This Week in Sound: “The Sirens Are Intended for Tsunamis”
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the August 22, 2023, 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.
▰ BOY TROUBLE: “Female-focused dating simulation games — also known as otome games — and AI-powered chatbots have millions of users in China,” writes Viola Zhou. “They offer idealized virtual lovers, fulfilling the romantic fantasies of women.” When those conversation chatbots shut down, the emotional pain is real, as has been the case with “Him,” a former service of the voice startup Timedomain: “Devastated users rushed to record as many calls as they could, cloned the voices, and even reached out to investors, hoping someone would fund the app’s future operations.”
▰ WHITE OUT: Just a year ago, Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman reported on how some Spotify podcasters made as much as $18,000 per month with white noise. Now Carman reports that Spotify is looking to ban the very same material: “As of January, according to an internal document Bloomberg viewed, white noise and ambient podcasts accounted for 3 million daily consumption hours on the platform, inadvertently boosted by Spotify’s own algorithmic push for ‘talk’ content (versus music). … Once Spotify realized how much attention was going to white noise podcasts, the company considered removing these shows from the talk feed and prohibiting future uploads while redirecting the audience towards comparable programming that was more economical for Spotify — doing so, according to the document, would boost Spotify’s annual gross profit by €35 million, or $38 million.” Side note: I feel confident that a lot of the music I listen to would be mistaken for white noise by copyright bots. (Thanks, Michael Upton!)
▰ KONG KING: The longtime voice of Mario in the Nintendo video games has retired. According to Chris Kerr at gamedeveloper.com, Mario+Rabbids: Sparks of Hope (2022) is Charles Martinet’s final work as the character. He also played Luigi and Wario, among other Nintendo gaming favorites. Stephen Totilo notes at axios.com that Chris Pratt, not Martinet, did the voice for the recent film The Super Mario Bros. Movie — however, Martinet portrayed “Mario’s father as an Easter egg for fans.” As Totilo says, “Mario never said much in his various Nintendo games, but Martinet made the most out of the character’s exuberant exhortations.” Martinet started performing as Mario in 1994, with Mario Teaches Typing, having worked for Nintendo as a voice actor since 1991. Back in June, per Devindra Hardawar at engadget.com, fans were wondering if Martinet had moved on, based on how the characters sounded in teasers of upcoming games (via videogameschronicle.com).
▰ ACUTE ACCENT: “I have a foreign accent. You have a foreign accent. If you’re from the South in the United States, you speak very differently than someone from Boston or California. There are companies that think of this as a problem and are trying to make people working at call centers in India or the Philippines sound like they are from the United States. That business does not excite me.” That’s Seamus McAteer, founder and CEO of Speechlab, “a startup building generative AI for speech-to-speech translation,” in an interview by Caiwei Chen.
▰ QUICK NOTES: Wrong Direction: There’s an update on the lack of emergency sirens during the Maui fires: “The sirens are intended for tsunamis, and sounding them would have sent residents to the hills and into the fires,” said the director of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, who defended the decision. (New York Times gift link). ▰ Speakerboxxx: Mozilla has a handy breakdown of the privacy matters of the most popular smart speakers. ▰ Wave Rider: I look forward to reading Carolyn Birdsall’s forthcoming book Radiophilia: “Treating radiophilia as a dynamic cultural phenomenon, it unpacks the various pleasures associated with radio and its sounds, the desire to discover and learn new things via radio, and efforts to record, re-experience, and share radio.” (Thanks, Barbara Postema!). ▰ Call of the Wild: Australians voted on their favorite animal sound, and a full third gave their votes to Gymnorhina tibicen, the magpie. (Thanks, Alison Armstrong!) ▰ In Sea: “For a three-year pilot project funded by the National Science Foundation … a national team of researchers have transformed a year of carbon dioxide readings taken off the coast of New England into sound.” ▰ City Living: “NPR’s Pien Huang takes a sonic tour of Providence, Rhode Island with researcher Erica Walker and talks about noise pollution solutions with Jamie Banks the founder and president of Quiet Communities, and New York City Council member Gale Brewer.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Call of the Wild (2): “Scientists are experimenting with sound to try and lure seabirds back to depleted environments,” reports the Australian ABC.net.au about “the ecological approach called Acoustic Restoration.” (Thanks, Michael Astill!) ▰ AI, Robot: An overview of recent text-to-music AI apps. ▰ This Is the Droid: “Android 14 will be more proactive in protecting your hearing with its new headphone loud sound alert feature.” ▰ Bad Apple: “Disabled people who rely on Apple’s accessibility features say that Voice Control has fallen behind Siri in both accuracy and capabilities, despite being an essential rather than a nice-to-have.” ▰ Siren Song: And on a local tip: San Francisco’s Tuesday noon sirens could be coming back by 2024. (Thanks, Michelle Milligan!)
