This Week in Sound: Shame Has a New Ringtone
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the October 29, 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.
▰ NO BACKSIES: Shame has a new ringtone. At the American Airlines terminal at San Francisco International Airport, “a warning sound [is] triggered when passengers attempt to board outside their assigned group. When a boarding pass is scanned, an ‘audible alert’ will notify the gate agent, displaying the passenger’s correct group number.”
▰ DUTY CALLS: “The audio team at lead dev studio Treyarch is enhancing the 3D soundscape to new levels, allowing players to better sense the location, speed, and direction of nearby activity, helping them to respond more effectively and become even more immersed in the world,” writes Dean Takahashi. I’m intrigued by this level of sound design detail in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, especially as it correlates with being a meaningful component of gameplay, and not just of story, design, and setting. Says audio engineer audio engineer William Cornell: “We’ve been working closely with the Project Acoustics team to simulate the way that sound waves bounce and propagate through the world down to the smallest details like what materials are made of, the size and shape of the room, and what path the sound has to take to get from where it happened to where you’re hearing it.”
▰ CREW CUT: The year-old company Crewless Marine, based in Rhode Island, expands sea research: “It’s important to understand our oceans, and understanding undersea acoustics is really a key part of that. The scope of that problem is something that crewed or manned platforms can’t handle alone — the ocean is too big. With the emergence of uncrewed platforms — in surface vehicles, undersea vehicles, and stationary platforms — we have an opportunity to put acoustic sensors on these vehicles to get a sense of the ocean and get a better understanding of what manmade and biological sounds are doing to the marine environment.”
▰ FLY BY: A potential model for how airports manage community concerns about noise will debut at the website of Tweed New Haven Regional Airport, reportedly to “give airport officials and airport neighbors the opportunity to measure where a plane is, or was, and how loud it was at any given time, from any spot on the map.” The website will be powered by tools developed by the Australian company Envirosuite. Per an article in the New Haven Register, this offering is beyond the capabilities of familiar plane-tracking services such as flightaware.com and flightradar24.com.
▰ PALETTE CLEANSER: A brief summary on the four-note theme of the San Francisco television station KRON on the occasion of the station’s 75th anniversary: “The four-note sonic brand originated during KRON’s 50th anniversary when composer Michael Boyd created the station’s signature sound, debuting in 1995 and in use until 2001 and again from 2006 until 2020. The new orchestration builds upon this foundation while expanding the musical palette.” Says an engineer at the firm that refreshed the sound logo: “If you’re at home and preparing dinner, and you hear that logo, you know it’s time for the news.” (Bonus points for the idea that one “hears” a logo.)
▰ GRACE NOTES: Hear, Say: The word “earwitness” was wordsmith.org’s word of the day this week, and apparently, if I’m reading correctly, it dates back to 1539? (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Unbound: “Audiobooks have surpassed e-book sales for August and the first eight months of the year for the first time.” ▰ Sales Call:SoundHound CEO and cofounder Keyvan Mohajer talks about helping power the “voice-commerce ecosystem,” which to a good degree means shopping by talking. ▰ A Good Caws: Movies get birds wrong a lot, and “rarely sound, look, or behave like they should.” One bird in one movie in particular apparently has disturbed birders for a quarter century: Charlie’s Angels (2000) may contain “the wrongest bird in the history of cinema.” ▰ Lab Report: Good Morning America got to visit Apple’s audio lab. ▰ Pod Saves: The podcast of The Wirecutter piggybacked on the hearing tools in Apple’s AirPods for a full episode of gadget commentary and personal anecdotes. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Road Rave: Local coverage, from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England, on the installation of so-called sound cameras, which capture images of loud vehicles. ▰ Orchestral Manoeuvres: The Los Angeles Philharmonic has announced a half-day marathon on November 16: “This year’s programming focuses on field recordings, combining a series of performances with panels engaging composers, acoustic ecologists, field recordists and climate scientists on the intersections of art, nature and technology.” ▰ Ads Up: This isn’t going to be a big surprise, but research suggests that, when it comes to advertising on smart services like Alexa and Siri, “giving users more sense of control through a combination of methods reduced negative reactions to advertising messages.”
