This Week in Sound: “Every Appliance Is Serenading Us”
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the September 19, 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.
▰ MUSIQUE D’AMEUBLEMENT: “As brands continue to search for ways to cut through the proverbial noise and connect with customers, we can only expect more appliance acoustics,” writes Johnny Brayson, reporting on what many people have noticed, which is that “Seemingly every appliance, from the vacuum to the dryer, is serenading us these days.” Also: “As novel as it may seem, it’s just new to the West. Appliances have been singing in other parts of the world before the dawn of the millennium, with Japanese appliance manufacturer Zojirushi incorporating chimes in their rice cookers as early as 1999. The sounds not only helped the brand stand out in the sea of standard beeps made by competitors’ products, but also it showcased the capabilities of then-new microcomputer tech, as programming the tones wasn’t possible before. Like Zojirushi, the consumer electronics brands filling American homes with song today are doing so for both emotional and practical reasons.” Erik Satie might be proud. (Thanks, Lowell Goss!)
▰ VOCAL DISCORD: Lisa Mulcahy at the Washington Post (gift link) explains both why one might find one’s voice annoying (“58 percent of the survey subjects said they didn’t like listening to themselves,” per Harvard teaching hospital research), and what can be done about it: “Several interventions are possible, including vocal cord injections using collagen, gel fillers or Botox. … Voice therapy using airflow exercises can be a helpful, safe alternative.” Me, I depend on speech-to-text tools, like MacWhisper and rev.com, to transcribe things for me, in part to save time, but also so I don’t have to hear myself. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ TOTALLY TUBULAR: A new update to the more recent of the AirPod Pros — or, as scriveners in the field of gadget journalism term them, AirPods Pro — means the devices “will automatically adjust to your environment or activity so you don’t have to touch the earbuds or reach for your phone.” Yes, this is a product update, and no it isn’t the end all or be all of just about anything, but per other recent writing here, I do think it’s highly valuable to track both technological milestones and exploratory interface tweaks, because today’s peculiar, fledgling firmware adjustment is the near future’s new normal. Not just observing these changes but documenting them in real time is highly valuable. “When there’s a change in your surroundings,” writes Billy Steele at Engadget, “Adaptive Audio gradually starts tweaking the blend of ANC and transparency. So if you enter a loud coffee shop or sit near a noisy A/C unit, AirPods Pro gently increases the level of noise cancellation to combat the clamor. The point is to smooth the transition, so the change in cancellation level doesn’t become a distraction itself.” (Related but less of a tectonic shift: there are 20 new iOS ringtones, including ones crafted by musician Adam Young, of the electronica act Owl City.)
▰ ALL EARS: SonarWorks has posted a survey of data about the headphone industry, noting: “The headphone market is highly consolidated with the top 10 headphone models together representing 36% market share and the top 3 models 19% market share.” Details include market share among the top 162 models, with Apple at roughly 20%, between three models. (Caveat: “Unfortunately, China and India were left out of our research due to a lack of available data.”) There are also several charts. This one below: “The frequency responses of the top 162 headphone models are represented by colored lines with the weighted average shown as a solid black line.” The variance at the high end (on the right) is quite striking. (Thanks, Kirke Godfrey!)
▰ QUICK NOTES: Pivot Tabled: I’m comfortable saying that I don’t understand the new product offering from Clubhouse, the “voice social media” service. ▰ Class App: Duolingo’s music lessons are, indeed, coming. I’ve been doing German for — checks phone — a 135-day streak. I’m looking forward to trying it out. ▰ Quiet Mode: Nathan Moody notes, on Twitter/X, the ASMR promotion of the upcoming Expendables film (apparently Extraction 2 and A Quiet Place did similar things). ▰ The Other Tweet App: Check out birdsong.fm, which is what it seems like (thanks, Jason Wehmhoener!) ▰ Mm-Hmm: 3M is on the hook for six billion dollars (for veterans and service members) due to hearing loss “from faulty earplugs.” That’s two billion per M. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Doggone Crazy:Researchers in Hungary are learning how best to talk to a dog. (Also, thanks, Rich!)
