TWiS: Elephant Talk
Plus: Japanese floors, buzz pollination, sonic beer branding, and much more
Dear Fellow Listeners
▰ how elephants name each other
▰ why Japanese floors might creak
▰ the secrets of “buzz pollination”
▰ the sonic brand of a Belgian beer
▰ and much more …
This Week in Sound is a newsletter for fellow listeners interested in the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, business, storytelling, warfare, art, society, and anywhere else it might resonate. My name is Marc Weidenbaum. I live in San Francisco and at Disquiet.com.
It’s “book-writing” season. There’s long-form writing I’ve committed to, with more planned. If issues of This Week in Sound go missing, that’s why.
As always, your support is appreciated. Even more appreciated: sound-related stories you come across from your field of specialization. Most Wednesdays I publish an issue as a thank-you to paid subscribers; it currently consists of annotated recommendations of ambient (and adjacent) music.
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Sound Ledger
Audio culture by the numbers
38.69: Mean number of decibels in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which has been judged the quietest large city in the United States
4: Number of decibels the city of Paris hopes to cut as it tackles noise pollution
21,000: Estimated number of noise complaints about aircraft made by one Perth resident over the course of a year
Sources: Oklahoma: insidermonkey.com; Paris: msn.com; Perth: thewest.com.au.
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On the Line
Some favorite recent phrases
▰ SONIC SIGNATURES:
“The roll-out had clearly been long prepared. There were Black Horizon explainers for every level of interest and education: a tranche of science papers and political briefings for the most engaged; documentaries fronted by avatars evoking a century's worth of trusted and beloved science and natural history communicators, their voices carrying digital echoes of Sagan's plosives and Attenborough's aspirates; comic books and animations for children of various age-groups; pictorial leaflets, even, for the dwindling but still globally significant strand-line of illiterates.”
“Sagan’s plosives and Attenborough's aspirates” — I love it. That is Ken MacLeod in Beyond the Hallowed Sky, the first book in his Lightspeed trilogy. And l love this reminder that included among the sounds of nature are the trademark sounds of the people who tell us about nature..
. . .
▰ PHONE ODE:
"So much past arrives on my screen
coupled with soft pings in the pocket
strange temple bell
And in these images pass chords of faces
of which I know next to nothing
while all fall I ride the 63 line from Moynihan to Rhine cliff
alongside passengers slumped with buds in their ears"
That is about a quarter of the poem “I Can’t Stop” by Jenny Xie, published in the June 20, 2024, issue of The New York Review of Books.
. . .
▰ WHALED AT:
“The girl wriggles out of his grasp, stands up straight on tiptoe, and makes a sort of moo-meow sound while doing a slow pirouette. It's her whale impression. I laugh, and she looks at the screen with bright eyes, enjoying the attention. She makes the whale-song again, this time spinning away, her feet slipping on the kitchen floor. The moo-meow fades into the next room.”
That is Robin Sloan writing in his 2012 novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which I reread this past week in advance of his brand new novel, Moonbound, which I picked up at Green Apple Books earlier this evening (after dinner around the corner at Spices). In this scene, the story’s protagonist-narrator is on a video call with someone. The girl is that someone’s daughter. When she learns that the narrator lives in San Francisco, she announces, “I like whales!” Her dad encourages her by asking, “What sound does a whale make, sweetie?”
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This Week in Sound
A lightly annotated clipping service
▰ ELEPHANT TALK: Quite remarkably, it appears that elephants may very well have individualized names. “‘They have this ability to individually call specific members of their family with a unique call,’ said Mickey Pardo, an acoustic biologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and an author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.” That’s from the New York Times article (gift link) about the Nature article, which notes the following conclusion: “if non-imitative name analogues were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution.” And yes, as with so much such news these days (such as the marvels being unearthed — “unsea’d?” — about whales), the work involves artificial intelligence: “To decode these rumbles, Dr. Pardo and George Wittemyer, a professor of conservation biology at Colorado State University and chairman of the scientific board for the nonprofit Save the Elephants, analyzed 469 vocalizations made by family groups of adult elephant females and their offspring recorded at Amboseli National Park and the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya.”
