TWiS: “‘Territorial Privacy’ Instead of Silence”
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 16, 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.
▰ SURROUND SOUND: This Tab AI necklace seems like it could be a potential privacy nightmare, but at the same time the combination of small microphones and AI is bound to have ramifications, so better to start keeping abreast of such developments sooner than later: “Tab is a small puck that hangs around your neck and listens to everything you (and the people around you) say. Essentially just a microphone and a battery that lasts up to 30 hours between charges, it uses Bluetooth to beam your audio to your phone and into the cloud, where ChatGPT currently transcribes your conversations, and various AI models will extract insights for you. (Its UX isn’t final, but assume you’ll use your phone screen for most anything you want to do.) Ultimately, Tab is meant to be an AI companion, or what Schiffmann calls a ‘clarity machine’ that rides along in every moment of your life.”
▰ SPACE, MAN: Workplace life is ever-changing (especially now that life/work balance is morphing into remote/office-work balance), as is use of those “privacy pods” that have been popping up in recent years: “The pods, some resembling old-school telephone booths, have emerged as one of the hottest segments in the $24 billion North American office-furniture industry. Manufacturers such as Room, Nook and Framery say business has been brisk. But some workers and managers say more booths means less eavesdropping, less gossiping, less camaraderie and less fun. … Other products seek a different balance between isolation and community. Furniture maker Steelcase offers a desk-encircling tent meant to ensure ‘territorial privacy’ instead of silence. Nook, headquartered in the U.K., makes hut-shaped hideaways intended to provide a sense of psychological safety without being completely enclosed.”
▰ PHONE HOME: The threat of AI fakes is getting real: “A San Rafael mother received a terrifying phone call in October, and a voice on the other line was a perfect replica of her son saying, ‘Mom, mom, I’ve been in a car accident!’ Then another man came on the line saying that he was a police officer, that her son had run a stop sign and injured a pregnant woman in the accident, and that he was going to be taken to jail. This was followed by another call from someone claiming to be a local public defender, saying that she and her husband needed to pay $15,000 bail ASAP to get their son out of jail.”
▰ QUICK NOTES: The Art of Listening: Two great items via Rob Walker’s always excellent The Art of Noticing newsletter: one on a payphone that plays birdsongsand the other an audio-enabled map of the world’s forests. ▰ Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is the Song Thrush, which, we are told, are “are loud, persistent performers.” ▰ Practice Makes Perfect: New scientific research shows that even birds “require daily vocal exercise to first gain and subsequently maintain peak vocal muscle performance.” ▰ Dog Days: The annual CES expo hosts unusual devices, and this year’s has been no exception. Case in point: a feeding device that will encourage the family pet to learn to play music. ▰ Frame by Frame: Also introduced at CES: Samsung has made a picture frame that doubles as a speaker. ▰ Location, Location, Location: Very interesting research on how geography has shaped language development.
