Dear Fellow Listeners,

Welcome to the third issue of the Throughline subset of my ongoing This Week in Sound email newsletter. Throughline issues generally go only to paid subscribers as a thank you for their support. I’m always trying to think of better ways to reward paid subscribers, and I have another ongoing concept (maybe two), directly tied sound …

Read more

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, design, politics, science, ecology, interfaces, 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.

Some of this week’s topics:

▰ Recording Los Angeles
▰ Public housing surveillance
▰ Reef madness
▰ Parkinson’s vs. the harmonica

This Week in Sound also publishes, as a thank-you to paid subscribers, Throughline issues that consist of annotated recommended listening, each installment focused on a different topic. I’m always trying to think of better ways to reward paid subscribers, and have an additional ongoing one (maybe two), directly tied sound studies, that I may introduce in the next month or so.

Your support of This Week in Sound is appreciated, as are sound-related observations, anecdotes, and links from your own life and work. There’s substantial long-form writing I’ve committed to, with more planned. If issues of This Week in Sound go missing, that is why.

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On the Line

Some favorite recent writing

▰ Sound Proof

The silence of the room indicated soundproofing that kept street noise from interrupting the serenity of the workspace. Everything in the office — the furnishings, the artwork, the man himself — exhaled refinement and propriety.

That’s from Theo of Golden, a novel by Allen Levi. Originally self-published in 2023, it was released last year by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books and has been on the New York Times list of best sellers for months.

. . .

▰ Squinting Sun

how starkly clear you hear them gnawing
at the wood of lawn chairs near the awning
all day in august or july, and not much longer,
till beneath their pincers every bit of fiber
is ground down, and the entire piece of furnishing

That’s from the poem “wasps” by Jan Wagner, translated from the German by David Keplinger, published last month in the New Yorker.

. . .

▰ White Noise

Thomson notes how, when sound appeared at the very tail end of minstrelsy (with The Jazz Singer in 1927), the dialogue and soundtrack could be understood as “a version of the white space” on a page, suggesting “hidden levels of meaning and realms that will never be reduced to mere visibility.”

That’s from Tim Riley’s review in the Los Angeles Review of Books of David Thomson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History.

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Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

40: Percent of fish in experiment, when submitted to motorboat noise, that mistakenly swam toward predators

95: Percent of short Chinese dramas — out of 128,000 in the first quarter of 2026 — that were AI-generated, including voices

80.65: Average noise level in decibels of the loudest of the 50 states that comprise the USA (it’s Texas)

Sources: motorboat (phys.org), China (ft.com), Texas (timeout.com)

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This Week in Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

▰ RECORDING ANGELES: “The sounds of Los Angeles are bringing together people from all walks of life to record and archive them, from the buzzing of a bees’ nest in Griffith Park to church bells echoing over goose honks in Echo Park. … George Jensen founded the Los Angeles Field Recording Club a little over a year ago. He said it has attracted sound lovers with all levels of recording sophistication, from people using their phones to folks with professional recorders worth thousands of dollars. ... About 20 club members meet up once a month at places like the purportedly haunted Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, a scrap yard in Sun Valley and a section of Griffith Park, where someone recorded a cacophony of bees buzzing around their nest. … The club's next endeavor, he said, is an interactive sound map where field recordists can archive their audio online for all to enjoy.”

▰ MIRROR DARKLY: “Chinese actors and online influencers have a new rival: cost-effective advanced AI video generation programmes that are threatening millions of jobs in a once-vibrant area of China’s gig economy. … In some cases, performers are being forced to ‘distil’ their images, voices and performing styles into AI tools before losing their jobs. ‘I was pretty much pinned against a wall,’ said the host of a popular children’s educational programme, who was told in April to consent to the creation of an AI replica of herself, or the company would find other actors who would.”