▰ LISTENING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE: Nick Sowers, a friend, recounts in an op-ed for archpaper.com how as an architecture student he visited Japan and had his ears opened to the role of sound in the design of buildings: “In the year following my building science course I visited Nijo Castle in Kyoto, Japan, home to Ninomaru Palace, a building housing a series of large tatami-floored rooms where shoguns would meet with advisors and visitors. Long hallways of bare wood floors surround the rooms and connect the outermost public spaces with private interiors. There is no way to walk on the specially attached boards without triggering them to squeak or ‘chirp.’ Our professor explained that the sound of the floorboards served as an ancient ninja proximity alert system. The legendary floors became known as the uguisu-bari, or nightingale floors.” There is far more about the topic in Nick’s article, so be sure to read it in full before drawing any conclusions. “Each visual component of architecture has a sonic counterpart,” he writes. “Think about a programmatic study, for example. Through the lens of sound (even our metaphors cannot escape the visual bias), we can have meaningful conversations about user groups, demands on space which are time-based, and ideal adjacencies among building users.”
▰ RING RING: Earbuds may have gone into overdrive, according to an NPR report: “According to the World Health Organization, over 1 billion young adults, ages 12 to 35, are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss due to ‘unsafe listening practices.’ By 2050, the WHO predicts that 1 in 10 of us will experience ‘disabling hearing loss.’” A study, done in coordination with Apple, has revealed “that 1 in 3 participants are exposed to excessive noise levels.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) … Also part of that University of Michigan study was analysis of tinnitus; via the Verge: “More than 77 percent of people who participated in a big Apple-sponsored study have experienced tinnitus at some point in their lives, according to preliminary data. Around 15 percent say they’re affected daily by tinnitus, perceiving ringing or other sounds that other people can’t hear.” More work is ahead: “The study could ‘help develop new products to optimize your hearing experience and reduce the likelihood of hearing loss.’”
▰ BUZZ OFF: One type of pollination is called “buzz pollination” (which means “bees use vibrations to remove and collect pollen from flowers incidentally fertilising them”). A fellowship is available (UK students only) for the study of buzz pollination, seeking to answer questions such as “What is the relationship between vibration properties (amplitude, frequency, and duration) and pollen release and fruit quality across different varieties of soft fruits?” and “What are the properties of the vibrations used by buzz-pollinating bees while visiting experimental plots of different varieties of soft fruits?”
▰ SOUND BITES: Voices Carry: A deep dive into the science of how people might distinguish deepfake voices from real ones. ▰ Head Banned: Ella Glover, in the Guardian, writes about ditching her headphones and learning to really listen. ▰ Star Struck: NASA, back in February, released Listen to the Universe, a half-hour documentary about its experiments with sonification. ▰ Hops to It: The Belgian beer Leffe’s sonic brand draws from its abbey history. ▰ At Play in the Field: Mat Eric Hart, in Sonic Tapestries, writes about exploring the landscape beloved by Cézanne — but through sound rather than painting. ▰ Keeping Score: Are video game companies “leaving money on the table” when it comes to game music? ▰ Multi-Core: Apple announced a lot this week, including Enhanced Dialogue (improving voice isolation) and new approaches to captions, haptic sound in Apple Music, and new “gestures” for AirPods. ▰ Blade Runner: The New York State Senate has approved a “noise tax” on helicopters.
