Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 143
June 21, 2022
This Week in Sound: “Acoustically Stressed”
These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the June 20, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (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.
▰ “Moths are going to inspire the next generation of sound-absorbing materials. … Remarkably, they found that the wings absorbed as much as 87% of incoming sound energy when mounted on top of a solid surface, while also absorbing a wide range of frequencies (broadband) coming from many different angles (omnidirectional).” ➔ cosmosmagazine.com
▰ Barcelona is taking action on noise pollution: “If the limits are exceeded during two consecutive weekends, the area will be confirmed as acoustically stressed. … In that case the district will have to present an action plan that can be worked on with neighbours, restaurants and others to try to mitigate the damage that is being done.” ➔ theguardian.com
▰ “A 20-year-old woman who was born with a small and misshapen right ear has received a 3-D printed ear implant made from her own cells.” The technology is remarkable: “The new ear, transplanted in March, will continue to regenerate cartilage tissue.” (The disorder is called microtia. It’s “a rare birth defect that causes the auricle, or external part of the ear, to be small and malformed.”) ➔ nytimes.com (Thanks, Mike Rhode — sorry I’m just getting around to this one)
▰ Clive Thompson rants against the car alarm, which he describes as “the distilled essence of car-ownership,” and describes the difficulty he had getting a car dealer to remove his. Two bits of his data appear in this week’s Sound Ledger. (I found this via the Twitter account of Deb Chachra, who suggested: “disconnecting your car alarm should be required before you can get a residential street parking permit in urban areas.”) ➔ clivethompson.medium.com
▰ “We’ve all been on a call where someone has poor room acoustics making it hard to hear them, or seen two people try to talk at the same time creating an awkward ‘no, you go ahead’ moment. Microsoft’s new AI-powered voice quality improvements should improve or even eliminate these day-to-day annoyances.” ➔ engadget.com
▰ Air taxis may be actually coming. The air doesn’t require the eminent domain that freeways can, but there are other sorts of impacts. “While a single air taxi may be relatively quiet, what happens when there is a constant stream of them coming in and out of a landing spot? Should there be nighttime restrictions on flights? Will this just be a means for the ultra-wealthy to buzz over poor neighborhoods to Dodger Stadium or Crypto.com Arena?” ➔ latimes.com
▰ I’d missed this dication news when sorting through the recent Apple announcements: “Today we’re excited to introduce an all-new dictation experience that lets you fluidly move between voice and touch.” There is even “emoji dictation.” ➔ cultofmac.com
June 20, 2022
Sound Ledger¹ (Cars & Satellites)
1: Percent of people who said they would “call the police upon hearing a car alarm”
95: Estimated percent of alarms set off by “vibrations of passing trucks or glitches in the car’s electrical system”
31: Number of days of satellite imagery in a NASA sonificaton project that resulted in a “a waltz-inspired melody.”
________
¹Footnotes
Alarms: clivethompson.medium.com. NASA: nasa.gov.
Originally published in the June 20, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.
June 19, 2022
June 18, 2022
twitter.com/disquiet: Morning Sounds, Drone Choir
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.
▰ Morning sounds, 9:44am EDT: chatter several rooms away, an intense drone of nearby construction activity, creaking of an old house as the summer sun consumes the neighborhood, passing traffic, ears ringing from allergies
▰ Ain’t no drone choir like a multiple simultaneous suburban lawn mowers drone choir.
▰ Correction: There is a meaningful addition to the lawnmower drones when the HVAC kicks in as the day’s temperature works toward the currently expected 86º Fahrenheit. (On a positive note, that’s down from the previously expected 87º.)
▰ How it started: airborne toxic event
How it’s going: a lot of kids’ pee on plastic balls
This DALL-E is by twitter.com/byron_queen.
June 17, 2022
Back Catalog
Looking through my late father’s CD collection, and thinking through which were gifts from me over the years, and which he purchased himself.
June 16, 2022
Disquiet Junto Project 0546: Code Notes
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 20, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 16, 2022.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0546: Code Notes
The Assignment: Make music that includes a secret message.
Step 1: This project was suggested by Glenn Sogge, informed by a widely circulated article about using music toward the end of the Cold War to encode information. Give it a read:
https://www.wired.com/story/merryl-goldberg-music-encryption-ussr-phantom-orchestra/
Step 2: Borrow, adapt, or create a means to compose music that includes coded information.
Step 3: Record a piece of music using the approach you decided upon in Step 2.
Step 4: When uploading the track, be sure to detail the approach you employed, and how you did so, and the message you encoded.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0546” (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 “disquiet0546” (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:
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0546-code-notes/
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:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 20, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 16, 2022.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0546” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
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 546th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Code Notes (The Assignment: Make music that includes a secret message) — at: https://disquiet.com/0546/
More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0546-code-notes/
Image by Wapcaplet, used (text, color added) thanks to a Creative Commons license:
June 15, 2022
Family Room
My father passed away this week, just shy of his 87th birthday. In my current state of sadness, words fail me, so for now here is a photo of his very old stereo system.
