Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 104

This Week in Sound: Sing Reliably in the Depths of Night

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the April 25, 2023, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

▰ STRING THEORY: HARP stands for Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas, a program that combines data from a quintet of NASA satellites. An article in the Washington Post announces that it “is now open to citizen scientists.” HARP is like neighborhood watch — but with your ears … in space. Writes Erin Blakemore: “The hope is that volunteers can help trawl through the massive amount of data while sussing out sounds that reveal more about the vibrations. Researchers will use their increased understanding of those interactions to help humans better prepare for future space weather events.” 

Learn more at listen.spacescience.org, where this accompanying image (by QiuGang Zong of the University of Massachusetts Lowell) depicts how “types of space waves are analogous to vibrations in air made by musical instruments.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ FIELD REPORT: I recently ordered an AudioMoth, an open-source device intended for use when making field recordings of sound in nature. It’s a great tool for acoustic ecology. (As The Economist has explained, “The device takes its name from the fact that moths can hear sounds across a wide frequency spectrum.”) I love that the mobile app for the AudioMoth does exactly one thing: it emits a chime that can set the device’s internal clock. 

▰ BRAND SLAM: WPP, an advertising conglomerate, has acquired amp (the name is all lowercase), a sonic branding company with such clients as Cadillac, Adobe, Dove, and Lay’s. Michele Arnese founded amp in 2009. I think the big question now is what this means for other small agencies that focus on sound branding: will they continue as standalone entities, or will we see an uptick of such acquisitions in 2023 and 2024? For my part, I think sound branding as a standalone operation isn’t as effective as within a larger organization, where it can be part of a broader, coherent strategy — though as in any field, there will always be small teams that push norms in a way larger organizations struggle to do.

▰ PHONE HOME: The CBC reports on a payphone in the middle of a forest. It is intended for “visitors dealing with the loss of a loved one to pick up the receiver and speak to those they miss.” (My dad died last June just shy of his 87th birthday, and I have an urge to use a wind phone as I type this.) Apparently the concept of the “wind phone” originated in 2010 thanks to Itaru Sasaki, a Japanese garden designer. You can find a wind phone near you at mywindphone.com. The nearest one to me (I live in San Francisco) is across the bay in Oakland on 5th Street below where Interstate 880 and Interstate 980 connect. According to that website, it was created by Jordan Stern in the memory of the three dozen people who died in the 2016 Ghost Ship Fire. Here’s a partial map of wind phone locations around the world. (Via Christof Migone)

▰ TRACK TRACKER: If film music is your thing, then you are probably already (or should be) checking out soundtrack.net’s regularly updated news, such as that Kevin Kiner, known for his work on some great Star Wars animated series (most recently The Bad Batch) is scoring the forthcoming live-action Ahsoka (based on a character who originated in the animated series; now starring actual human Rosario Dawson), and that Mica Levi has a new assignment (The Zone of Interest, based on a Martin Amis novel from 2014 and from the director of Under the Skin, which Levi also memorably scored). Related topic: still no word on an album release for Siddhartha Khosla’s exceptional score for the TV series Rabbit Hole. 

QUICK NOTES: Wind Bag: A scientist explored an idiomatic expression and learned it’s mistaken: “It isn’t harder to shout into the wind; it’s just harder to hear yourself.” (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!) ▰ Orchestral Maneuvers: “The Los Angeles Metro is using classical music on its light rail system to deter homeless people from congregating and sleeping in a downtown station.” (Thanks. Rich Pettus!) ▰ Bird Brain: The podcast from Emergence Magazine recently had an episode titled “The Nightingale’s Song,” featuring “acclaimed folk singer, conservationist, and song collector Sam Lee, who steps into the forest each spring to sing with these beloved birds.” ▰ Channel Surfing: What appears to have been an intercepted comment on a taxi radio “has become a sensation in Argentina after the driver’s taxi radio interfered with the signal from the International Space Station and popped up live during NASA’s live broadcast of a spacewalk.” ▰ App Alert:“Voicemod, the popular voice changer and soundboard, has just landed on macOS, allowing Mac users to transform their voices and trigger sound effects in real time.” ▰ Hearing Aid: A new tool in speech-to-text recognition is modeled on the human ear. ▰ Speak AI: Speech recognition software is increasingly part of the medical world, and a recent study, using mock patient encounters, explores its effectiveness in history-taking. ▰ Planet Rock: Jenna Jones and Joseph Joyce, for Ableton, summarize the benefits of data sonification as a tool for climate action. ▰ When a Problem Comes Along: A podcast called the Wind has a new episode about the politics of the whip: “How a small sonic boom came to represent homelessness in Reno, and how the city responded to unhoused people taking up sonic real-estate.” (Via Rob Walker’s always excellent The Art of Noticing newsletter) ▰ Avian Squad: One of my favorite online nature features is the “Shriek of the Week” by Charlie Peverett of Birdsong Academy, who this week highlighted the nightingale, one of the “few birds to sing reliably in the depths of night and during the day.”