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A Drummer on Nature’s Rhythms
My review in the new issue of The Wire
My review of percussionist Susie Ibarra’s new book, Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm (Habitat Sounds, 158 pages), is in the current issue of The Wire, the one with Tomeka Reid on its cover. Here’s the first paragraph:
The great drummer and composer Susie Ibarra — born in Anaheim, California, home to Disneyland, among the most artificial environments on Earth — has long embraced the natural world as intrinsic to her music. In 2002, her Songbird Suite, released by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, teamed her with a supergroup (the label’s term) of Jennifer Choi, Ikue Mori and Craig Taborn. Uncredited were additional participants: the birds whose music could be heard on the title track, not merely sampled, but having provided evident inspiration for her antic percussion and for Taborn’s impressionistic piano playing. Two decades on, Ibarra’s Walking on Water (Innova, 2021) melded a larger ensemble with more birds and, trenchantly, the sounds of glaciers in decline. At times during Walking on Water, a listener might think Ibarra’s music had lost a battle with the field recordings, before coming to recognise the water is, in fact, the music.
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My Favorite New Album
Home/office playlist
Kenneth James Gibson (synthesizers, arrangements) and Paul Carman (saxophone) have collaborated on Murals for Immersion, a new full-length album (released on May 31st).
The word “murals” both signals the musicians’ intent and ever so slightly risks doing the recordings an injustice. Certainly these slow-paced, jazz-inflected pieces are deeply ambient in nature: They work well in the background, immediately lending a space (or headphones) a lulling sense of slowed time, of patient retreat. The horn parts and the hushed synthesizers in combination bring to mind the Fourth World music of the late Jon Hassell, albeit minus any glitchy effects. It’s all moody haze, all the time, and all the better for it.
Then again, a “mural” isn’t a background in the same way wallpaper is. Wallpaper music and mural music would be very different things. This is mural music in the way it guides the listener over time, its abstractions changing slowly, elements coming and going. It is mural music in the sense of not being overly patterned or repetitive, in not feeling remotely mass-produced, in bringing a deliberate sense of its own presence.
“Tonio Between Two Poles” uses an echoing motif. The track is stately (imagine an alpenhorn muffled by distance), and like much of the record, it suggests a kinship to drone music while being far more complex than mere tones for their own sake. “Above Suicide Peak,” another highlight, appears to borrow its name from a location near Idyllwild Pine Cove, where Gibson lives. It takes extended pauses between echoing saxophone parts, letting the ear get accustomed to quietude before surfacing again. The whole record is worth exploring in depth. Don’t just relegate it to the background.
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Public Scratch Pad
Bits from my online notebook
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media.
▰ The voice-menu phone tones for the hearing impaired are my new jam
▰ People gesticulate so much in internet video ads (which I always have on mute), I regularly think they’re targeted ads for Theremins
▰ It’s 2024, meaning you can be doing chores while listening to an audiobook and then a voice from your phone interrupts to say things like “A phone number with a 503 area code has liked a message from a 213 phone number,” no other information. Then the audiobook begins again. And it’s just normal.
▰ So far every day this week has felt like Friday. That is the start of summer.
▰ The most surreal experience of the morning was trying to type the word “accelerationist,” a word my computer’s autocorrect kept pushing back at, as if it were trying to, I dunno, tell me something
▰ Responding to a friend’s query, I chose a song I liked, the title of which shared initials with my name: Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” I asked ChatGPT to identify a three-word title, to fold in my middle name (Aaron). It just made up a song by the Kinks that doesn’t exist, “Meet Again Wednesday,” and tried to pass it off as real.
▰ Yes, given the past decade’s increased proliferation of music PR via email I’m not exactly excited at the prospect of unedited AI-generated one-sheets arriving at an ever-escalating pace
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Disquiet Junto: Concerto for [ ]
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is emailed to the group’s members, who have until the following Monday evening to upload a track in response. The Disquiet Junto began in January 2012 and has run weekly ever since. This has been week 0649.
Check out the project that came to a close yesterday, June 10, 2024. The assignment: Write a piece of music in concerto form. Listen to the results in the project’s SoundCloud playlist. Learn more about the project and the Disquiet Junto at disquiet.com/0649.
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End of Transmission
Modus operandi: Listening to art ▰ Playing with audio ▰ Sounding out technology ▰ Composing in code ▰ Loitering in video games ▰ Rewinding the soundscape
The cover image for this issue is by Bernard Dupont and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Really good one this week!