Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 36

On the Line

▰ Like a Glove:

The chanters give the puppets voice with intense and compressed screeches, gasps, and tears of terror, shame, and remorse — but they themselves slip from our awareness. Their disembodied voices operate like a soundtrack, synchronized with puppet gesture and emotion: a sinking chest, the kink of an elbow, a feverish shake.

That is Jennifer Homans in The New Yorker describing the art of Japanese puppetry, focusing here on the individuals who give voice to the dolls.

. . .

▰ Spaced Out:

... there are mysteries below our sky:the whale song, the songbird singingits call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

That is Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate, in her brief poem, “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” which could almost be read to suggest there’s enough on Earth worth wondering at, that the skies are a distraction. Almost.

. . .

▰ Room Tone:

In this case, the great volume of air seemed charged and activated, but often I felt that the elegant airiness operated like a buffer and that the work could use some coaxing, that some itinerary or timeline or thematic might have been laid out.

That is critic Alex Kitnick, writing at 4columns.org, about a retrospective of the art of Christine Kozlov currently exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Manhattan. The further context of this description is Kozlov’s Information: No Theory (1970), in Kitnick’s words: “a recording system that commits a room’s sound to magnetic tape only to immediately erase it.”

Sound Ledger: Dialects, Ocean, Noise

201: number of dialects (from 288 cities) reported to be supported by the voice recognition technology of the company iFlytek

4,000: distance, in kilometers, that the sound of airguns, used in oil and gas exploration underwater, can travel

147,000,000,000: estimate annual cost, in euros, of noise pollution, per France’s Environmental Transition Agency (aka ADEME)

Sources: dialects (techinasia.com), airguns (phys.org), noise (lemonde.fr)

Looking Out for No. 1

Looks like someone was voted off the island

On Repeat: Aarset, Kowalczyk, Fennesz

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ This 9-minute jam is pretty heavy, even by guitarist Eivind Aarset’s standards, like hearing Dark Magus emerge from Black Sabbath. It’s a new trio, teaming Aarset with drummer Audun Kleive and keyboardist Ståle Storløkken. According to Kleive: “We are currently building our repertoire further.” Eric Furst replied on Mastodon: “It’s a bit like a black hole posting that they are ‘currently in the process of becoming more massive.’”

▰ Some deep interstellar drones from Kamil Kowalczyk, born in Poland and based in Scotland:

▰ There’s a new album, Mosaic, due out in December from Fennesz, and its excellent opening track, “Heliconia,” is a shoegaze expanse you can really get lost in over the course of its 9+ minutes.

Scratch Pad: Lore Was Always Ahead of Mythos

I  do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ gluten-free breadboarding

▰ Still not sure why audiobook players don’t let you also listen to music

▰ Been doing this thing with TV ads lately where I unmute for the last second or, at most, two seconds (the now normalized ad countdown makes this easy), and seeing — that is, hearing — what makes the final sonic impression, and then trying gauge the extent to which advertisers are doing anything in that final moment to catch the ear of and appeal to vigilant ad-muters

▰ Friday morning hold-music dancing-in-place

▰ In the middle of reading too many books. As matters of gluttony go, it’s a lesser of numerous evils. I did finish reading a short graphic novel, Old Dog: Operations, an anthology by various writers and artists building out the world and lore introduced a year ago in Declan Shalvey’s Old Dog [Redact One]. I was going to type “mythos,” and then sorted “lore” as the more common word these days, and then wondered when lore overtook mythos, but according to the data in Google Books Ngram, lore was always ahead of mythos.

TWiS Listening Post (0024)

This went out to paid This Week in Sound subscribers as a thank you

The Science of Oz

Every week, when I send out the Disquiet Junto project, I don’t actually send it out directly. I set it up in various digital publishing tools, primarily my disquiet.com website and an email list service, and then I set them both on timers. I am almost always deep asleep when they actually go out, shortly after midnight. I do all this knowing that some of the first Junto members to see each week’s project instructions are in Australia, and in fact it’s not uncommon for an Australian track to pop up on the llllllll.co discussion thread before I wake up. (I’m looking at you, Bassling* — aka Jason Richardson.) So it seems particularly appropriate that this week’s project has as its basis the research of four scientists from an Australian University. I first became aware of it as part of the process of putting together my This Week in Sound email newsletter.