▰ SURVEILLANCE STATE: “In 2024, the public housing authority in Concord, N.H., started installing Minut sensors, a product popular with Airbnb hosts who want to make sure short-term guests aren’t smoking or having loud parties. Around 300 affordable housing apartments in a handful of buildings now have the devices, which initially cost $50, with an additional monthly $7.50 monitoring fee. … But when some residents looked up Minut online, they were aghast at the wide range of data the devices collected: decibel levels, air quality and Bluetooth signals from mobile devices, a proxy for how many people were in a unit at any given time. The device even acts as a motion detector. … Tenants in Concord wondered what sorts of noises would trigger alerts. One tenant, whose Minut monitor was installed almost directly over her bed, wrapped it in foil and put it in her freezer. Another asked her landlord — the government — why it was monitoring her movements in her apartment and was told, incorrectly, that the device was not collecting that data. One mother asked her college-aged son to keep it down while playing video games in his bedroom, just in case, because the monitor was right outside his door.”

▰ REEF MADNESS: “Coral reef fish that are exposed to motorboat noise grow up smaller and less able to dodge predators, new research shows. Scientists played either boat noise or natural reef sounds to a species from the Great Barrier Reef called the spiny chromis, both as embryos and soon after hatching.”

▰ GRACE NOTES: Culture Shock: “I know you guys are testing for sound, but what about vibration” (the battle over data center noise continues). ▰ Rattle & Hum: The harmonica’s role in managing Parkinson’s. ▰ Inch Worm: Not all noise measurement tools are created equally. ▰ Space Out: A study of soundscape installations in urban environments. ▰ Quiet Down: Nokia introduces a new approach to “denoising.”

Credit Due: China (Rich Pettus), harmonica (Mike Rhode) — thanks!

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Music + Photography Discommunication

My essay for Yoshi Yubai’s new book from Landslide

I first met the Japanese street photographer Yoshi Yubai back in late 2022 at the apartment of V. Vale in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Vale is the founder of the storied publisher RE/Search Publications. I happened to notice a synthesizer on a table in Vale’s living room, and learned it belonged to his wife, Marian Wallace. As is inevitable, talk turned to music, and Yubai and I bonded over mutual favorites.

We kept in touch, and then last year, as he was putting thought into an upcoming collection of his work, he asked if I would write the essay for it. The book was published recently by Landslide, which is a Sydney, Australia, imprint run by Jake Wotherspoon. The book made its debut at the recent San Francisco Art Book Fair. Both Yubai and Wotherspoon were in attendance, and I spent several days during the fair at their table.

The pervasive theme in Yubai’s recent work, a few reproductions of which appear below, is “discommunication,” a concept of his that serves as the book’s title. Discommunication is a massive, sprawling document, each page 42 cm × 30 cm (16.5” × 11.8”), the pages a shiny silver, the images stark and evasive. While it is a photography book, it is one fueled by music, and its urban imagery naturally suggests the soundscapes of the unnatural environments that Yubai chronicles and creates.

With permission from Yubai and Wotherspoon, I am sharing here the text of my introduction for the first time outside of the book, which was printed in a limited edition of 120. My essay fills a page toward the end of the book and is broken into three sections. I am proud to have played my small role in the book’s production, and very much enjoyed observing from the sidelines as its development progressed.

Encounters

I once found myself at a dinner seated between a businessman and a graphic designer. During the meal, the businessman became increasingly wary whenever discussion turned to the designer’s profession. This tension was of the fleeting yet consequential sort that can occur when polarized individuals meet for likely the only time in their lives — a blunt snapshot, an emphatic moment, an elemental fissure.

Eventually, the businessman spoke his mind, concern having built up such steam that it demanded release. What he said was structured like a question, but leapfrogged to accusation. “So,” the businessman asked of the designer, “you’re telling me that you take ‘ideas’ and … then you express them ... ‘visually’? You turn ideas into ... images?”

The businessman’s pauses were troubling, like he felt his version of reality being yanked away, and he was doing his damnedest to pull it back to his side of whatever line he perceived had been drawn. The stakes seemed high — though perhaps only to him. His tone signaled that the graphic designer was either self-deluded or a fraud. I politely rose to the designer’s defense, but in the mind of the businessman, I clearly dug myself a hole right next to this person on whom he had focused his incredulity.

The incident feels like a modern day Aesop’s fable, one arriving by way of J. G. Ballard’s anthropological x-rays: a charged interaction between white-collar workers, a study in societal contrasts that borders on the violent — all due to the provisional status of the image.

Renderings

That images can and do express ideas seems self-evident to me, no less today than at the dinner decades ago. If anything, as time has progressed, aesthetics seem ever more like encapsulations of perspectives, concepts, ideologies, narratives, scenes, cultures. The very word “aesthetic,” for example, has shifted its form, morphed as culture has evolved, from noun to adjective, from described to descriptive.

For something to “be” “aesthetic” today means for it to have a sensibility that extends well beyond objects themselves, well beyond (mere) matters of design, and to stand for something akin to a statement, an ethos. At the least, something being approvingly recognized as “aesthetic” signals the presence of a coherent, consistent point of view — and the term can imply far more; being “aesthetic” can encompass, as it were, an entire worldview.

Such are these prints by Yoshi Yubai, an extraordinary street photographer from Japan’s Hiroshima Prefecture, and one who is fully grounded in global urban culture. Yubai, in this book, sets war mementos against storefront hallucinations, ominous structures against corrupted data, surveillance residue against damaged silhouettes — and it is all of a piece. The intense aesthetic — in the older sense of that word — of Yubai’s art takes two forms in particular. There is the work itself, and there is the way it connects past the realm of photography.

Street photography often aspires to capture the beauty in the broken and the mundane, to document fleeting moments that don’t so much defy as transcend classical conceptions of what is condoned to be aesthetically pleasing. By identifying essential subjects and shapes, figures and stories, textures and moods, in the everyday, Yubai’s street photography stakes a claim. There is the denuded affect of faces removed from any helpful context, the extreme saturation that elevates the simple to the iconic, and perhaps foremost, the emotional impact of a vision that is at once inspirational and post-apocalyptic.

Yubai then pushes those same subjects — whether generic models or battle sites, advertisements or street signage, car graveyards or images of images — further than their original forms suggested, often past the point of recognizability. These images are rendered — like with fat, reduced to vital components — in order to amplify any inherent texture, and to draw out the opportunities for abstraction, building back up from the elemental.

If in much street photography, a moment is captured for consideration, then in Yubai’s, those moments are starting points for serial reuse: layering, degradation, polarization.

Throughout, as his work takes on the impure patterning of a dying television screen, he retains the flavor of street photography. Rather than (merely) document a dingy alley or a seedy business corridor or a forlorn building, he summons their graffiti-coated spirits. In turn, the haphazard angles and violated surfaces of the environments he studies become fantastical works of art.

Generations

Yubai cites diverse resources for focusing his imagination, notably the pioneering computer graphics of Robert Abel. Countless generations of Moore’s Law have rendered Abel’s early animations quaint by comparison, perhaps — but those works share with Yubai’s contemporary prints an emphasis on willfully basic geometries that bleed surrealism.

Also in the passing years, as technology has made one consequential footfall after another, art has grappled with how to curb the monster. Cyberpunk recognized the rust in the machine, and set a precedent for the grit that Yubai ekes out in his imagery. The metallic surfaces and reflective qualities of his prints speak to digital dreams and artificial pleasures, to Mirrorshades appetites and Neuromancer bohemia.

Further along the way, glitch came to celebrate the beauty of systems tested well beyond their limits. Yubai finds camaraderie and regeneration in the glitch-inflected music of electronic acts like Oval and Autechre, which push their digital audio tools past intended purposes — until, like in his photography, the quotidian reveals itself as raw material for adulterated abstraction. Music fuels him. He identifies (and identifies with) a through-line back to the time of barebones bands like Suicide, which wrestled with fundamentals — the minimal, the electronic, the experimental, the febrile.

That proto-industrial era followed immediately on the heyday of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, a pronounced presence in this book, not just in subject matter (advertising, commerce, beauty, appropriation) but in presentation. Printed onto silver foil beneath a reflective gloss finish, the images glisten like the surface of still water, amplifying the book’s atmosphere, at once sharp and ambiguous.