Sound Ledger¹ (AI Survey)

60: Percent of surveyed musicians “already using AI in their productions”

11: Percent of surveyed musicians who’ve used AI during the “songwriting” process

1,299: Number of musicians surveyed

0: Amount of credence I personally put in this survey

. . .

¹Footnotes: musicradar.com.

Junto Profile: Nick Sinnenberg, aka Sinny

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? Nick Sinnenberg, although I am known in certain circles as “Sinny.”

Where are you located? My primary base of operations is New York’s capital region, although I spent four years in Syracuse while attending Le Moyne College. During that time, I encountered a professor and musician named Edward Ruchalski, who opened my horizons to minimalist, drone, and musique concrète music from composers such as John Cage, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, many of whom were associated with Fluxus, an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to art creation that has guided the restraint-based prompts found in Disquiet Junto. In the summer of 2022, I also had the pleasure of visiting La Monte Young’s Dream House, a sound and light installation situated one floor above Young’s dwelling unit.

What is your musical activity? Prior to joining Disquiet Junto in late 2021, I was a drummer/percussionist in various bands. While I certainly relished these opportunities, I also sought an outlet to create more experimental compositions that took advantage of multitracking and audio processing. I recognized that drone and ambient music was untenable within the confines of most standard rock bands, so I directed my attention toward audio production through the use of digital audio workstations (DAWs), eventually settling on Logic Pro as my software of choice.

Despite my roots as a drummer, I usually eschew the standard drum kit in favor of auxiliary percussion, found sounds, and programming to supply desired rhythmic elements. One reason stems from the difficulty of miking an entire drum kit — I simply do not have the necessary equipment to accomplish this daunting task! Another reason can be attributed to personal preferences — the timbral qualities of a slapstick are far more appealing than a standard snare drum.

In addition to my 100+ Soundcloud releases, I also have around 30 unreleased compositions that are currently collecting digital dust. Some of these songs are earmarked for my Cave Utensils project, a collaboration with an amiable British lad. A series of donkey oriented compositions and an eight minute deconstruction of Mambo Number Five will be released under the Cave Utensils alias in the foreseeable future. Other unreleased material include unfinished Disquiet Junto compositions, a dozen comedy songs intended for Babbling Blubber, plus some miscellaneous covers and originals that have yet to find a home.

Over the next few months, my focus will be shifting towards a musique concrète album titled Objects Around the House. The idea of fostering resourcefulness through the use of common household fixtures had been percolating in my head since late 2021, although the concept was formalized when I compiled my musical New Year’s resolution for 2023. Progress began in early January, when the prompt for disquiet0576 instructed participants to get a musical New Year’s resolution out of the way. The byproduct of that prompt was “Objects Around the House 1,” which is slated to be the opening song on the album. “Objects Around the House 2”  followed a week later, and additional songs for the project are also in development.

I’m also preparing an album called Solitary Statue, which will include nine reworked Sinnyseven songs released from 2017-19. A re-recording of “Calculation” was used for disquiet0579, although the album version will be slightly longer. Two previously unreleased songs that were created prior to 2017, namely “Market Square at 7:00” and “Robot’s Bath,” are slated to appear on the album.

What is one good musical habit? I occasionally go into music creation without having a preconceived notion of the finished product, and instead let the sound of an instrument or object dictate the general trajectory of the composition. This was particularly the case for disquiet0561, where Disquiet Junto participants were tasked with creating a composition using Samplebrain, a piece of sample mashing software designed by Aphex Twin. As prescribed by the prompt, I fed various bird and rain WAV files through the software and mangled the samples beyond recognition, eventually settling on a soundscape that resembled a glitchy sprinkler system. These unconventional means of song composition can manifest in unique creations that deviate from the chordal hierarchies ubiquitous in tonal music.