*And indeed, he had recorded and posted before I was up.

Slightly adapted from the note that appeared in the October 24, 2024, issue of the Disquiet Junto project announcement newsletter.

Disquiet Junto Project 0669: Phonosynthesis

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0669: Phonosynthesis
The Assignment: Make music to help a forest regenerate.

A scientific research paper this month documented evidence that sound can help fungus grow. The conclusion: “Demonstrating a tangible impact on fungal activity, our findings suggest that carefully tuned acoustic parameters might be able to enhance ecological processes.”

Record music to help a forest grow. Imagine an array of solar-powered speakers is spread through a forest-in-need. Or come up with another deployment scenario of your own imagining. What sort of music would you play for the forest to encourage its regeneration?

The research paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0295.

Coverage in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/science/fungus-sounds-growth.html

The paper is the work of four people from the College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, in Australia.

Thanks to Michael Rhode for having shared with me the research coverage.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0669” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0669-phonosynthesis/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How hard do you need to work to keep your secret?

Deadline: Monday, October 28, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 669th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Phonosynthesis — The Assignment: Make music to help a forest regenerate — at https://disquiet.com/0669/

More This Week in Sound: Phonosynthesis, Farts

▰ ROOTS MUSIC: Call it “phonosynthesis,” as scientists confirm that sounds can improve the growth of fungus, per the New York Times: “Playing sound to Trichoderma harzianum, a green microscopic fungus that defends tree roots from pathogens, led to growth rates seven times as fast as those of fungus grown in the sound of silence. If the laboratory findings can be replicated in nature, then sound could be an unexpected new tool for improving the health of forests, encouraging beneficial microbes to take root and thrive.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ SCREEN OFF: One thing I love about the Diary section of the London Review of Books is it often doesn’t announce its topic. It’ll just say “Diary” at the top, along with the entry’s author’s name, and unless you read the piece, you might not know what it’s about, and when you begin to read, you don’t necessarily know what’s ahead. A Diary by Dani Garavelli earlier this month waits until its second paragraph to introduce the topic at hand, movie theaters, and while you might guess it’s about their decline, it doesn’t get around to that for a spell. Eventually we do get around to the introduction of sound in the 1920s and ‘30s, and eventually to the unfortunate results of haphazard cost-cutting decades later. With one theater, by way of example: “They simply dropped a wall from the circle downwards and then divided what they had behind that into two more cinemas. There was no soundproofing: you could quite often hear the film in the neighbouring auditorium.”

▰ BOTTOMS UP: Noni Hazlehurst was a presenter on the longrunning Australian TV series Play School from 1978 to 2011. I hadn’t heard about the show until she was interviewed by the Guardian. Here she describes an inflatable raft that caused what she says was the most chaotic thing to ever happen on the show’s set: “Now, the thing is, it’s meant to inflate in 30 seconds into a two-person rubber dinghy, which it did – but it made the most extraordinary farting sound that you’ve ever heard in your life. For a full 30 seconds. It exploded and just about knocked the whole set over. We were in absolute hysterics, to the point where someone wrote in and said we were obviously drunk. You couldn’t have written it. It was just so funny.”

▰ 21ST CENTURY FX: “I’ve never really used sound effects in comics much. I don’t like them. As a kid, they fascinated me, but after a certain age they started to take me out of the storytelling, so I’ve tried to avoid them. I was part of the generations that helped kill the sound effect and the thought balloon, I guess.” That’s the opening of a great consideration the sound effects (and related topics) of comics in the latest issue of Warren Ellis’ newsletter, Orbital Operations. There was also a heap of inventive sound in his recent audio drama, The Department of Midnight, which I need to get around to unpacking. 

