TWiS: How Bats Hear Their Own Calls
Plus: AI tones down customer complaints + listening for subs in warming oceans
Dear Fellow Listeners
▰ toning down customer complaints
▰ device tones causing demonetization
▰ listening for subs in warming oceans
▰ how bats hear their calls in a crowd
▰ 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 weeks I publish a second 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
100: Number of McDonald’s locations that had a (now canceled) AI ordering system for drive-through customers.
6: Hours per weekday when take-out orders are prohibited in parts of Milan to decrease noise pollution.
200,000: Estimated average cost of production, in $U.S, for an eight-to-ten–episode podcast.
Sources: McDonald’s: qz.com; Milan: msn.com; podcast: bloomberg.com.
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Mixed Message
This feels vaguely like a political statement, a call-to-arms, or a scared-straight warning.
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On the Line
Some favorite recent phrases
▰ MOUTH OFF:
“The sound of our voices is born of our anatomy, the way we’re shaped inside — not just a skill but part of the physical self. The prospect of not being able to sing anymore felt like contemplating an amputation.”
The singer Dessa contemplates the loss of her voice in a New York Times essay. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
. . .
▰ FLORA AURA:
"Primroses may respond to sound — but that doesn’t mean that they 'hear' the way that we do. As Schlanger writes, they have a version of 'earless' hearing: 'Sound, to them, is pure vibration.'"
The Schlanger mentioned above is Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, the subject of Rachel Riederer’s review in The New Yorker.
. . .
▰ BIRD BRAIN:
“The simple song of the cirl bunting is reminiscent of a sewing machine, or a hand-held scanning device from Star Trek.”
That’s the description of the Shriek of the Week this week. Crystal clear, as always.
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This Week in Sound
A lightly annotated clipping service
▰ SOFT MACHINE: “SoftBank Corp. announced that it has developed voice-altering technology to protect employees from customer harassment,” reports the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. This is to say, the software takes the edge off phone calls from customers who are registering complaints. The words themselves remain the same; “the pitch and inflection of the voice is softened.” I’m reminded of a recent incident when, in a lengthy email back and forth in a browser-based chat, I felt the need to confirm that my interlocutor was, in fact, a person. I had, a few days earlier, gone through a similar back and forth with a different company, that time via email, only to receive an email the next morning informing me that what I had been told in the emails was incorrect, and in fact I had been emailing with an AI the whole time, and the AI got it wrong. The chat-based helper, however, confirmed it was an actual person I was dealing with. What led me to ask was that there had been no sense of empathy in the other person’s responses. Now I wonder if the SoftBank software can work both ways — whether in the future, similar software will be able to make the voice of a customer-support employee sound more empathetic than it actually is. For the time being, SoftBank’s main concern appears to be employees: “Because it is difficult for AI to completely replace operators, [the software’s creator] said he hopes that AI ‘will become a mental shield that prevents operators from overstraining their nerves.’” According to the South China Morning Post, the SoftBank tool is only available currently in Japanese, “but the company has said it is considering developing versions in other languages for markets that require it.” In adjacent news, according to Gizmodo, “The Memphis-based regional bank First Horizon was planning to use AI to detect when a call center employee was on the brink of losing it, according to American Banker in March. The bank’s plan was to send the employees a relaxing video montage of photos of that employee’s family set to music. However, First Horizon has reportedly decided not to adopt the system.”
▰ WASH OUT: It’s Cory Doctorow’s and William Gibson’s and Neal Stephenson’s and Annalee Newitz’s world, and we’re just living in it. Case in point: A YouTuber’s video “was demonetized because a Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming,” reports Wired. Making the situation all the more ridiculous, the song in question isn’t even copyrighted: “The song was composed in 1817 and is in the public domain. Samsung has used it to signal the end of a wash cycle for years.”
▰ HOT WATER: A scientific/military research program near the Arctic seeks “to understand how climate change, which is warming the Arctic faster than the rest of the planet, is affecting the movement of underwater soundwaves.” This report notes a previous study exploring how climate change might affect “hunting for submarines in the warming ocean.” (That previous work proved inconclusive: “Our analysis suggests that trends in underwater sound propagation might make acoustic detection more difficult in certain regions, and that an extensive analysis is needed to assess the possible impacts of climate change on anti-submarine warfare.”)
