This Week in Sound: Sonic Lasers, Dulcet Hospitals, Voice Anonymization

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the March 19, 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.

▰ AID UPGRADE: October 17, 2022, marked an important turning point for hearing aids, when the FDA identified a new category of over-the-counter devices in an industry long held captive to prescriptions, the cost for which can be in the thousands of dollars (U.S.). The FDA’s landmark decision has led to new, cheaper, more widely available tools for consumers, as well as to upgrades of existing devices. A new major turning point may be arriving, with the rumored addition of hearing aid features in the upcoming iOS 18 release for Apple’s iPhones, as initially noted by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. As Chance Miller wrote for 9 to 5 Mac, the foundations of such a move have been in place for some time: “AirPods already offer a feature called Live Listen, which launched as part of iOS 12 in 2018. This feature essentially turns an iPhone into a directional microphone, transmitting the audio captured by that iPhone to AirPods in real time. … Apple also introduced a Conversation Boost capability to AirPods Pro in 2021, which boosts mic pickup from directly in front of you, to better hear someone talking to you. A study in 2022 showed that some of these existing AirPods Pro features already compare well to much more expensive dedicated devices.”

▰ SOUND ADVICE: “Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, have found that making medical device alarms more musical can significantly reduce perceived annoyancewithout negatively impacting the ability of research participants to learn and remember the alarms. … Hospitals have a great many auditory alerts, with prior research indicating upward of 85% of alarms require no urgent clinical action. This overabundance of noise poses patient risks, with clinicians sometimes tuning out important alerts. Modifying timbre could mitigate excessive annoyance while keeping alarms informative, the study suggests.” (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!)

▰ MINE GAMES: “If you have an audiobook coming out,” writes Brent Underwood, author of the book Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley, “I encourage you to think of places to record it other than a nameless studio in a major city. Your publisher might not like this idea, but your listeners will.” Underwood recorded himself reading his audiobook in one of the mines he wrote about — 900 feet underground. “It took three full days to record the book. During breaks, I walked miles of mineshafts, reading parts of the book about the mines to myself as I walked. Which, back at the microphone, brought the stories to life in a way that would have been impossible anywhere else.” There’s also a video he shot of the experience. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ PHONON HOME RUN: “A tiny, levitated bead is at the core of an unprecedentedly bright laser that shoots particles of sound instead of light. … Just as a ray of light is made up of many particles called photons, sound consists of particle-like chunks called phonons. For several decades, researchers have been creating ‘phonon lasers’ that output these particles in a narrow beam, similar to the way optical lasers emit photons.” Per New Scientist, researchers at Hunan Normal University in China have “enhanced the laser’s ‘brightness’ – the amount of power it delivered at each phonon frequency – tenfold, as well as making its beam tighter and helping it last longer.” Due to phonons moving with less disruption through liquids than do photons, “they could be more effective than conventional lasers for imaging watery tissues in biomedicine or in some deep-sea monitoring devices,” according to Hui Jing, a co-author of the research. 

▰ GLOBE TROTTER: The Sphere in Las Vegas apparently isn’t just about the surround visuals: “It was an event that introduced Holoplot’s proprietary 3D audio-beam-forming and wave-field synthesis technology—which provides headphone-quality, personalized audio to every seat—to a literally and metaphorically massive stage,” per Fast Company. “That was just one of the several projects in the past year that have showcased the Berlin-based company’s impressive ability to manipulate sound to improve the experience of listening to music.”

▰ VOICES CARRY: MIT postdoc Nauman Dawalatabad talks about potential positive uses of the technology also credited with troubling deepfakes: “Beyond the realm of creativity, where voice conversion technologies enable unprecedented flexibility in entertainment and media, audio deepfakes hold transformative promise in health care and education sectors. My current ongoing work in the anonymization of patient and doctor voices in cognitive health-care interviews, for instance, facilitates the sharing of crucial medical data for research globally while ensuring privacy. Sharing this data among researchers fosters development in the areas of cognitive health care. The application of this technology in voice restoration represents a hope for individuals with speech impairments, for example, for ALS or dysarthric speech, enhancing communication abilities and quality of life.”

▰ QUICK NOTES: Havana ‘Nother Look: Research into the brains of those who reported suffering from so-called Havana Syndrome show “no clinical evidence for the mystery condition.” ▰ Hum a Few Bars: YouTube continues to roll out a feature that identifies songs when users hum them. ▰ Making Sense: Marjorie Van Halteren unpacks poetic work of artist Andy Slater originally published in McSweeney’s: “It satisfies the quest for an approach to audio disconnected from image-‘splaining slavishness to format,” she writes. “It’s completely untethered from a listener’s second guessing, yet utterly compelling.” I love this idea of “image-‘plaining.” ▰ Shriek of the Week: The latest is that of the nuthatch: “They whistle, and chitter, and whisper. But their loud ‘dweep dweep’ call is one of the easiest to latch on to.” ▰ Sea Trek: A scientific deep dive into how noise pollution impacts whale migration — also, there’s a Scientific American podcast episode about the “anatomical workings” behind whale song. ▰ Audi-phile: Aside from a steering wheel, there are no physical hand controls on the Audi Q6 e-tron car: “it’s touchscreen or talking only.”