TWiS: “Known in the Trade as ‘Chirpers’”

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the November 7, 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.

▰ STREET LIFE: I’ll for certain be reading Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London by Charlie Taverner. This is from John Gallagher, writing in the London Review of Books: “The presence of hawkers shaped the streets of London. Their barrows and stalls might block the traffic, especially when they set up in busy places – on bridges, for instance. But they are best remembered for their sound. Hawkers were the voice of many cities – the travel writer and historian James Howell advised 17th-century tourists on the continent to keep their windows open when lodging at an urban inn so that they could hear the cries of the town and better understand how it worked and the language its people spoke. Samuel Pepys, not averse to a street snack himself, owned a huge print that contained little sketches of the street sellers of Rome with the texts of their cries appended. Those ‘cries’ remained an object of fascination (and sometimes of revulsion) across the three centuries covered by Taverner. A slew of musicians and artists competed to capture the sights and sounds of hawking. Orlando Gibbons composed a madrigal in the first decades of the 17th century based on the cries of London, featuring the overlapping calls of traders selling ‘new lilywhite mussels’, ‘hot mutton pies’, garlic, samphire, ‘fine Seville oranges’ and ‘ripe cowcumbers’. In the years before industrialisation and motorised transport, the voices of those who walked the streets touting produce were especially audible, even as the ambient volume levels of city life rose and rose. Some street sellers hired prepubescent boys whose shrill tones could be heard above the din; they were known in the trade as ‘chirpers’.”

▰ RUMBLE SEAT: “[Deaf filmmaker] Ziervogel and sound design supervisor Daniel Pellerin shaped the sonic landscape for the indie Canadian film [Finality of Dusk] with increased bass and rumble to allow Finality of Dusk to not only bridge the hearing world and the Deaf world but also to allow deaf moviegoers to feel the film vibrating through their body in their seats.”

▰ GET SMART (ROOM): On the one hand, the idea of distinct pockets of silence in a single shared space is remarkable. On the other, the tools required to accomplish it are not insignificant — maybe comically so? “A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has developed a shape-changing smart speaker, which uses self-deploying microphones to divide rooms into speech zones and track the positions of individual speakers. With the help of the team’s deep-learning algorithms, the system lets users mute certain areas or separate simultaneous conversations, even if two adjacent people have similar voices. Like a fleet of Roombas, each about an inch in diameter, the microphones automatically deploy from, and then return to, a charging station. This allows the system to be moved between environments and set up automatically. In a conference room meeting, for instance, such a system might be deployed instead of a central microphone, allowing better control of in-room audio.”

▰ SAFE HARBOR: “Over the past decade, a curious invention has spread across Europe’s northern seas. It’s called a big bubble curtain, it works a bit like a giant jacuzzi, and it helps protect porpoises from the massive underwater noise caused by wind farm construction. A very large, perforated hose is laid on the seabed, encircling the wind turbine site. Air is pumped through, and bubbles rise from the holes to the surface of the water, forming a noise-buffering veil.”

▰ EAR WITNESS: Smart glasses are developing technology to assist the blind and those with poor vision to better navigate the physical world: “the smart glasses described in the study create distinct sounds known as ‘auditory icons’ when an object enters the device’s field of view that convey its identity and location to the user.” (More details in the research document.)

▰ QUICK NOTES: Social Animals: “Rats seem to emit ultrasonic squeaks of happiness just because they are in the company of another rat.” ▰ After the Fire: NPR on how “restorers are making the Notre Dame Cathedral sound the same after restoration.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus — and for the following two, as well!) ▰ Cave In: NPR on “the Great Stalacpipe Organ,” or “the largest musical instrumentin the world.” ▰ Red Alert: And how the sounds of Martian quakes are helping scientists understand its core. ▰ New Jack Swing: The new 24” iMac joins a short list of Apple products that support high-impedance headphones. ▰ Funny Girl: No doubt by now you’ve heard that Barbra Streisand, frustrated that Siri mispronounced her name (“It’s Strei-sand like sand on the beach”), says she called Apple CEO Tim Cook and asked him to change it. ▰ Paper Cuts: Kindle Direct Publishing is working on a system to automate audiobook production“using virtual voice narration and synthetic speech technology.” ▰ Fearless, and Therefore Powerful: Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, Google, and MIT teamed up to create 5,000 AI-voiced audiobooks from public domain works by Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and William Shakespeare, among other authors. ▰ Next Generation: LeVar Burton, famed for encouraging literacy with Reading Rainbow, now is teaching sonic literacy with a 10-episode podcast called Sound Detectives. ▰ In the Wind: “Leaf blowers produce a low-frequency buzz that ‘allows loud sound at harmful levels to travel over long distance and readily penetrate walls and windows.’” ▰ Radio Face: The “matchmaking” of pairing a celebrity reader for an audiobook.

Image of Stalacpipe Organ by Jon Callas from Wikipedia, used thanks to a Creative Commons license.