For those experiencing creative lapses, the use of prompts can be useful in spurring inspired musical output. My first exposure to this concept was through Oblique Strategies, which I discovered while browsing through Wikipedia. Developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies is a series of card-based aphorisms that encourage lateral thinking as a means of overcoming writer’s block. Some of these prompts include “change specifics to ambiguities” and “abandon normal instructions.” An online version of Oblique Strategies is available for those who are interested.

What are your online locations? I was relatively late to hop on the social media bandwagon, although I eventually bent to pressure by creating an instagram account in 2017. A Facebook and Snapchat account later followed, although these have since been abandoned. While I occasionally contemplate abandoning Instagram altogether, I might instead launch another account exclusively dedicated to music releases. As of early 2023, my songs have been released with very little, if any, promotion, and most of my followers are probably unaware that I release music on a near-weekly basis.

YouTube, Spotify, and Soundcloud are my primary means of listening to music, with Spotify being my primary streaming service. If an artist does not have their entire discography on Spotify, I will usually turn to YouTube to fill in the gaps. SoundCloud is the only platform I use to release my own music, although I might explore other websites such as BandCamp and Spotify once I finish Objects Around the House and Solitary Statue. I am also an avid user of Wikipedia and have made several thousand edits on the website.

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? Most of my Junto submissions are recorded without the help of outside musicians, but I find collaborations to be the most fulfilling projects. One such opportunity was provided through disquiet0527, where participants were tasked with completing the final third of a song created by another musician.

“Even More Reflections (disquiet0527)” originated from Noodle Twister’s “Collab 1 (disquiet0525)”, a glitchy backing track with several percussive elements. A week later, Daniel Diaz overdubbed some tasteful bass work, culminating with the release of “More Reflections (disquiet0526).” Work on “Even More Reflections” began on February 1, 2022, two days before the prompt for disquiet0527 was officially announced. For those who are unfamiliar with Disquiet Junto, participants are usually given five days to submit their song, (from Thursday-Monday), although disquiet0527 was a rare instance where the prompt was hinted at weeks in advance. As such, I took advantage of the extra time to layer a compelling yet relaxing rhythmic blanket over an already percussive song.

One of the main rhythmic motifs was played on a miniature djembe from Ghana. Sometime around December 2017, a friend from college was visiting Ghana for a vacation, so I implored him to return with some cool percussion instruments, and he happily obliged. Sonically, the mini djembe is more akin to a high pitched bongo, and the instrument itself is quite portable. Much of the percussion on “Even More Reflections” was inspired by Herb Alpert’s “Rotation,” a jazz funk instrumental released in 1979 that managed to reach the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Also featured on “Even More Reflections” are three rototoms, which were tuned in real-time throughout the recording by rotating the drumheads. At certain points (such as the 2:40 mark), the rototoms created audible squeaks, and I even failed to hit the small rototom at one point, instead striking the rim (at 2:58). Ultimately, I opted to include these “blemishes” as they worked surprisingly well in context with the rest of the song.

Does being a drummer in some way give you a different perspective on making music than someone with a more generally chordal/tonal background, like a pianist or a guitarist? And if so, how?

Guitarists tend to write songs on a guitar and pianists usually compose on a piano, yet I rarely craft songs on a drum kit. Unlike the piano and guitar, most drums are unpitched instruments, rendering them largely incapable of producing recognizable musical notes.

To branch out beyond the drum kit, I learned how to play virtual synthesizers through a computer keyboard. The layout of a computer keyboard is very familiar to me; it also helps that the computer keys are compactly spaced, especially when compared to a standard piano. Furthermore, the “F” and “G” keys on a computer correspond with the same notes found on a piano, which made the process of learning “musical typing” relatively easy. Drums and percussion are still included in my compositions, but only when a song requires it.

My approach to music creation centers around a desire to create a compelling sound environment that makes use of both tonal and atonal elements. While my songs generally adhere to the 12-tone scale, they are often augmented with sounds not usually associated with music, such as animal noises and household appliances.

