More This Week in Sound: Phonosynthesis, Farts
▰ ROOTS MUSIC: Call it “phonosynthesis,” as scientists confirm that sounds can improve the growth of fungus, per the New York Times: “Playing sound to Trichoderma harzianum, a green microscopic fungus that defends tree roots from pathogens, led to growth rates seven times as fast as those of fungus grown in the sound of silence. If the laboratory findings can be replicated in nature, then sound could be an unexpected new tool for improving the health of forests, encouraging beneficial microbes to take root and thrive.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ SCREEN OFF: One thing I love about the Diary section of the London Review of Books is it often doesn’t announce its topic. It’ll just say “Diary” at the top, along with the entry’s author’s name, and unless you read the piece, you might not know what it’s about, and when you begin to read, you don’t necessarily know what’s ahead. A Diary by Dani Garavelli earlier this month waits until its second paragraph to introduce the topic at hand, movie theaters, and while you might guess it’s about their decline, it doesn’t get around to that for a spell. Eventually we do get around to the introduction of sound in the 1920s and ‘30s, and eventually to the unfortunate results of haphazard cost-cutting decades later. With one theater, by way of example: “They simply dropped a wall from the circle downwards and then divided what they had behind that into two more cinemas. There was no soundproofing: you could quite often hear the film in the neighbouring auditorium.”
▰ BOTTOMS UP: Noni Hazlehurst was a presenter on the longrunning Australian TV series Play School from 1978 to 2011. I hadn’t heard about the show until she was interviewed by the Guardian. Here she describes an inflatable raft that caused what she says was the most chaotic thing to ever happen on the show’s set: “Now, the thing is, it’s meant to inflate in 30 seconds into a two-person rubber dinghy, which it did – but it made the most extraordinary farting sound that you’ve ever heard in your life. For a full 30 seconds. It exploded and just about knocked the whole set over. We were in absolute hysterics, to the point where someone wrote in and said we were obviously drunk. You couldn’t have written it. It was just so funny.”
▰ 21ST CENTURY FX: “I’ve never really used sound effects in comics much. I don’t like them. As a kid, they fascinated me, but after a certain age they started to take me out of the storytelling, so I’ve tried to avoid them. I was part of the generations that helped kill the sound effect and the thought balloon, I guess.” That’s the opening of a great consideration the sound effects (and related topics) of comics in the latest issue of Warren Ellis’ newsletter, Orbital Operations. There was also a heap of inventive sound in his recent audio drama, The Department of Midnight, which I need to get around to unpacking.
▰ GRACE NOTES: Listen Up: Paranoia about whether or not smart devices are listening to us got a nudge when 404 Media shared a leak of an “active listening plan” that proposed to use “‘real-time intent data’ from smart device microphones to deliver ads to consumers.” ▰ No Fooling Around: A multimedia feature in the Guardian on life — especially sonic nocturnal life — during wartime: “people can see almost nothing in the darkness and so strain their ears to hear the noises that haunt them afterwards.” ▰ Punctured: Inconsistency is cited in research on the use of breath sounds in respiratory evaluations. ▰ Battle Bots: Robot vacuums across the country were hacked in the space of several days, [allowing] the attackers to not only control the robovacs, but use their speakers to hurl racial slurs and abusive comments at anyone nearby.” ▰ Just Browsing: A Chrome extension keeps alert for audio deep fakes.