Take that materiality into consideration. Discommunication is not simply a container for reproductions; the book itself functions as the work. Yubai explains that his images stand in deliberate opposition to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous “decisive moment,” the singular instant of clarity traditionally associated with photography. These photographs arrive instead through accumulation, degeneration, and prolonged processing. Moments are layered, repeated, inverted, and pushed toward abstraction until documentation gives way to something stranger: unstable images suspended between recognition and mirage. If Cartier-Bresson sought revelation through precision, Yubai embraces distortion and overload. These are anti-decisive moments — photographs that resist resolution.

And those are just some of the ideas, the perceptions, that infuse Yoshi Yubai’s art. The stark contrasts of his hypnotic images bounce between the familiar and the peculiar, the monotonous and violent, the wan and the strident. The viewer gets lost in compositions where processing has, literally, blurred the lines between object and atmosphere; this murkiness is the essence of discommunication. Architecture is mistaken for typography, concern for scale gives way to a fixation on the granular, and the nocturnal — that dominant environment of street photography — takes on the qualities of an x-ray.

Learn more about Yoshi Yubai’s book Discommunication at landslide.sydney. Follow his photography at instagram.com/yoshi_yubai and the publisher’s work at instagram.com/landslide_books.

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Pamela Z’s Jukebox

My latest piece for the The Wire

First spread of the pair that comprise my lengthy interview with longtime San Franciscan Pamela Z (for the magazine’s Invisible Jukebox series — issue 512, October 2026, the one with Mike Watt on the cover). We sat down at her studio loft in the Mission to discuss 10 different tracks, which she was to identify and discuss. We talked about voice, sampling, STEIM, folk music, MIDI controllers, festival curation, opera, the pandemic, transcribing, arrangements, neon, and much much more. In the mix: Laetitia Sonami, Joni Mitchell, George E. Lewis, Annea Lockwood, Claire Chase, Carl Stone, and Clipping (with Daveed Diggs), among others. I’ve read the Invisible Jukebox series forever, and it was super fun to actually conduct an entry.

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Public Scratch Pad

Bits from my online notebook

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ I still have this thing where because only one of my two desktop stereo speakers features a little “on” light, I routinely check to confirm the other speaker is actually making any sound, which of course it is.

▰ Funny issues with sound-related search returns: an interest in “voice privacy” ends up with situations where “voice” is a verb, as in “residents voice privacy concerns,” and “field recording” routinely brings up sports articles, in which there’s a comma (or intended comma) between the two words (e.g., “flyout to left field, recording back-to-back innings”). Being sports-illiterate, I’m still coming up to speed on that meaning of “recording.”

▰ The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival is gonna hit extra hard this year. RIP, Dolly Parton

▰ I kinda dig the temporary burn-in in e-ink ebook devices (mine currently: Boox Go 7, Xteink X4). It reminds me of the way text bleeds through in old paperbacks from the other side of the page you’re reading. Also, the scheduled reset of the e-ink screen gives me a sense of my reading progress (X number of pages before reset, for example).

▰ Wow, so just 35 weeks until the 800th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project

▰ I have probably destroyed my YouTube algorithm for the next month by watching a half-hour video deep dive into Yes bassist Chris Squire’s techniques, but it’s okay. The video is highly informative and entertaining, and totally worth it.

▰ It’s mid-2026, and metadata still can’t be dependably attached to wav files.

It’s mid-2026, and I’m still complaining about this. See you in 2027 for more of the same.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep converting to ALAC or FLAC, I suppose.

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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

Dear Fellow Listeners,

Welcome to the second issue of the new Throughline subset of my ongoing This Week in Sound email newsletter. Throughline issues (like the Listening Post issues they sprouted from) generally go only to paid subscribers, as a thank you for the support.

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technolog…

Read more

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, design, politics, science, ecology, interfaces, 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.

Some of this week’s topics:

▰ Sonic fertilizer
▰ Boom times for acousticians
▰ Quiet ride’s unforeseen consequences
▰ Dorm RAs on mediating noise

This Week in Sound also publishes, as a thank-you to paid subscribers, Throughline issues that consist of annotated recommended listening, each installment focused on a different topic. I’m always trying to think of better ways to reward paid subscribers, and have an additional one, directly tied sound studies, that I may introduce in the next month or so.

Your support of This Week in Sound is appreciated, as are sound-related observations, anecdotes, and links from your own life and work. There’s substantial long-form writing I’ve committed to, with more planned. If issues of This Week in Sound go missing, that is why.

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On the Line

Some favorite recent writing

▰ Carry On

The nightjar carries it lightly
But the world’s heavy as a lamp in a gale.
I watched it move through the olives and the hush,
Over rooftops, stones, and cragged hills,
Unclenched as it glistens in the gloam,
Indifferent, sonorous, and true.

That’s the opening stanza of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ poem “The Nightjar” from the August 20, 2026, issue of the New York Review of Books.

. . .

▰ Novel Feature

Every home has its own sound world.

That’s musician and sound artist Alice Boyd, who was invited by the estate agent and journal the Modern House to produce a soundscape of one of its locations, a place in South Oxfordshire.

. . .

▰ Idyll Chatter

The driver muttered something that sounded like a dog trying to speak, and without understanding, Paul said yes. Never had he understood the people here and their bizarre accent, and he sometimes had the sense that they spoke unintelligibly to him on purpose, which he in turn quite liked.

That’s from Air, the novel by Swiss writer Christian Kracht, recently translated by Daniel Bowles

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Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

59: Percent greater yield measured in a plant submitted to specific acoustic signals

340,000,000: Estimated number of people worldwide with “blindness or moderate-to-severe visual impairment,” and who would benefit from better audio tools, such as personalized audio guidance

40: Percent of organizations where employees have “encountered a deepfake combined with social engineering during an audio call”

Sources: plants (newscientist.com), blindness (nature.com), deepfake (biometricupdate.com)

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This Week in Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

▰ JURASSIC BARK: “Very little is known about the acoustic landscape of long-gone environments, such as the Jurassic forests. The sounds made by dinosaurs and other charismatic vertebrates are not definitively known because their vocal organs rarely preserve well in fossils. Unlike tetrapod vocal cords, the sound-producing organs present in the sclerotized cuticle of some arthropods do fossilize well. … One species called above 20 kHz, suggesting that ultrasonic communication in insects was established long before the emergence of bats in the Eocene. Evolving mammalian hearing thresholds suggest early predators imposed acoustic pressures before bats. This arms race with singing ensiferans likely drove Jurassic insect song diversity and the evolution of mammalian and insect auditory systems.”

▰ MEASURE TWICE: “We also advocate for an independent investigation into infrasound noise pollution for data centers near residences and schools.” That’s the Federation of American Scientists weighing in on the expanding data center construction controversy. An especially interesting detail: “Existing Colorado laws do not effectively regulate data center noise because of their low frequencies. Colorado’s maximum permissible noise levels are measured according to db(A). (In a possibly premature statement, the editors of The National Review determined “most of the concerns about noise or pollution are unfounded.”) Per the FAS: “This measure biases towards audible, higher frequencies, as shown by the curved red line in the figure below.”

▰ BAD DATA: “Unlikely Winners of the Data Center Boom: Sound Consultant. The sprawling facilities get a lot of attention for their water and energy usage, but it’s the threat of constant noise emission that has nearby residents up in arms. That’s where the acousticians come in.” The Bloomberg article’s title is odd, given that sound consultants are unlikely beneficiaries here the way dentists are unlikely to benefit from Halloween candy — but in any case, you know noise concerns are pressing when sound technicians are called in.

▰ WITHIN EARSHOT: “Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a double identity. He is an artist who, in 2019, jointly won the Turner prize; and one of his works is, for my money, among the most striking on show at this year’s Venice Biennale. But he is also the director of a young NGO, founded in 2023, called Earshot, which investigates human rights abuses using sound evidence. In less euphemistic language, that means, on occasion, investigating horrific killings.”

▰ FISH STORY: “A master’s thesis defended this spring found that offshore wind farm noise causes herring schools to disperse near the source, but the fish can swim away from noisy areas when necessary and their spring spawning was unaffected. Kirke Paris examined in a master’s thesis defended at the University of Tartu how low-frequency noise typical of offshore wind farms affects the behavior of Baltic herring. A field experiment showed that herring schools were less dense near the noise source. However, the preliminary result does not mean wind farms necessarily cause significant harm to fish.”

▰ EYE DUNNO: Details on a smartglasses competitor: “RayNeo focuses on capturing what the user and their counterpart are saying as precisely as possible. For this purpose, in addition to an array of four microphones, the glasses contain a VPU bone conduction sensor that captures the vibrations of the wearer’s vocal cords to ensure precise speech transcription even in noisy environments.”

▰ SONG LINES: Abstract for a fascinating research article: “The human capacity to construct and share subjective experiences from diverse sensory inputs is central to human cognition, and is vividly exemplified through music listening. Direct, focused music perception has been extensively studied while free, imaginative listening, typical of real-world engagement with music, has not. Here, we identify shared neural representations for imaginings evoked by matched excerpts of music and speech across listeners. Twenty participants freely imagine stories while listening to ten music excerpts in an fMRI scanner, then recount their imaginings. Stories for each excerpt are highly similar between listeners. Stimulus-specific spatial patterns are observed in auditory regions for music perception, speech perception, and music report. Triple pattern similarity across all conditions reveals unique spatial patterns in default mode, language, and association regions. These findings demonstrate that music elicits detectable, modality-general brain representations specific to particular excerpts, pointing to a shared neural basis for meaning-making across diverse sensory inputs.”

▰ GRACE NOTES: Cruise Control: “The Hollywood theme park built a ‘whisper quiet’ ride to avoid angering nearby neighbors. They didn’t fully account for the enthusiasm of the riders.” ▰ Negotiation Room: Dorm RAs recommend how to cope with noise. ▰ Backseat Driver: Tips when Siri doesn’t work in your car. ▰ Whale Tale: Research into how ocean noise affects whale songs. ▰ Qubit Much: The possible future of quantum computing music.

Credit Due: Thanks, Geoff Manaugh (Jurrasic)!

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Waiting Room Zombies

Hyper-realistic TV like The Pitt can still bend toward the fantastic

With the January 2027 return of the TV series The Pitt just announced, it’s a good time to revisit a keen and telling moment of sound design from the most recent season, its second, which came to a close back in mid-April.

First, just in case you’re recovering from a medically induced coma in the ICU and aren’t aware of The Pitt, it’s an acclaimed scripted drama running on HBO Max about doctors doing the best they can in an underfunded ER in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The show won the Best Drama Series award at the 2025 Emmys; this year it has more Emmy nominations, 25, than any other show. The Pitt stars Noah Wyle, who previously played a doctor on the long-running E.R.

Even with all its persistent matters of mortality, including medically accurate gore, the show is at its core a workplace drama, of the categorical sort that highlights how just about everyone involved, even if they don’t get along, does an exceptional job under extraordinary circumstances.

The intensity of those circumstances is heightened in The Pitt because of its naturalistic structure: in a format reminiscent of the old thriller 24, all the episodes in a given season take place sequentially from start to finish in the exact number of hours as those episodes. Which is to say, both of The Pitt’s two seasons so far — each of which consisted of 15 episodes — took place over the course of 15 consecutive hours. Aside from occasional state-of-mind flashbacks (often relating to PTSD), the episodes remain in the persistent present. Where one episode ends, the next begins. As viewers, we have the relative comfort, cliffhangers and deaths aside, of experiencing those hours one week at a time, while the characters experience them within one highly compressed day. 24 originally ran from 2001 to 2010, overlapping with E.R., which ran from 1994 to 2009.

