This Week in Sound: “Alternative Venues for Their Sonic Battles”

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the October 31, 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.

▰ DRIVE ALL NIGHT: “About a year ago, people there began gathering for so-called siren battles — a homegrown subculture in which members of Pacific Islander, or Pasifika, communities in New Zealand compete to see who can play music the loudest.” My memory of freshman year of college was rival factions playing Bruce Springsteen and Talking Heads out dorm windows; in New Zealand, it can come down to Celine Dion versus Celine Dion, apparently. “The police said that among other measures, sound testing was being completed at various locations around the city, and that the authorities were working with siren clubs to explore alternative venues for their sonic battles.” (Gift link: nytimes.com)

▰ CAT SCRATCH FEVER: There’s new research out that suggests a cat’s purr may be less emotionally meaningful than we’d thought: “closer to a snore than a voluntary muscle spasm” — that is, “more like a snore than a smile.” However, the jury is still out, and the critiques have teeth: “The article’s conclusions have sparked some controversy. Biomechanical engineers interviewed by Science claim that the experiment was limited to verifying the functioning of the larynx in isolation, without taking into account the complex systems of a living cat, which they feel represents a significant oversight. Scientist David Rice, for instance, compared the research to removing the mouthpiece of a wind instrument and then analyzing the noise it produces independently from the context of that instrument.”

▰ GHOST STORY: “In a new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers … used the ghostly finger setup to probe another kind of hallucination: hearing voices. They found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was a lag between the push of the button and the rod’s touch than when there was no delay. … The findings suggest that the neurological roots of hallucinations lie in how the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, the researchers said.” Here’s to more sound studies of sounds that don’t actually exist. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ IN THE AIR TONIGHT: In his book The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology, author Tobias Dengel makes a case for voice control not just at our desks and in our cars, but in the cockpits of airplanes: “When voice becomes a major interface in airliner cockpits, a new tool for preventing such disasters will be available. In traditional aviation, pilots receive commands like ‘Cleared Direct Casanova VOR’ or ‘Intercept the ILS 3’ via radio from dispatchers at air traffic control. After the pilots get this information, they must use their eyes and hands to locate and press a series of buttons to transmit the same commands to the aircraft. In a voice-driven world, that time-wasting, error-prone step will be eliminated. In the first stage of voice adoption, pilots will simply be able to say a few words without moving their eyes from the controls around them, and the plane will respond.”

▰ ROBOT RANGER: Yes, yes, the “AIs can solve [Problem X]” stories can be a bit much and a bit repetitive, but if you drill down sufficiently, some can hold water: “To prevent the loss of wildlife, forest restoration is key, but monitoring how well biodiversity actually recovers is incredibly difficult. Now though, a team has collected recordings of animal sounds to determine the extent of the recovery. However, while using these sounds to identify species is an effective way to monitor, it’s also labour intensive. To overcome this, they trained an AI to listen to the sounds, and found that although it was less able to identify species, its findings still correlated well with wildlife recovery, suggesting that it could be a cost-effective and automated way to monitor biodiversity.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

▰ QUICK NOTES: Orange Alert: Around Lewiston, Maine, before the mass shooter was caught, consideration was given to delaying rifle hunting season: “The presence of hunters and the sound of gunfire could disrupt the search, distract the police, cause frightened residents to make additional 911 calls and potentially put hunters in harm’s way.” ▰ Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is that of a bird called the Curlew: “Curlews emit a range of shrill, characterful noises. The easiest to recognise is the one that we use to name them: a high, far-carrying ‘cor-leee’.” ▰ Flight Club: Ed Jong (author of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us) reports from Australia, making the case that the country is “the birthplace of birdsong.” ▰ Wheels of Steel: Meet “the de facto DJ of the Netflix picket lines,” Evan Shafran: “Every morning, he drives 15 miles from his apartment in Shadow Hills to Sunset Boulevard and sets up his subwoofer in front of the company’s headquarters.” ▰ Color Me Impressed: New firmware for the Teenage Enginering OB-4 speaker: “the latest OB-4 update adds the ‘noise’ function to disk mode. listen to white, brown and pink noise — constant ambient sounds that can induce calm and focus by masking distracting sounds, in or outside your head.” (And the Washington Post perchance has a helpful colored-noise explainer — thanks, James Britt!.) ▰ Hare Raising: Plot of the upcoming horror film Rabbit Trap, starring Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, and Jade Croot: “When they accidentally make a field recording of a mystical sound never before heard by human ears, a strange child enters their lives who gradually untethers them from reality.” ▰ Save the Horn: The radio telescope in Holmdel, N.J, credited with discovery of evidence of the Big Bang will not be moved due to planned senior housing on the site: “an agreement between town officials and [the real estate developer] seemed to augur the end of the cosmic controversy.” ▰ Hear, Hear: Gene therapy could restore hearing in some children.