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Tele Genic

Got a second guitar used, this one to keep in my office

This Week in Sound: Bat Mimicry, Cairo Field Recordings, Apraxia Achievement

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the May 23, 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.

▰ There is “a species of bat that mimics the buzzing sound of stinging insects like hornets to deceive owls that might otherwise eat them.” This rare circumstance is called acoustic Batesian mimicry. “Mimicry is just such a powerful idea in science and evolutionary biology in particular,” said an evolutionary biologist, David Pfennig. “It shows how you can get remarkable adaptations even among really distantly related groups.” ➔ nytimes.com

▰ “For the past several years, Youssef Sherif, 28, and Nehal Ezz, 26, have wandered the Egyptian capital in search of the cries of street vendors, the tap tap tap of metal workers in their shops, the cacophony of chaotic traffic. Their goal is to capture in recordings what Cairo sounds like — right here, right now — before these noises disappear. They are collecting the sounds to share on an Instagram account and eventually hope to establish a searchable database of sounds.” This Washington Post story does a great job of incorporating examples of the sounds into the feature presentation. ➔ washingtonpost.com (Thanks, Rob Walker!)

▰ A lawsuit claims that the eardrums of a 12-year-old boy were damaged by Apple AirPods. The cause, with some irony, was an Amber Alert, which of course was designed to protect children from abduction. ➔ macrumors.com

▰ UC Berkeley graduated its first two students with apraxia, due to which they are non-speaking. Both are autistic. One, David Teplitz, “graduated with a 3.85 GPA, receiving a degree in political science with a minor in disability studies.” The other, Hari Srinivasen, “graduated with a 4.0 GPA and has now received a fellowship to pursue his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Vanderbilt University.” ➔ abc7news.com

▰ Come to Jennifer Flowers’ article in the current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek (probably my single favorite magazine, I should mention) for details of birders who listen before they look (birding by ear, not by eye), and then stay for the former guerrilla fighters in Colombia who now escort naturalist travelers: “Once you get to know your own territory and realize there’s a rich and biodiverse forest to protect, you won’t go to war,” one tells her. ➔ bloomberg.com

▰ McDonald’s used voice ID to identify repeat customers, leading to a lawsuit. American Airlines, Amazon, Google, and PetSmart have also faced lawsuits about voice privacy. ““Voiceprint litigation is venomous instead of infectious,” says one lawyer. “It goes in so many different directions, every case is so different, and it’s still growing.” ➔ bloomberglaw.com

▰ “What is this weird animal sound I recorded?” asks my friend Mark Frauenfelder, on Boing Boing, recently returned from a trip to the island of Madeira: ➔ boingboing.net

▰ Yes, you want to know how to silence someone else’s phone’s alarm. ➔ macrumors.com

▰ Spring break may be for young lovers, but Great Barrier Reef fish are facing decreasing life expectancy due to motorboat noise. ➔ newscientist.com

▰ It may mean nothing, but machine listening was listed in the summary of just one of the top ten AI graduate degree programs (University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign). ➔ cio.com

▰ A new pair of Sony headphones come with the Endel software’s generative soundscapes built in. They’re called the LinkBuds. A journalist who hadn’t heard previously of Endel described it as follows: “It’s less a standard streaming service like Spotify and Apple Music, and more an algorithmically generated mood enhancer.” ➔ techcrunch.com

▰ Google is adding to videos “audio descriptions that verbally explain what’s shown on screen.” Google is also expanding Project Euphonia: “a research initiative that the company introduced in 2019 to work with people with speech impairments to create more accommodating speech recognition models.” ➔ androidpolice.com, research.google

▰ “The US Federal Communications Commission has prioritized fighting illegal robocalls over the past few years, and the agency continues to turn up the heat in 2022. Last week, the agency passed regulations targeted at overseas phone scammers, but the push to end robocalls is far from finished.” ➔ 9to5mac.com

▰ For the Birds is the title of a massive collection of audio recordings of and related to birdsong. There are 242 tracks in all “of original songs and readings inspired by or incorporating birdsong.” The National Audubon Society will release it as a 20-LP box set later in 2022: “A radiant electronic trance from Dan Deacon and a Beatles interpretation from Elvis Costello share space with a Jonathan Franzen reading; Laurie Anderson, Alice Coltrane (remixed), Yoko Ono and a reading from Wendell Pierce open separate LPs.” ➔ nytimes.com

▰ Supercuts can be automated to find every instance of a word from a long single video and trim to highlight the numerous examples. Here’s how: ➔ lav.io

Sound Ledger¹ (More Voice Assistants Than Humans)

2024: The year when there will be more voice assistants than humans.

