a post to the This Week in Sound email list just for paid subscribers. It’s an experiment, and supplements the usual (and still free) Tuesday and Friday issues. 

Just yesterday I asked what people would potentially pay for, or more to the point what people who do pay might appreciate, and so far in the poll recommended ambient music came up on top, seconded by an additional email issue. Today’s email accomplished both those ideas. We’ll see how it goes.

The items in this first issue of the TWiS Listening Post were (1) a remix, (2) a demo, and (3) a clip. The remix was a sneak listen to Karen Vogt’s upcoming album (the cover image of this issue is a still from the video for one of the tracks). The demo was a short video of a piece of looping/sampler software. The clip was a video by Orbital Patterns on Instagram.

I don’t love paywalls, but I figure one out of three posts requiring a paid subscription may not be a bad idea. Or it may be a bad idea. Experimenting means experimenting, and as Brian Eno says, something really only is an experiment if there’s a potential it will fail.

This Week in Sound: The Science of Calling a Cat

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the May 2, 2023, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

JUST KIDDING: There is a Kickstarter (I have no association with it) for a “smart pacifier.” The little device, which seems to combine a harmonica and a binky, is designed to “activate the creative mind at an early age, making passive listeners into musicians before they can say their first words.” … And separately, news about a nursery device that turns “patented auditory sequences into soothing melodic and other background tracks to help the infant brain do its job of paying attention to environmental sound changes.” It’s the Smarter Sleep Sound Soother from RAPT Ventures.

WHISKER WHISPERERS: “Scientists in France might have just found the most effective way to catcall an unfamiliar cat. The team discovered that cats living at a cat cafe responded most quickly to a human stranger when the stranger used both vocal and visual cues to get their attention. The cats also appeared to be more stressed out when the human ignored them completely,” writes Ed Cara at Gizmodo. Here’s a helpful diagram of how the experiment, by Charlotte de Mouzon and Gérard Leboucher at Paris Nanterre University’s Laboratory of Compared Ethology and Cognition, was undertaken:

THE THIX OF IT: “Irish inventors Rhona Togher and Eimear O’Carroll created an advanced acoustic material that reduces noise and can be used with household appliances, as well as in the automotive, construction, and aerospace industries.” The material is called SoundBounce, and it “has a cellular structure that works in tandem with a thixotropic gel placed inside the cells that allow sound to be dampened, reducing noise transmission from one space to another.” FYI, “thixotropic” means “Becoming a fluid when agitated but solid or semi-solid when allowed to stand.” Togher and O’Carroll are currently in the running for a European Inventor Award 2023.

CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC: The ecommerce/delivery reality is making life louder: “With millions of Americans now living in close proximity to a warehouse, it’s time to start treating these drab, feature-less buildings like pollution hotspots, says a recent report by the Environmental Defense Fund. Warehouses are quickly popping up all over the US, bringing truck traffic and tailpipe emissions with them. And yet there is no federal database to see where current or proposed warehouses are located, unlike other major sources of pollution like oil and gas facilities. … [T]here’s significantly more traffic, air pollution, and noise in census tracts with warehouses compared to those without them, another study based in California found last year.”

QUICK NOTES: Rim Shot: Netflix has a news desk (I don’t know how new it is) and it’s called “Tudum” — i.e., onomatopoeia for the network’s sonic brand logo — and that is sorta genius (netflix.com/tudum). ▰ Bank Teller: Voice biometrics was the focus of a letter sent by Senator Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, reportedly to JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab and TD Bank. ▰ Moon Man: Austin Kleon did a new blackout poem inspired by comments I madein recent issue of This Week in Sound. ▰ Bull Market: The Shriek of the Weekwas the bullfinch, “adept mimics” that “can be taught to whistle a human tune like a parrot.” ▰ Mo’ Mojang: There’s new ambient music in Minecraft (update 1.20) and Rohan Jaiswal knows where to find it. ▰ Street Scene: Check out this microtonal composition based on data related to Krasnodar Public Transport in Russia. (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!) ▰ Blue Jay Way: Soundfly, which offers courses for musicians and connects them to mentors, has a story about bird song — I love the idea of musicians having an avian tutor.

Looking, Listening, Recording

There’s a cool recent video game called Season in which you wander the rural landscape on a bicycle, taking pictures and, quite wonderfully, making audio field recordings — all in the shadow of a looming catastrophe. I have a full page review of it in the new issue of The Wire (June 2023: the one with a bright red cover that’s dedicated to The Fall). 

I’ll post the full text in a month when the next issue comes out. Meanwhile, here’s the opening paragraph:

Have you ever paused in the middle of a video game simply to contemplate your virtual surroundings? Not paused as in hit the pause button — not turned off the game, just eased your urge to level up: to shoot or run or jump, or whatever adrenaline-raising action the game was engineered to impel you to accomplish. Now, what if a game was explicitly designed for you to take such a pause? What if paying attention to the world around you — to the world within the game, the world of the game — was the goal of the game? What if observing — looking, listening, recording — was itself the principal game mechanic?

. . .

Screen shot of a detail of the printed page: