TWiS: "The White Noise of Domestic Life"
Plus: unenforced noise laws, hearing-accessible hotel rooms, and quiet EV dangers
Dear Fellow Listeners,
▰ refrigerators fight crime
▰ old noise laws are unenforced
▰ hotels are becoming hearing-accessible
▰ quiet EV cars may be more dangerous
This Week in Sound is a newsletter about 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.
Your support is appreciated. Even more appreciated: sound-related stories from your field of specialization. Most weeks I publish a second issue as a thank-you to paid subscribers; currently it consists of annotated recommendations of ambient (and adjacent) music.
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Sound Ledger
Audio culture by the numbers
10,000: Rough number of pipes in the old organ at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
$14.5: Cost of the renovation in millions of US dollars
86: Age at which the organ “died a natural death”
Source: washingtonpost.com (Thanks, Mike Rhode!).
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On the Line
Some favorite recent phrases
▰ WRONG TRACK:
“I just equated it to this phantom noise, and maybe we’re all in a mass hysteria moment: we hear the bell, but we ignore it because we’re New Yorkers.”
That’s an employee at a coffee shop adjacent to a Manhattan subway stop where a bell rang for weeks straight, per the Guardian.
. . .
▰ HEDGE FUN:
“of quince, or damson, strafed into the grass
and bruised to softness by a week of rain,
the wasps grown quick and blind
around that feast, the pigeons
fattened in the hedges, blind with song.”
That’s a stanza from “Notes towards a Devotio Moderna,” a poem by John Burnside in the July 4, 2024, issue of The London Review of Books.
. . .
▰ GIRL TALK:
“Part mommy, part secretary, part girlfriend, Samantha was an all-purpose comfort object who purred directly into her users’ ears. Even as A.I. technology advances, these stereotypes are re-encoded again and again.”
That’s Amanda Hess on the voices of AI in the New York Times.
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This Week in Sound
A lightly annotated clipping service
▰ COLD OPEN: When asked what I listen to, my usual response is to qualify that mostly I listen to the equivalent of refrigerators humming — so you can bet that I’m already deep into Nicola Twilley’s new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. It’s as full of hums as my record collection, and of tantalizing observations such as the following item, which appears as a footnote far into the volume: “This low hum actually vibrates around sixty hertz, due to minute fluctuations in the grid as utility companies respond to changes in demand. The result is an ever-shifting symphony of frequency vibrations that London's Metropolitan Police began to record in 2005 for use in audio forensics. Because the hum is so omnipresent, inserting itself into most recordings, law enforcement can match the particular sixty-hertz fingerprint of UK-made recordings to its archive to arrive at an exact time stamp. Every time you open the fridge door (which the average household does 107 times per day, according to research conducted by LG), triggering its compressor to kick on, you're helping create that particular second's unique audio fingerprint.” The footnote is connected to a sentence observing that the hum of refrigerators has “slipped beneath our perception threshold to become the white noise of domestic life.”
▰ ANTI UP: “When considered on a national level, noise just doesn’t compete against other environmental problems for emotional intensity,” says Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes. He’s quoted in an article — originally in Undark, and then picked up by NPR — about a current lawsuit: “an anti-noise advocacy group, Quiet Communities, sued the Environmental Protection Agency for not doing its job to limit the loud sounds people are exposed to in everyday life. The group is now waiting to hear if it will be able to argue its case in front of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.” The piece, by Joanne Silberner, is a primer on the health threats inherent in noise:
“noise increases the risk of death from coronary artery disease by about 5% for every 10 A-weighted decibel, or dBA, increases in traffic noise exposure”
“Traffic noise in Western Europe causes the loss of 1.6 million healthy years of life annually.”
“the last time EPA estimated noise exposure” was 1981
“Planners have been routing highways through under-resourced neighborhoods for decades”
The last time the EPA suggested any noise limits was in 1974, before the health effects were well known. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
Related, from the LA Times: “Pedestrians are twice as likely to be hit by an electric or hybrid car than by a vehicle that runs on gasoline or diesel. … [R]esearchers hypothesize that the relatively quiet operations of an electric vehicle is the key factor.”
