This Week in Sound: “Synchronizing the Bodies and Emotions”
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the February 6, 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.
▰ ONE WORLD IS ENOUGH: “Music can be felt directly in the body. When we hear our favorite catchy song, we are overcome with the urge to move to the music. Music can activate our autonomic nervous system and even cause shivers down the spine. A new study from the Turku PET Center in Finland shows how emotional music evokes similar bodily sensations across cultures,” per a study shared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “People move to music in all cultures and synchronized postures, movements and vocalizations are a universal sign for affiliation. Music may have emerged during the evolution of human species to promote social interaction and sense of community by synchronizing the bodies and emotions of the listeners.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
▰ SOUND AND VISION: An app for the new Apple Vision Pro, inspired by the theremin. (Thanks, Dan Sim!)
▰ CALL OF THE WILD: “Claiming that everything that sounds like music is music isn’t just circular; it also opens up an entirely new can of worms. Are those sounds that do not sound like human music, then, by default, non-music (or nachtmusik, as [composer Dave] Soldier calls them)? What about the sounds that have similarities to our music but are the result of entirely different processes, such as the rhythmical stridulations of cicadas and crustaceans?” That’s Tobias Fischer writing on the subject of animal music.
▰ QUICK NOTES: Bar None: A lawyer named Lori Cohen, who lost her voice, is using AI to regain the ability to speak in the courtroom. ▰ Shriek of the Week: Great Spotted Woodpecker: “It may prompt a sense of anticipation in the listener — did I really hear that? Will it sound again? Has it gone? And there it is again.” ▰ Out of the Loop: Aside from listing the latest Disquiet Junto music community project, I don’t spend much time on the Junto in this newsletter, but I do need to note this participant’s ingenuity: “I have a lamp that interferes with my guitar-cable-amp loop. So, I decided to cut the guitar out of the loop and just use the lamp, cable, and amp.” ▰ Transistor Sisterhood: The New York Review of Books profiles electronic musicians Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Robo Cop: The FCC may outlaw robocalls that use AI voices. ▰ Sound Barrier: “The [Detroit] Lions broke the sound-level record of the 22-year-old Ford Field four times during the Rams game, topping out at 133.6 decibels, roughly equal to a jackhammer or jet engine.” The record they beat was their own.