One such example can be found on “Soft Concrète,” which features the use of car keys, a flag pole, and a cuckoo call in addition to more conventional instruments such as an acoustic guitar and electric piano. Instead of relying on the guitar and electric piano for chordal accompaniment, I interpret these instruments as raw materials that can be melded and manipulated to construct brand new sounds. Conventional playing is thrown out the window in favor of amateurish experimentation, which in turn yields unconventional results.

String Bouquet

The bouquet of recently plucked strings resulting from guitar re-stringing, which I am bad at and bad at doing frequently enough, two things that may be related

Message to Self

The electric vehicle I’ve been driving lately highlights two different circumstances about the nature of problems and solutions in voice-related interfaces. 

One example is how the correct solution can often leapfrog the perceived solution. Consider the way a cellphone is held in a car. There is no standard, universal phone holder in cars, and in fact most cars don’t even come with a phone holder. You’re left with the perceived solution, which is haphazard aftermarket devices that dangle from air conditioning vents or extend from former cigarette lighters. 

As it turns out, the best solution may be to put one’s phone away entirely. Services like Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto don’t just mirror one’s phone but provide better implementation of the phone’s essential apps on the larger screen that is part of your car. In many cases, these car-specific variants of the apps emphasize voice interaction over typing or even looking. When I receive a text message while driving, it is read to me. If I wish to reply, I can do so verbally, and then that message is turned into text, which is sent to my interlocutor. It’s kind of funny to think that if I am conversing this way with someone in another car, each message undergoes voice-to-text-to-voice conversion. Yes, we might as well call each other, except we’ve learned that asynchronous — even when near-synchronous — communication has its benefits.

Like many solutions, this one can lead to new problems. This week I received a ridiculous automated text message in the car, via CarPlay’s connection with my iPhone. The inbound message was read aloud to me automatically. I responded, out loud, saying that it was a ridiculous message. I intended this comment for the person in the passenger seat. However, technology is about as good with rhetorical comments and social boundaries as it is with irony. The car immediately repeated my statement back to me and asked if I wanted to send it as a reply, which of course wasn’t my intention. I declined.

The other example has to do with solving for inexplicable absences. Of the roughly 250 apps on my phone, fewer than 30 are mirrored via CarPlay on my car’s dashboard screen, and two of those are car-specific. The majority are things like audiobook apps, music apps, and communication tools. 

The biggest surprise is a glaring omission: the lack of a way to record a voice memo. It’s worth remembering that the iPad didn’t always have the Voice Memos app that comes with the iPhone. And the app hasn’t come to CarPlay — at least not yet. In fact, none of the audio recording apps on my phone (such as Just Press Record and Motiv) appear in CarPlay. 

I record a lot of voice memos, to the point that I worry I might become Michael Keaton’s character in the 1982 movie Night Shift (“Why don’t they just feed the tuna fish mayonnaise!”). I do it before bed each night, just rattling off random thoughts before I close my eyes, and I do it while going for walks. I don’t drive all that often, but I’m used to using my phone to record voice memos. I have it set so that if I tap three times quickly on the back of the phone, voice-memo recording commences immediately (as a feature within the Apple Notes app). 

In the absence of a proper voice memo app in CarPlay, I looked for a solution. There appear to be two. If you have Siri on (which I don’t), you can request that it records an audio note. Alternatively, you can add yourself as a contact in the Messages app, and use the app to send yourself a note via voice-to-text messaging. (The latter is a corollary to the pre-cellphone habit I had of calling my answering machine at home and leaving myself an occasional message.) 

So, there’s a business opportunity for free: if anyone out there wants to make a CarPlay voice memo app, you seem to have little competition — and at least one user.

Right Movie, Wrong Time

A couple nights ago, I wanted something to watch. The day’s client work was over, and I had filed one freelance piece, with a few others in appropriate phases of development. There’s a short story I’ve been trying to tie up, and I hit pause on that. I wanted someone else’s story — preferably at the atmospheric end of the narrative spectrum — in my head and in the living room. 

I’ve been slowly re-reading Fahrenheit 451 lately (in between three others books, already one more than my usual for fiction: Anya Ow’s admirably unadorned Ion Curtain, Hiron Ennes’ deep purple Leech, and Sayaka Murata’s casually unsettling Life Ceremony — all published in 2022). Ray Bradbury’s classic, which turns 70 this year, has made me quite self-conscious about the intersection of personal technology and media — both about the insulating capacity of audiobooks (Bradbury calls in-ear devices “Seashells,” and I now wonder if they informed the name of the “Starfish” at the end of Jenifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad), and about how filmed entertainment appearing on large screens in one’s home can become a matter of domestic decoration and artificial environment. 