▰ WAKE-UP CALL: I have on occasion found myself in a hotel room for which I was not the intended sort of guest, specifically those with oversized bathrooms with wide doors and wall to wall tile, designed for visitors in wheel chairs and with other support needs. Those showers, I’ve learned, are called “roll-in.” I have gotten them, in the past, when booking a room quite late — like the day before — at which point the hotel must have decided no one actually needing it is likely to arrive. New to me is the “hearing accessible” hotel room, such as one at a hotel south of where I live, in Menlo Park. I trust — or hope — that people who would benefit from such rooms are aware of them, and that they are becoming more common. This place advertises:
strobe light
TTY device doorbell
ADA approved telephone
▰ ORIENT EXPRESS: How it is that fish know where sound comes from? (Starts at 9:21 in the podcast.) Due to how sound moves underwater, fish have evolved to hear differently than humans do. How exactly that functions, and why it has been a difficult topic to pursue, is the topic of a segment in the Nature Podcast. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
▰ SOUND BITES: Tone LoC: The Library of Congress, on how it preserves sound recordings (thanks, Mike Rhode!). ▰ Dive In: Tribeca Festival Immersive Curator Ana Brzezińska on learning to appreciate immersive sound. ▰ Bugged Out: Tips on how to deal with overwhelming cicada songs. ▰ Ray Ban: A StingRay device for spying on cellphones was up for sale (for $100,000) on eBay before it was reportedly taken down by the auction company. ▰ Horn Dog: This moose may love wind chimes as much as I do (Instagram). ▰ Hops to It: The magazine Print picked up the story about the Leffe sound brand: “Developed by recording the acoustics within the original Leffe Abbey in Belgium — home to monks since 1240 — the sound of a bursting balloon in the Abbey was transformed into a digital reverb, creating a unique and recognizable sonic signature.”
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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.
▰ Afternoon trio for foghorn, tea timer, and washing machine
▰ It seems like it shouldn’t matter that I can now quickly post and to update Disquiet.com, which for a few months had a laggy thing going with its CMS. I should be able to just write and post, and a 30-second or even minute-long delay shouldn’t matter. But it really does. That’s how online-first writing, especially blogging, differs from (old-school) writing writing. There’s something fluid to the process of sketching a post, adding links and embeds, making sure it works, hitting post — and often tweaking slightly after. It’s just its own medium, and its own flow.
▰ The barber’s electric razor is expressing its sentience by performing a cover of Underworld’s “Rez”
▰ A reflection on the music of Aphex Twin by Alarm Will Sound percussionist Craig Thompson — all about the question of its “beatless”ness, to the nature of tempo, and much more. He’s played Aphex Twin arrangements for many years and has a unique perspective as a result.
▰ I’ve self-published Disquiet.com since the end of 1996. Some articles are backdated prior. I’ve been thinking about reading back through it from start to present, thousands of posts. Tidying it up as I go (a recent upgrade messed some markdown). Anyone here with a longtime blog done such a revisit?
▰ As Bill Bragg sang, “What is that sound? Where is it coming from?” If you’re reading this, then you may very well be acquainted with Shazam not knowing what the heck it is that catches your ear. Though when it works, it works.
▰ You know you’ve watched a lot of Bill Frisell live performance videos when you’ve graduated from “Yeah, cool socks as always” to recognizing specific shirts, as if they’re as much a part of his repertoire as a given piece of music
▰ Paid subscribers to This Week in Sound got a bonus issue in the form of a three-part ambient/adjacent mixtape: two live recordings plus music from Shanghai for contemporary dance.
▰ Have a good weekend, folks. Listen to an old favorite record. Identify a musician who played a secondary role on that record and listen to a second record that also features the musician. Then listen to a third record, one that’s from the same label and time period as the second record. Happy hunting.
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Disquiet Junto: Story Time
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 0652.
Check out the project that came to a close yesterday, July 1, 2024. The assignment: Set a favorite story to music. Listen to the results in the project’s SoundCloud playlist. Learn more about the project and the Disquiet Junto at disquiet.com/0652.
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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