Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 62

This Week in Sound: Sonic Lasers, Dulcet Hospitals, Voice Anonymization

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the March 19, 2024, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ AID UPGRADE: October 17, 2022, marked an important turning point for hearing aids, when the FDA identified a new category of over-the-counter devices in an industry long held captive to prescriptions, the cost for which can be in the thousands of dollars (U.S.). The FDA’s landmark decision has led to new, cheaper, more widely available tools for consumers, as well as to upgrades of existing devices. A new major turning point may be arriving, with the rumored addition of hearing aid features in the upcoming iOS 18 release for Apple’s iPhones, as initially noted by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. As Chance Miller wrote for 9 to 5 Mac, the foundations of such a move have been in place for some time: “AirPods already offer a feature called Live Listen, which launched as part of iOS 12 in 2018. This feature essentially turns an iPhone into a directional microphone, transmitting the audio captured by that iPhone to AirPods in real time. … Apple also introduced a Conversation Boost capability to AirPods Pro in 2021, which boosts mic pickup from directly in front of you, to better hear someone talking to you. A study in 2022 showed that some of these existing AirPods Pro features already compare well to much more expensive dedicated devices.”

▰ SOUND ADVICE: “Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, have found that making medical device alarms more musical can significantly reduce perceived annoyancewithout negatively impacting the ability of research participants to learn and remember the alarms. … Hospitals have a great many auditory alerts, with prior research indicating upward of 85% of alarms require no urgent clinical action. This overabundance of noise poses patient risks, with clinicians sometimes tuning out important alerts. Modifying timbre could mitigate excessive annoyance while keeping alarms informative, the study suggests.” (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!)

▰ MINE GAMES: “If you have an audiobook coming out,” writes Brent Underwood, author of the book Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley, “I encourage you to think of places to record it other than a nameless studio in a major city. Your publisher might not like this idea, but your listeners will.” Underwood recorded himself reading his audiobook in one of the mines he wrote about — 900 feet underground. “It took three full days to record the book. During breaks, I walked miles of mineshafts, reading parts of the book about the mines to myself as I walked. Which, back at the microphone, brought the stories to life in a way that would have been impossible anywhere else.” There’s also a video he shot of the experience. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ PHONON HOME RUN: “A tiny, levitated bead is at the core of an unprecedentedly bright laser that shoots particles of sound instead of light. … Just as a ray of light is made up of many particles called photons, sound consists of particle-like chunks called phonons. For several decades, researchers have been creating ‘phonon lasers’ that output these particles in a narrow beam, similar to the way optical lasers emit photons.” Per New Scientist, researchers at Hunan Normal University in China have “enhanced the laser’s ‘brightness’ – the amount of power it delivered at each phonon frequency – tenfold, as well as making its beam tighter and helping it last longer.” Due to phonons moving with less disruption through liquids than do photons, “they could be more effective than conventional lasers for imaging watery tissues in biomedicine or in some deep-sea monitoring devices,” according to Hui Jing, a co-author of the research. 

▰ GLOBE TROTTER: The Sphere in Las Vegas apparently isn’t just about the surround visuals: “It was an event that introduced Holoplot’s proprietary 3D audio-beam-forming and wave-field synthesis technology—which provides headphone-quality, personalized audio to every seat—to a literally and metaphorically massive stage,” per Fast Company. “That was just one of the several projects in the past year that have showcased the Berlin-based company’s impressive ability to manipulate sound to improve the experience of listening to music.”

▰ VOICES CARRY: MIT postdoc Nauman Dawalatabad talks about potential positive uses of the technology also credited with troubling deepfakes: “Beyond the realm of creativity, where voice conversion technologies enable unprecedented flexibility in entertainment and media, audio deepfakes hold transformative promise in health care and education sectors. My current ongoing work in the anonymization of patient and doctor voices in cognitive health-care interviews, for instance, facilitates the sharing of crucial medical data for research globally while ensuring privacy. Sharing this data among researchers fosters development in the areas of cognitive health care. The application of this technology in voice restoration represents a hope for individuals with speech impairments, for example, for ALS or dysarthric speech, enhancing communication abilities and quality of life.”