289,000,000: Number of TikTok videos tagged #synesthesia

0.2: The percent less than which it is estimated of which people actually have synesthesia

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¹Footnotes

Assistants: thesaxon.org. Synesthesia: wired.com.

Rock On

When bird droppings look like a metal band’s logo

twitter.com/disquiet: Autechre, Burrell/Adderley, Sun Ra

I do this manually each Saturday, 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.

▰ Officially have done the This Week in Sound email newsletter 20 weeks in a row: tinyletter.com/disquiet.

▰ Afternoon trio for birdsong, percolating crockpot, and neighborhood gearhead revving motorcycle engine.

▰ TFW 8 hours of live Autechre sets pop up in your YouTube subscriptions at the start of a workday

(Also at autechre.bandcamp.com.)

▰ Feels really good to get the Junto projects set up the night prior. Thursday feels a little odd, still, because I spent a decade putting the post together and then hitting send. Now I prep it more thoroughly in advance, and it arrives automatically, and I follow up via email.

▰ Says to self: “I’m gonna practice Kenny Burrell’s ‘Chitlins Con Carne’ for half an hour without looking at the sheet music or listening to the track.”

Proceeds to practice Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” for 15 minutes.

Finds “Chitlins Con Carne” sheet music. Listens. Practices it.

▰ Verb I heard this morning that I will not be employing: “diligencing”

Phrase I used this morning and plan to make more use of: “synth dandruff”

A friend followed up with the quite amazing “laptop dander”

▰ Bosch listens to Sun Ra.

Long day, long week. Have a good one. See you Monday.

Two Classics

The Xbox controller and Modern Jazz Quartet album cover in the living room went unexpectedly well together.

Disquiet Junto Project 0542: 2600 Club

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, May 23, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 19, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0542: 2600 Club
The Assignment: Make some phreaking music

Thanks to Alan Bland for proposing this concept for a project.

Step 1: The number 2600 holds particular meaning in hacker circles. Roughly half a century ago, it was discovered that 2600 cycles per second, or 2600 hertz, was the frequency that let people gain operator-level access to phone systems. If this story isn’t familiar, a quick web search will bring you up to speed. It’s widely documented. Familiarize (or re-familiarize) yourself with the doors opened by a whistle at 2600 cycles per second.

Step 2: Make music that somehow engages with the number 2600. You might employ a tone of 2600 hertz, though fair warning it’s quite high-pitched. You might simply use a whistle, in celebration of the Cap’n Crunch toy at the center of the 2600 phone phreaking (as it was called) story. Or you might come up with some other sonic exploratiobn of the number.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0542” (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 “disquiet0542” (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-0542-2600-club/

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, May 23, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 19, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. How long can you exhale?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0542” 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 542nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — 2600 Club (The Assignment: Make some phreaking music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0542/

Thanks to Alan Bland for proposing this concept for a project.

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-0542-2600-club/

Image by arbyreed. And it is used (cropped, with text added) thanks to a Creative Commons Attribution-license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/. Original at https://flic.kr/p/56Efud.

Unofficial Channels: Data Sonification Archive

A merging of distant galaxies that hits the ear like the Doppler effect on an urban highway. El Niño weather patterns as expressed by an instrumental ensemble. Covid-19 statistics that transform into an increasingly complex drone. These are not gestures conceived by modern classical composers. This is scientific research, examples of data sonification, a word still underlined in red by word processors despite its high profile exploration at NASA, the United Nations, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Data sonification is an umbrella term for a growing variety of techniques by which information — from stock market fluctuations to DNA sequences to air pollution trends — gets represented through sound. Sonification is often compared with data visualization, an iffy correlation that perhaps fueled unrealistic expectations for its widespread utility.

Still, engaging work happens regularly. In the first example above, the creators fast-forwarded through billions of years of planetary activity to orient the listener: “the surround sound enables them to hear the galaxies approach from each side and orbit around each other before finally merging together,” write the collaborators, from two observatories and the engineering firm Arup, in accompanying documentation.

The weather one is by Benjamin Renard, a hydrologist doing statistical analysis of climatic datasets. The pandemic one is by Chelidon Frame, extrapolating open data from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. These works are among the nearly 400 examples of sonification that constitute the ever-growing collection indexed at the website sonification.design. The online resource is maintained by Sara Lenzi and Paolo Ciuccarelli, both from the Center for Design at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Asked on a Zoom call if she has identified best practices of what works in sonification, Lenzi, who researched the topic for her PhD at the Polytechnic University of Milan, helpfully reframed the inquiry: “The main research question was,” she says, “does sonification work or not? Is it going somewhere or not?” Sonification doesn’t “replace” data visualization, she argues. “It never really came out of its niche.” But a diminishing sonic purism is allowing a new wave of intriguing work, according to Lenzi: “People started using different strategies, like combining it with other sensory modalities,” among them data visualization. In the Covid-19 example cited above, a user interface (you adjust how quickly time passes) and fluid diagrams align with the drone to make a deeper impression on the user than sound or image alone would have.

