This Week in Sound: Pythagoras’ Flaw, Whale Chatter, AWOL Fog Horn
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the March 5, 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.
▰ ROAD WARRIOR: We can spend a lot of time worrying about the direct impact of voice AI, but more intricate scenarios such as this one, reported by the Los Angeles Times and Engadget, suggest a breadth of possibilities way deeper than mere “deepfake scam” anxiety: “Amazon is being sued by the writer of the original 1989 Patrick Swayze version of the film Road House over alleged copyright infringement in the movie’s remake, The Los Angeles Times has reported. Screenwriter R. Lance Hill accuses Amazon and MGM Studios of using AI to clone actors’ voices in the new production in order to finish it before the copyright expired. Hill said he filed a petition with the US Copyright Office in November 2021 to reclaim the rights to his original screenplay, which forms the basis of the new film. At that point, the rights were owned by Amazon Studios, as part of its acquisition of MGM, but were set to expire in November 2023. Hill alleges that once that happened, the rights would revert back to him. According to the lawsuit, Amazon Studios rushed ahead with the project anyway in order to finish it before the copyright deadline. Since it was stymied by the actor’s strike, Hill alleges Amazon used AI to ‘replicate the voices’ of the actors who worked in the 2024 remake. Such use violated the terms of the deal struck between the union and major studios including Amazon.”
▰ OUT OUT: The ShotSpotter is a tool for surveilling gunshot occurrences with a mesh network of microphones around cities. I’ve mentioned it several times, in the context of a lawsuit questioning its utility and a man who spent a year in prison until someone sorted out the sound that sent him away had been a firecracker. Last month, a leak unveiled the network behind ShotSpotter: “Until now, the exact locations of SoundThinking’s sensors have been kept secret from both its police department clients and the public at large. A leaked document, which WIRED obtained from a source under the condition of anonymity, details the alleged precise locations and uptime of 25,580 ShotSpotter microphones. The data exposes for the first time the reach of SoundThinking’s network of surveillance devices and adds new context to an ongoing debate between activists and academics who claim ShotSpotter perpetuates biased policing practices and proponents of the technology.”
▰ RADIO ON: “When I was a kid, you could actually look inside a radio and see all sorts of neat stuff in there, like the amazing mechanical linkages of the tuning mechanism, or the mysterious, soft yellow glow of the vacuum tubes (the transistor hadn’t yet completely replaced tubes). Take a radio apart today and all you see is a bunch of little plastic-like blobs called integrated circuits, which sounds neat, although it all still looks like little plastic blobs.” That’s Paul J. Nahin talking about the childhood wonder that got him into engineering. His new book, from Princeton University Press, is The Mathematical Radio: Inside the Magic of AM, FM, and Single-Sideband.
▰ TASTE MAKER: Big surprise: aesthetics aren’t universal, which is to say Pythagoras was mistaken about the universality of certain musical-mathematical ratios: “This idea has shaped how Western musicians play chords, because the philosopher’s belief that listeners prefer music played in perfect mathematical ratios was so influential. ‘Consonance is a really important concept in Western music, in particular for telling us how we build harmonies,’ says Peter Harrison at the University of Cambridge. But when Harrison and his colleagues surveyed 4272 people in the UK and South Korea about their perceptions of music, their findings flew in the face of this ancient idea.”
▰ COMIC RELIEF: Susannah Clapp rhapsodizes over Posy Simmonds in the London Review of Books: “England has been slower than France to realise that the term ‘graphic’ in front of novel is not (in the manner of ‘lady novelist’) diminishing, that it might actually signal a double dose of imagination. The speech that snaps out of these drawings (‘snog Ryan … bet you … he’d be like a donkey eating an apple …’) makes the dialogue of much contemporary drama look pallid. Some pictures create their own sonic boom. As a child, and mimic, Simmonds’s role in school plays was to supply the sound effects by voicing the creak of the stable door and the honk of the donkey. Her drawings have some comic splat — the !!!!s and ****s of the Dandy and the Beano with newer ‘Thunks!’ and ‘Gargs!’ They also reverberate graphically.”
▰ QUICK NOTES: War of Fog: A local letter writer makes the claim that San Francisco’s fog horns are gone. It hasn’t been particularly foggy lately (just rainy), so I’m trying to sort out if this is the case. ▰ Play Time: It’s a good sign when the demo of a music app makes for perfectly good listening all on its own. ▰ Alert Alert: A bit on the “chirping Facebook app” issue some people faced. ▰ TV Guide: Listen to a podcast episode about how the Hulu audio logo, or sonic brand, evolved. ▰ Field of Dreams: I always love the roundup of recent field recordings on Bandcamp, this time written by Matthew Blackwell. ▰ The Shriek of the Week: It’s a bird called the chiffchaff, a bird whose “whose name in English is a direct description of [its] song — ‘chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff.’” ▰ Pipe Up: NPR had an episode about that John Cage piece for organ (“Organ2/As Slow As Possible”) that’s been playing non-stop for 21 years in the German town of Halberstadt. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Whale of a Story: The effort to not just learn to understand what whales are saying, and to speak with them. (Thanks, George Budd!) ▰ Eye Patch: “Prototype smart glasses can track people’s eye movements using a technique similar to sonar, an approach that uses 95 per cent less power than other methods.”