▰ QUICK NOTES: Havana ‘Nother Look: Research into the brains of those who reported suffering from so-called Havana Syndrome show “no clinical evidence for the mystery condition.” ▰ Hum a Few Bars: YouTube continues to roll out a feature that identifies songs when users hum them. ▰ Making Sense: Marjorie Van Halteren unpacks poetic work of artist Andy Slater originally published in McSweeney’s: “It satisfies the quest for an approach to audio disconnected from image-‘splaining slavishness to format,” she writes. “It’s completely untethered from a listener’s second guessing, yet utterly compelling.” I love this idea of “image-‘plaining.” ▰ Shriek of the Week: The latest is that of the nuthatch: “They whistle, and chitter, and whisper. But their loud ‘dweep dweep’ call is one of the easiest to latch on to.” ▰ Sea Trek: A scientific deep dive into how noise pollution impacts whale migration — also, there’s a Scientific American podcast episode about the “anatomical workings” behind whale song. ▰ Audi-phile: Aside from a steering wheel, there are no physical hand controls on the Audi Q6 e-tron car: “it’s touchscreen or talking only.”

On the Line: Egan, Burnside, Whitehead

“And if more than eight lines of awkward dialogue threaten irrevocable awkwardness, silences like the one now elapsing between M and me are an even greater peril. And I am a guy who knows how to measure silences. But whereas in music, a prolonged pause adds power and vividness to the refrain that follows it, pauses in conversation have the opposite effect, of debasing whatever comes next to the point that a perfectly witty riposte will be reduced to the verbal equivalent of a shrunken head, if too long a pause precedes it.”

That is from The Candy House, Jennifer Egan’s excellent sequel to her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. The bit about how the speaker is “a guy who knows how to measure silences” is a call back to a bit in Goon Squad when the younger version of this character kept track of songs with pauses in them. Here, older and maybe a little wiser, that character finds additional (and painful) meaning in silence.

. . .

"I stood out in the road, by Brewster’s Yard,and waited for a ghost, since ghosts were true,a pair of Clydesdales pressing to the fenceto listen: rain; the music of the spheres;or else, those calls I knew, from other worlds,the wind across the sands, a whimbrel’s cry."

That is from one of two poems by John Burnside published in the March 21, 2024, edition of the London Review of Books. I didn’t know what a “whimbrel” was before I read this. I enjoyed the comprehension void before I filled it with a simple Google search, during which the word could have referred to anything at all. It’s nothing special, but I won’t say what a “whimbrel” is so you, too, can — if you also don’t know — take a pause before doing the search yourself. 

. . .

“Out of the Zenith hi-fi shook crazy saxophone stuff from the Village. Freddie could have identified who was playing, and on what basement bebop nights he'd seen them, but whenever Carney heard those sounds he felt trapped in a room of lunatics.”

That is from the novel Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, whom I had not gotten around to reading until now. It’s a great book, and there’s a lot packed into those two sentences, key among the data: (1) the identification of the make of hi-fi relates the main character’s job as a furniture salesman, a form of employment that begins as background information but comes to serve as a filter for how he processes the world around him, and (2) the notion of jazz as being like something from “lunatics” is a marker of a cultural divide between that character, who is Black, and certain aspects of the culture in which he was raised. (I’ve been on a novel-reading tear. Harlem Shuffle was my eighth in 2024. Reading is a form of writing procrastination that sort of doubles as research.)

Sound Ledger: Go-karts, SoundHound, leaf blowers

100: Number of noise complaints in Tokyo in 2023 due to go-karts

346: Percentage return to holders of SoundHound shares since start of 2024

2028: The year Portland, Oregon’s leaf blower prohibition goes into full effect 

Sources: Go-karts: japantimes.co.jp. SoundHound: forbes.com. Portland: portland.gov

Current Status

Piazzolla chord in three clefs

Life Without Metadata

When you send me an album without proper metadata for the tracks, this is what I do:

I unzip the archive.I load it into VLC for a quick listen. (Recommendations for alternate, elegant, quick-listen apps on a Mac appreciated.)I notice the tracks have little if any information — and may even be in the wrong order.I pull up AudioRanger, which is the software I use to edit the metadata of audio files. (If other tools are recommended, please lemme know.)I see in the grid what is missing. The main things I look for are:

Title (track)
Artist
Album (title)
Track number
Release dateI proceed to fill those in manually. The biggest hassle is the track title information.I then locate the album’s cover, either in your .zip file (thank you!) or on your Bandcamp page. Sometimes I can’t find it. I then attach the image to the files, again using AudioRanger.Then I save this material.Then I load it into my digital jukebox (I use Plex).Often these promotional .zip archives don’t actually include the press materials. Easily some 75% of the time, I create a .txt file and copy and paste in the background information, and then I save that in the folder with your audio files.