▰ GRACE NOTES: Listen Up: Paranoia about whether or not smart devices are listening to us got a nudge when 404 Media shared a leak of an “active listening plan” that proposed to use “‘real-time intent data’ from smart device microphones to deliver ads to consumers.” ▰ No Fooling Around: A multimedia feature in the Guardian on life — especially sonic nocturnal life — during wartime: “people can see almost nothing in the darkness and so strain their ears to hear the noises that haunt them afterwards.” ▰ Punctured: Inconsistency is cited in research on the use of breath sounds in respiratory evaluations. ▰ Battle Bots: Robot vacuums across the country were hacked in the space of several days, [allowing] the attackers to not only control the robovacs, but use their speakers to hurl racial slurs and abusive comments at anyone nearby.” ▰ Just Browsing: A Chrome extension keeps alert for audio deep fakes.

The Ears Have IT

Restaurants are getting noisier, and the noise gets harder for people to deal with as they age. Both those things are true, and they combine to make the situation even worse. Fortunately, in the wake of revised FDA regulations back in 2022, over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids are becoming available, dropping the price significantly (from the thousands of dollars to the hundreds), and increasing innovation in the marketplace. 

The new hearing health tools in Apple’s AirPods became the FDA’s first authorized OTC hearing aid software device, as announced last month. Without that regulation change, the situation would not have improved as quickly as it has. 

As Chris Welch reports in the Verge, the initial trio of Apple featues includes “clinical-grade hearing aid functionality, a hearing test, and more robust hearing protection.”

Rebecca Hamilton at Slate reports on the scale of need: “[J]ust 16 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 69 years who would benefit from hearing aids ever use them. Some 20 million go without.”

Pete Wells in the New York Times notes a particular use case that predates the hearing health additions: “What you may not know is that the AirPods Pro 2 already come with a setting that can turn up the volume on the voices of people you’re talking to and another one that tamps down background noise. Other earbud makers, including Sony, Samsung, Beyerdynamic and Soundcore, also offer functions meant to make conversation easier in noisy places.” Wells was a long time restaurant critic, so if anyone knows something about noisy rooms, it’s him.

Technology will help, but a major next step is going to require changes to cultural norms. Right now, AirPods and earbuds in general send a visual signal of isolation, that someone is paying attention to something other than the world around them. We’ll need to get comfortable sitting across from someone and not take the presence of their earbuds as a physical indication that they aren’t paying attention to us. No one sees a traditional hearing aid in someone’s ear and thinks they’ve checked out of the conversation, quite the contrary.

Related stories on the topic of things we put in our ears:

▰ Up to 11: For some with extreme hearing loss, the answer in the future may be an SCBI, or “spinal computer–brain interface,” which can “effectively convert sound into interpretable spinal cord stimulation patterns, offering a novel approach to sensory substitution for individuals with hearing loss.”

▰ Fungus Among Us: Mycelium is a fungus with manufacturing utility and reported antibiotic properties. Also, the fungus is the sole ingredient in a brand of earplugs made by Gob (gob.earth), a company based in San Francisco. “The result is a hypoallergenic earplug with a secure fit that moulds to the ear with a similar action as memory foam,” writes Ellen Eberhardt in Dezeen. The makers claim certain unique qualities: “Unlike traditional foam earplugs, which can muffle certain frequencies, our mycelium-based earplugs provide superior sound absorption while maintaining clarity and comfort.” 

▰ Ear Ache: A conservative political commentator was involved in a recent humorous kerfuffle. He reportedly attended a sports event wearing earplugs, and later was accused of editing the plug out of a selfie. Reminder: the year is 2024, and everything is political, including the perceived manliness of hearing protection.

▰ Say What?: “[Researchers] have found those who experience hearing loss are more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease later on. … But if hearing aids are prescribed right off the bat, the risk of diagnosis appears significantly dampened.” The chart below is from the latest issue of JAMA Neurology, published by the American Medical Association.