Furthering the realism of The Pitt is the paucity of any sort of musical score. Instead, the sounds of the ER are highlighted, even heightened, throughout each episode. Much as with the beeping terminals and cellphones of Industry, another workplace drama on HBO Max (which produced The Pitt alongside BBC Two), here the EKG machines, defibrillators, and rattly wheelchairs collude in a quotidian suite that serves as the sonic backdrop for the episodic storytelling.

The limited non-diegetic — or out-of-scene — score in The Pitt is by Gavin Brivik, whose experience working in horror films serves him and the series well. A full album was released for season one, with a brief track for each of the episodes. The “3:00 P.M.” entry (each episode in the show is titled simply by its hour) so sounds like medical machines that it could easily be mistaken for merely that.

Which brings us to “6:00 P.M.,” written by Danny Hogan and show co-creator R. Scott Gemmill (who also worked on E.R.), and directed by Amanda Marsalis. (Other key crew: music editor Lorena Perez Batista, supervising sound editor Bryan Parker, and re-recording mixers Todd Grace and Ed. C. Carr III.) The ER in The Pitt this day is more tense than usual, due to a cyberattack that has rendered all the computers useless, and has the older staff informing the younger ones what the protocol is for landlines and what “that sound” is (it’s a fax machine).

Then the moment happens. “Chairs is looking like Mullaney’s on St. Paddy’s Day,” says beleaguered nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa). By “chairs” she means the waiting room, which is overrun with impatient would-be patients. “They’re gonna break through the doors like zombies,” she warns.

Evans speaks right after two other doctors, Wyle’s Dr. Robby and Isa Briones’ snarky Dr. Santos, converse about patient satisfaction scores. By the show’s standards, the sonic bed for that conversation is quiet. This is at a timecode of roughly 16:14 in the episode. There are footsteps, and you get a sense of the cavernous space in the echo of Robby and Santos’ chatting. The silence isn’t entirely comforting: it’s a reminder that the computers are down.

That’s when Evan speaks, looking up from two handfuls of the paper the staff has resorted to due to the hacked computers. As the nurse speaks, a roar, sublimated but threatening, rises quickly. It sounds almost like a sports stadium, that moment when cheering and jeering are indistinguishable. A vuvuzela wouldn’t be out of place. It’s worth locating this moment in the episode, backing up, and then paying attention as the scene within the scene unfolds.

Now, nothing specific has changed in the moment to account for this newly introduced sound, except that the sound design is electing to underscore — word selected purposefully — the threat described in Evans’ reporting. The camera has moved just a few feet in the direction of the doors between the ER and the waiting room, and in that time, that threat, veering from anecdotal and hypothetical to looming, has become visceral.

Intentionally or not, the “zombie” moment closes with an awareness of sound, when a newly arrived patient, covered in blood and wheeled in prone on a cart, complains he can’t hear, and then that he is experiencing a lot of ringing.

The Pitt routinely trains us as viewers to listen, and the characters listen with us. Earlier in the episode, Gerran Howell’s sweet Dr. Whitaker, taking a phone call outside, hears a rapidly approaching pick-up truck before he sees it. Dr. Robby walks through the main area of the ER and, despite all his years of experience and his stature as a hospital leader, is startled by something as simple as a phone ringing. Then again, he has reason for concern: except when it signifies a steady heartbeat, sound is rarely a source of good news on The Pitt.

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Public Scratch Pad

Bits from my online notebook

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Parent quietly to two young children at public library as they enter together: “What volume do we use here?”

Younger child, authoritatively: “Two.”

Parent: “Or even one.”

▰ When recently discussing video game sound design, a friend thought I said “Armoury” (as in the ASUS gaming software Armoury Crate) when I’d said “R. Murray” (as in acoustic ecologist and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer) and now I wanna start a dedicated game-sound channel called @armouryshaeffer

▰ Current Preoccupations: trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire + guitarist Eivind Aarset + no-vocals early CSN(&Y) tracks on YouTube + footfall sounds in video games + synthesizer player Amma Ateria + organist LJ Holoman + attending live jazz concerts

▰ Los Lobos will be playing the Hardly Strictly festival in San Francisco this October, first time I believe since 2018 (not counting a virtual performance in 2020). (I thought it was 2013, but someone informed me it was 2018, and they also played 2015.)