Think of how much easier it would be for the people to whom you’re sending your music if you just took the extra step to edit your metadata. On a positive note, something about Bandcamp’s audio hosting process generally seems to ensure that all such information is in the right place (sometimes excepting the press information).

Scratch Pad: Whistle, Wenders, Whitehead

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ There’s this kid who can’t whistle but sure practices a lot who walks by the house every morning on the way to school and it is the best thing ever

▰ Due to the fairly intense wind outside (30 MPH gusts), in the building where I rent a tiny office the skylight is making a buzzing that sounds like there’s a fly here the size of an avocado

▰ Working through 7th chords (major, dominant, minor, diminished, half-diminished, minor flat 5) during guitar class felt somehow like sorting through pages of D&D rules

▰ Thought some random tab on my laptop was playing a drone album, but it’s the bathroom fan

▰ Afternoon trio for laundry machine spin cycle, passing jet plane, and low level electric hum

▰ My email inbox would seem to suggest that more records have been released in the first two weeks of March than in all of 2023. It’s sort of out of control, but hey, worse things than an embarrassment of riches.

▰ The March 14 Strands game on the New York Times’ website was particularly fun

▰ Alert! Wim Wenders Criterion Closet! He says he’s the first person allowed to enter it twice. Last time was 11 years ago, before he had Blu-ray. He spies Until the End of the World on a shelf and says he thinks it may be the best thing he ever did.

▰ I finished reading several books last week, including my eighth novel of the year, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, which is up there with other favorites I’ve read in 2024 (Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours, and Alastair Reynolds’ Permafrost). Lively and personal, and so smart, especially how it threads in the characters’ personal histories. I also finished the first proper non-fiction book I’ve read this year, Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America, and I’ve read a ton more of the manga series The Fable (about a hitman who is required to take a year off), by Katsuhisa Minami, which I’m now up through volume 16. It’s always interesting how, when you read a few books proximate to each other, connections surface. The Whitehead and Desmond both deal with the invisible and visible boundaries of class and race, the Whitehead and Minami deal with hitmen, and all three deal with characters/individuals whose lives are significantly constrained by societal forces. That statement isn’t to excuse the murderous occupation of the main character in The Fable, more to point out how difficult it is to properly hide oneself when one has been a killer for so long.

Chords

When I’m not working, these are the forms I spend time filling out

Disquiet Junto Project 0637: Right (2 of 3)

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 appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0637: Right (2 of 3)
The Assignment: Record the second third of an eventual trio.

These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully.

While this is the second part of a three-part project, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which will occur over the course of three consecutive weeks, starting last week. 

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0636). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Important: Leave space for what is yet to come.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and 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 (47 as of last count). All but one are in this playlist:

One additional track is on the Lines discussion board:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0636-left-1-of-3/66416/2

(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 track as the basis for their piece (more on this in Step 5 below).

It is strongly encouraged that you look through the discussion thread for the previous project on the Lines forum because many tracks include additional contextual information there:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0636-left-1-of-3/

Step 3: Record a short 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 leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right. 

To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track you selected in Step 2 and yours.

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

Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. In normal circumstances, Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do two this time. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet. I will keep an updated list in this Google Drive document of what has been utilized:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kDorIMT9j_nQQPXACYpMPe4B86T2QD5Xvv98XAOS4UE/edit?pli=1#gid=0

The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. That, foremost, is the spirit of this project.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0637” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required).

Share: Post your track and a description explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0637-right-2-of-3/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

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

Deadline: Monday, March 18, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

License: It’s required for this sequence of projects 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 637th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Right (2 of 3) — The Assignment: Record the second third of an eventual trio — at https://disquiet.com/0637/

End of Day

Screen Time

Love my neighborhood. Bonus points for that Morvern Callar score.