Lenzi is currently working on a report summarizing the first year of sonification.design, which launched in January 2021. “We curate the collection,” she explains. “We don’t accept automatically what is sent to us by the submission form. We analyze each case.” And since the field remains new, the website’s categorization, Lenzi says, “keeps changing.”

The above is slightly expanded from the version that appeared in the Unofficial Channels column in the May 2022 issue of The Wire.

This Week in Sound: Prison Privacy, Antarctic Revival, Foghorn Ephemera

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the May 16, 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.

▰ Eric Guth reports in the New York Times on the “ecological revival” of South Georgia, a sub-Antarctic island: “[O]ne of the best signs, Dr. Jackson said, comes from the sounds she hears underwater. ‘What you’ve got in the underwater environment now is blue whales calling nearly continuously,’ she said, noting that the whales were nearly wiped out entirely.” Dr. Jackson is Jen Jackson, a British Antarctic Survey whale biologist “‘It just makes my heart sing,’ she added. ‘We are watching the ocean rewild itself.’” ➔ nytimes.com (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ I reviewed Jennifer Lucy Allan’s book on foghorns for The Wire. The book is now out in paperback, and to mark the occasion, Allan has published foghorn-related stories and ephemera she’s learned about or experienced since the hardcover was released. ➔ thequietus.com

▰ “Calls placed by people in prisons in New York State are being recorded using flawed, racially-biased, and publicly-unproven voice recognition software without the informed consent of the people placing or receiving the calls,” begins a statement from the ACLU of New York about voice privacy for prisoners and their visitors. “The voice recognition software from controversy-plagued Securus Technologies also tracks the location of the people being called from prison, including friends, family, and minor children. This means innocent people are being surveilled by DOCCS simply because they have received calls from people in prison. Their voices are analyzed, their locations are uncovered, and their voiceprints are cataloged in a database, without any meaningful oversight of where all this information goes and what it’s used for.” ➔ nyclu.org

▰ “When the iPod arrived in 2001, it seemed too good to be true, promising ‘a thousand songs in your pocket.’ Before that, if you took music on the go, you wore a Walkman, maybe packing a spare cassette or two. But an iPod blew those limits away.” My friend since college Rob Sheffield on Apple’s announced end to the era of the iPod: ➔ rollingstone.com

▰ “The low-frequency sonar of warships and submarines directly interferes with dolphins’ echolocation, said Pavel Goldin, a marine biologist specializing in dolphins at the Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology in Ukraine. Unable to navigate, the dolphins cannot identify prey and can therefore starve.” ➔ nbcnews.com

▰ Sadly, podcast host Darwin Grosse’s energy hasn’t been great since he was diagnosed with kidney cancer a couple years ago, and so he’s signing off his Art + Music + Technology series after 380+ episodes of incredible conversations with composers, musicians, and technologists (often one and the same). He’s keeping the archive up. It’s a rich, deep dive: ➔ artmusictech.libsyn.com

▰ Google’s map app, according to the Māori Language Commission, has failed to make good on a 2017 promise to fix Māori pronunciation. ➔ nzherald.co.nz

▰ The term “ambient intelligence” can, in a sense, be thought of as voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc.) that do less talking: ➔ smh.com.au

▰ Video maker Callux stayed in an anechoic chamber for over four hours straight, longer than he did back in 2019. There’s a 14-minute compressed highlight reel of his time in the padded box. The footage looks like something out of The Blair Witch, and no doubt there’s a performance aspect to his difficulties with the situation, but it’s still a telling depiction of an extended anechoic experience. ➔ lsbu-acoustics.blogspot.com,youtube.com

Sound Ledger¹ (Ecosystems, Airplanes, Loudspeakers)

1/3: The percentage of the day that the Indian state of Karnataka now requires government approval for the use of a loudspeaker (10pm to 6am)

11,000,000: The amount, in $U.S., raised by the startup Rain to help companies “conceive, build, and manage voice experiences that integrate with brand services and ecosystems”

10: Reportedly how much higher the airplane noise from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport is than that “represented by the airport”

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¹Footnotes

Karnataka: hindustantimes.com. Rain: venturebeat.com. Rocky: thedenverchannel.com.