June 14, 2022
This Week in Sound: The Staccato Cadence of the Cisco Ringtones
These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the June 13, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (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.
▰ “Deepfake audio doesn’t do emphasis well, as you might have heard in the somewhat monotonal recorded speech of customer service bots. Human voices have evolved over time to nuances of emphasis, dialects, and other quirks that deepfakes can’t yet match.” Jeff Elder on the technology’s Achilles’ heel — at least for now. ➔ sfexaminer.com (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ IKEA teamed up with Swedish House Mafia to make a turntable and a desk. When you think about it, isn’t Ikea the Swedish House Mafia? ➔ engadget.com
▰ Definitely check out these interactive noise maps of Paris, New York, and London. ➔ interactive.wearepossible.org, duncangeere.com
▰ Just a note that the entire second season of the CW’s Kung Fu centers around a mystical ancient bell with unique tuning that was, apparently, the cause of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. And someone’s building a replica! ➔ cwtv.com
▰ Spotify explains its acquisition of of the AI voice company Sonantic: “For example, this voice technology could allow us to give context to users about upcoming recommendations when they aren’t looking at their screens. Using voice in these moments can reduce barriers to creating new audio experiences—and open up the doors to even more new opportunities.” ➔ 9to5mac.com
▰ “By 2060, 24 percent of the U.S. population is expected to be 65 or older” — meaning hearling loss may become “commonplace.” ➔ psychologytoday.com
▰ There’s a story in the Korea Herald about the expansion of use of voice AI by the police in sex crimes, and I’m trying to sort out if it’s a positive development, or a frightening privacy violation. ➔ koreaherald.com
▰ Toward the end of the Cold War, musician Merryl Goldberg smuggled information in and out of the U.S.S.R. in the form of musical notation: “Musical note names span the letters A to G, so they don’t provide a full alphabet of options on their own. To create the code, Goldberg assigned letters of the alphabet to notes in the chromatic scale, a 12-tone scale that includes semi-tones (sharps and flats) to expand the possibilities. In some examples, Goldberg wrote only in one musical range, known as treble clef. In others, she expanded the register to be able to encode more letters and added a bass clef to extend the range of the musical scale. These details and variations also added verisimilitude to her encoded music.” ➔ wired.com (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!)
▰ The always great Computers Are Bad by the tireless J.B. Crawford explores the sounds of old analog office phones: “To be fair, though, whatever anonymous Cisco employee sat down to copy the Merlin ringtones made some meaningful improvements. The staccato cadence of the Cisco ringtones, as opposed to the Merlin’s legato, is very distinctive and probably more recognizable in a loud environment. It also sounds pretty cool, which sure helps with a TV series about a vague counter-terrorism agency with apparently superhuman abilities.” ➔ computer.rip (Thanks, Brian Crabtree!)
▰ How “urban canyons” can “prolong sonic booms in cities”: “Narrower streets introduce more complex boom propagation through multiple reflections on building facades. While they don’t affect boom loudness, they tend to prolong the pressure signals at ground level in urban canyons through increased resonance between buildings” ➔ phys.org (Via Warren Ellis’ newsletter)
▰ “If you could immerse yourself in a quantum fluid, you would hear every event twice, because they support two sound waves with different speeds.” ➔ phys.org (Also via Warren Ellis’ newsletter)
▰ Using microphones to understand New York Harbor’s dolphin resurgence: “Scientists have found that bottlenose dolphins can emit a rapid series of clicks known as feeding buzzes that help them track prey. From 2018 to 2020, the team set up underwater microphones and recorders at six locations off Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey to listen for the distinctive sounds.” ➔ nytimes.com
June 13, 2022
Sound Ledger¹
2,000: distance in kilometers greater than which cetaceans can communicate
63: percent of protected natural spaces where human activity doubles background-noise levels
21: percent of protected natural spaces where human activity increases background-noise levels tenfold
________
¹Footnotes
Cetaceans: theconversation.com. Protected: theatlantic.com
Originally published in the June 13, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.
June 12, 2022
Bleak Triplex
Clearly this triplex provides homes for three fierce individualists who — after a lengthy legal engagement, a kind of Bleak Apartment House, or Bleak Coop, or Bleak Tenancy in Common — came to an agreement, co-signed and notarized, that each could select their own doorbell system. Also, clearly, this battle took place long ago. The three devices have weathered the passage of time — or more to the point, been weathered by it. At some point, perhaps a new generation of tenants will initiate a reconciliation, and the archaic buzzers will be replaced by a single system, the uniformity of which will reflect a newfound multi-domestic peace. Until then, the begrudging buzzers maintain an uneasy truce.