All that in mind, I selected Red Desert (1964) by Michelangelo Antonioni, whom I know mostly from Blow-up, which was Antonioni’s subsequent film, released two years after Red Desert. His Blow-up is of particular interest because it inspired Blow-out (1981), Brian De Palma’s homage, which swapped the original’s emphasis on photography for audio recording, and thus is up there with The Conversation as a key entry in the Sound Studies Film Festival. Red Desert is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

The opening is all bleak industrial landscape (totally my jam), but it’s also so rich with field recordings of the zone that I couldn’t really lose myself in it; I was consumed, instead, by the quietly insistent background noise. Then the credits, set to a female vocal that seemed to emulate the wavering tonality of the Theremin, announced the work of not one but two composers (Giovanni Fusco as well as, for “musica elettronica,” Vittorio Gelmetti). And then a tiny car pulled up, weighed down by two comically oversized megaphones, and I had to acknowledge that this movie was not going to be the engrossing evening distraction that I’d hoped for. It felt more like a research magnet, a sonic rabbit hole. Homework. I’ll watch it again some other time in the appropriate mood. Then I’ll report back.

Scratch Pad: Wiki, MP3, EV

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @disquiet@post.lurk.org (on Mastodon). Some material appears here earlier inone form or another.

▰ The loudspeaker at the pharmacy: “Assistance requested in the Pain and Sleep Department.”

I’m not sure even JG Ballard or William S. Burroughs could have come up with the Pain and Sleep Department.

▰ RIP, Ahmad Jamal (92). Fairly certain it was the first jazz concert I ever attended, sometime in my teens. He played an arts venue in my hometown. I was transfixed by the drummer.

▰ Pause button, but it waits until the next downbeat

▰ The street construction is so loud it’s like being at the dentist except my entire body is a tooth

▰ Always fun keeping an eye on changes in Wikipedia entries

▰ The way your blood pressure chills after you turn off autoplay on Apple Music

▰ Step 1: “I’m gonna really get those decades of MP3s/etc. organized.”

Step 2: Downloads various recommended pieces of software to try out.

Step 3: Installs software.

Step 4: Reads subsequent instructions to download another piece of software to support the software already downloaded.

Step 5: Plays a YouTube video.

▰ Just to confirm: Apple’s new classical streaming service tells you who wrote the album’s liner notes but doesn’t actually share the notes to themselves?

▰ Turning off the air conditioner in an EV simply because it’s noticeably loud versus the still eerie quiet of the vehicle itself — the comfort of the quiet ride beats the comfort of a chilled ride

▰ Now can we have a science fiction show that dispenses with everyone except Carol Kane and Amy Sedaris?

▰ During the week: noisy construction on the street. Currently: in the garage. I should schedule a dentist appointment just to continue the trajectory.

Pyotr Principle

Based in Amsterdam, the Error Instruments company is a tremendous source of electronic musical tools, with a specialty in the playful and the esoteric. Among its most recent is the Ballerina Eurorack, which puts the archetypal music box into the context of a modular synthesizer (complete with the ability for it to be impacted by control-voltage signals). And yes, the Ballerina is wound by hand. Naturally, the gadget plays a snippet from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. If this is of interest, you might like other synthesizer implementations of old-school music boxes, as well as a synth-kalimba (or mbira), the African thumb piano.

Disquiet Junto Project 0590: Concrète Roots

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, April 24, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 20, 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 0590: Concrète Roots
The Assignment: Make music combining field recordings and feedback

This project is the first of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2023 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 6 through 10. The topic this year is « √ » — as the organization explains: “the radical, or square root symbol and the power of its symbolism are central to the festival and these will be translated into music in multifarious ways.” All three projects will engage with the work of Éliane Radigue, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2023 festival.

We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the fifth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects may be played and displayed throughout the festival.

Step 1: Consider two different techniques: field recordings and feedback.