▰ SOUND BITES: New Fruit Flavors: (1) Apparently the next major OS update for the Apple Watch, watchOS 11, will let you change its ringtone (I had no idea this wasn’t an option previously) and (2) the Vocal Shortcuts in upcoming iOS 18 will let you rename Siri, and (3) there will be more controls available in the Adaptive Audio settings. ▰ Amazon Delivers: A recent update to Kindle apps for Mac, Android, and iOS provides TTS (text-to-speech) service. ▰ Gross Out: “A Nevada Congressional GOP candidate is suing his former opponent, claiming he’s responsible for creating deepfaked audio of him and calling him a ‘sexual predator and deviant.’” ▰ Burger ChatGPTy: White Castle is among the latest companies to try AI at the drive-through (cue the “put some glue on it” jokes) — meanwhile, McDonald’s has stopped its trial run of a similar program. ▰ Audio Games: A list of the best video games, as gauged by the their employment of binaural sound, has been compiled by thegamer.com. ▰ Field Goal: Gordon Hempton and Perri Lynch Howard were the National Park Service’s ACA Soundscape Field Station artists in residence this year. ▰ Voice Activated: Research at Cornell claims that VALL-E 2 is “the first of its kind” to hit key “milestones” in speech synthesis: “speech robustness, naturalness, and speaker similarity.” ▰ Havana Bad Time: A report suggests the immediate response by the State Department to the so-called Havana syndrome may have not been sufficient. ▰ Bats, Man: Echolocation is essential to how bats navigate, yet they also travel in packs — so how can they hear their own vocal calls in a crowd? ▰ The Sopranos: A study of the biomechanics of sound production in high-pitched classical singing.”
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Two New Aphex Twin Tracks
Or perhaps more like “new”
It looks like you can listen to the two newly announced Aphex Twin songs right now. In fact, they appear to have been available for almost a decade. Warp Records has announced a set of new pressings of Aphex Twin’s classic Selected Ambient Works Volume II, originally released 30 years ago, in 1994 (my 33 1/3 book on it came out 10 years ago, in 2014).
The new Warp editions contain 27 tracks each, including the original 24 tracks, and the formerly vinyl-only “Stone in Focus,” and two that appear at the end of the new release: “th1 [evnslower],” which is glacially slow, and “Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev,” which features operatic vocal elements and qualities that suggest parts of it, if not the entirety of it, are being played in reverse (hence the “Rev” in the title). By the way, “Stone in Focus” wasn’t vinyl only, per se, as it was also on the 1994 Astralwerks CD compilation Excursions in Ambience (The Third Dimension), which also had tracks from Seefeel, Spacetime Continuum, Future Sound of London, and Air, among others.
Both of those tracks appeared previously on Aphex Twin’s own SoundCloud accounts. The first is on his famed @user18081971, on which he posted heaps of tracks when he reemerged (culminating in the album Syro) from a long period of relative silence, and the other at his eponymous @aphextwin/@richarddjames account. Judging by the time codes for those tracks on Warp website and on the individual track pages (11:07/11:08 for “th1 [evnslower]” and 6:41 for “Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev”), these are the same pieces of music.
And several enterprising people have, of course, reversed the “Rev” track so we can hear it before it was flipped. Here it is:
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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.
▰ Blue sky and fog horns means there’s a thick marine layer in the bay. I marvel at it every time.
▰ I got back into tai chi earlier this year and I look forward to having enough memory of the forms that I can listen to Lou Reed’s Hudson River Wind Meditations while doing it, but for now all I’m listening to (and watching) is tai chi tutorial videos.
▰ I’ve recently taken to, once a day, looking in my email sent folder, ’cause sometimes — in an age of heavily filtered email, due to general email overload (PR, spam, newsletters, ads) — replies end up bypassing my inbox, and I otherwise might not know someone had replied
▰ Somehow guitar practice means guitar and headphone amp and headphones and iPad* for noting down chords and laptop for displaying sheet* music.
And this excludes the step where I swap the amp for an audio interface so I can feed the sound through my computer and, thus, more easily record myself (on occasion).
And yes, I’m considering an acoustic guitar.
And yes, that wouldn’t remove many steps.
And yes, I’d annoy people with my playing.
*Goodnotes, which is quite excellent, in both cases
▰ The most important day for guitar practice is the day after guitar class
▰ DJ Krust poster in the first (2000) episode of the Rebus TV series, as the detective interviews a club owner backstage
▰ Very odd when you get a bunch of alerts of people all signing up for your newsletter from the same source, but there’s no record of that source. I guess it’s paywalled or something.
▰ I’ve been typing since before I could read
▰ Overheard during my lunch walk: tourists disappointed to see a driver behind the wheel of a passing Waymo
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Disquiet Junto: Doppler, Interrupted
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 0650.
Check out the project that came to a close yesterday, June 17, 2024. The assignment: Record a piece of music in which a passing siren blossoms into something else entirely. Listen to the results in the project’s SoundCloud playlist. Learn more about the project and the Disquiet Junto at disquiet.com/0650.
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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