Step 2: Combine field recordings and feedback in the development of an original track.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0590” (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 “disquiet0590” (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-0590-concrete-roots/

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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, April 24, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 20, 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 590th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Concrète Roots (The Assignment: Make music combining field recordings and feedback), at: https://disquiet.com/0590/

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-0590-concrete-roots/

This Week in Sound: The Difficulty of Not Making Sounds

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the April 18, 2023, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

▰ FILM THREAT: You’ve probably read enough stories by now about why dialogue on TVs is hard to hear, even if your ears haven’t neared middle age. But there is hope on the audible horizon. A forthcoming feature from Amazon Prime Video, called Dialogue Boost, “lets you raise the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects.” Does it do this by accessing the source audio from the original production? No, the application uses artificial intelligence — which if it is sentient must be happy to, for a moment, be a savior rather than a threat: “Dialogue Boost analyzes the program’s audio and uses AI to spot points where dialogue may be tough to hear. Then speech is isolated and its audio enhanced to make dialogue clearer.” Now let’s ponder unintended consequences, like people turning off the music entirely from films and recommending their own alternate scores, or movie studios suing to maintain the intended level of mumblefication. (Thanks, Bart Beaty!)

▰ CALL OF THE WILD: In a radio broadcast, KERA’s Krys Boyd interviews New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger on the “surprising musicality” of animals. Bilger profiled neuroscientist-composer David Sulzer in a recent issue of the magazine on this topic. Boyd asks whether we, as humans, invented music, or just discovered it. Bilger replies: “I feel like we invented a certain kind of music but I agree with Sulzer that it’s something that’s sort of threaded through the world around us that we’ve just learned to echo it more than invent it.” (Thanks, Rob Walker!)

▰ OFF THE RAILS: The redevelopment of downtown LaGrange, Georgia, has a perceived sonic obstacle: the noise of its railroad. “The horns can be heard throughout the downtown area, even in the downtown hotel, where guests will complain about the horns blaring,” said Phillip Abbott, who is identified as a local business owner and redeveloper. As a result, the city voted “to determine how much it would cost to convert railroad crossings around downtown to silent crossings.” (Since you may be wondering, as did I: This isn’t the La Grange made famous in the ZZ Top song that goes “haw, haw, haw, haw.” That one’s in Texas. And in any case, the song is about a house of ill repute on the outskirts of town.)

▰ SPLIT TIME: Adam Sliwinski of Sō Percussion does an excellent, playful close read of John Cage’s 4’33”, inspired by the observation that David Tudor, who premiered the work 71 years ago in Woodstock New York, “stopped and re-started the stopwatch between movements.” That’s in contrast with the accepted norm: “Most of the performances I can remember,” he writes, “articulated the movements within the time frame, but didn’t ‘stop’ time in between.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

▰ ON THE CLOCK: There’s a lot of talk regarding autonomous vehicles, as with merely electric and hybrid ones, as to what sounds they should emit. Researchers from Cornell have discerned something: “It was the timing of the sound that was most important. … In analyzing the videos, Pelikan and Jung saw that regardless of which sound they played, the timing and duration were most important for signaling the bus’s intentions.” The study is by lead author Hannah Pelikan, a doctoral student at Linköping University in Sweden (and a recent visiting scholar at Cornell), and Malte Jung, associate professor of information science at Cornell. (And yeah, the word “intentions” is extra interesting in this context.)

▰ QUICK NOTES: Keyed In: If you wish your plain old laptop sounded like a clackety mechanical keyboard, there’s an app for that. And, yeah, it’s called Klack. ▰ Noise Floor: A guy in Hong Kong was tired of his very loud upstairs neighbors so he aimed a speaker at them through his ceiling (and their floor). ▰ Sex Works: Selene Ross (Radiotopia’s The Kitchen Sisters, KALW, NPR, KCRW) on how working in erotic fiction informed her broader work in audio: “I had to ensure every sound effect — every swish of bedsheets shifting, every dress falling softly to the floor — landed the way we wanted.” ▰ Walk This Way: How Sperry, the shoe maker, came up with its sonic brand, “an eight-second sound(plus a shorter, two-second version) composed of ocean sounds and an A major seventh chord played on an acoustic guitar.” ▰ Grate Outdoors: A video from Wired explains how a “line array” speaker system has improved sound at concert festivals. ▰ Foley Folly: The hardest part of action scenes? Shadow and Boneactor Ben Barnes describes “the difficulty of not making sounds during action scenes.”

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