▰ Just a reminder that Listen to Wikipedia still exists, and is still fantastic, turning various public actions from the website into sound and, in turn, into an ongoing ever-changing piece of music. Listen at listen.hatnote.com.

▰ It occurs to me that the three words (pickleball, audiobook, soundwalk) central to the On the Line section of my August 19th This Week in Sound newsletter are all paired-noun yokings (contemporary neologisms) that would have, with the possible exception of audiobook, felt odd to me when I was young.

▰ Belated barbershop report, a day late: no music, as other barber had left for the day

▰ Afternoon trio for distant car alarm, bathroom fan, and refrigerator drone

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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

Dear Fellow Listeners,

The old Listening Post feature of This Week in Sound has been renamed Throughline to better represent the underlying concept. The concept is an annotated three-item music playlist/mixtape, each entry centered on a different theme, that theme being the “through line” between the varied tracks.

What constitutes a through line? It might be instrumentation (as in this issue), or technique, or cultural heritage, or record label, or scene, or medium, or mode of consumption, or collaborative connection, or generational influence, or something else entirely. The tracks may be new or old, live or studio, original or reworked, official or unofficial. Usually there will be at least one recent (or otherwise timely) track in order to keep the loose associations tethered to our current moment. This week they’re all new.

If the This Week in Sound newsletter is about the role of sound in culture and everyday life, then the Throughline issues, by highlighting the shared context of various tracks, surface such concepts through clusters of mutual association. (Similarly, by connecting the dots within a given issue’s selections, I’m aiming to connect the dots between Throughline and the sound studies material that constitutes This Week in Sound.)

The plan is for these Throughlines issues to go to paid This Week in Sound subscribers as a thank-you, but as I haven’t sent out one of these recommended listening sets in a while, this issue goes out to the full subscriber list. There are currently well over 5,000 This Week in Sound subscribers, which is awesome. I can’t promise the Throughlines annotations will always be as lengthy, meaty, and link-filled as this week’s, but the themes and sets will always reflect consideration.

The first of these new Throughline entries is titled “Valve Proposition” — yeah, a brass-themed play on the idea of “value proposition,” which was on my mind as I’ve been adjusting my overall approach to my newsletter in this age of newsletter overload (and, not unrelated: machine-induced slop). This issue situates side-by-side the work of three very different exploratory trumpet players. Below are videos of two live performances, plus one album track. Thanks for listening and reading. As always, your feedback, recommendations, and support are appreciated.

▰ 1: FOUR-TIFIED: Max Kraft Takes a Chair

If you read my long-running blog, Disquiet.com, then you may have seen a mention of this video earlier this week, when I listed it in the On Repeat section, where most Sundays I mention some music I’m especially fond of at the moment, and that I don’t want to risk waiting to write about. This footage is of a quartet featuring the extraordinary Norwegian electric guitarist Eivind Aarset. Like a lot of his listeners, I first encountered Aarset’s heavily processed playing as a result of his partnership in the band led by trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær. If I understand correctly, the quartet here — Aarset, Jan Bang (live sampling, electronics), Ingar Zach (percussion), and Max Kraft (trumpet) — is essentially the After the Wildfire Quartet, with Kraft in the place of the great Arve Henriksen. This is fantastic music, with subtle rhythms and sublime, restrained playing by both Aarset and Kraft. This video is the first I’ve heard Kraft, and it’s rewarding to listen to this back to back with some of After the Wildfire’s work. After the Wildfire is its own complicated and rich subject, having arisen from a collaboration between Bang and Henriksen (along with Dzijan Emin, who conducted the Fames Institute Orchestra from North Macedonia). Given that this edition of Throughlines is the first in the new series, I couldn’t have hoped for a better example of a through line than this video (recorded at the Gărâna JazzFest in Romania back in July), since this is a new(ish?) quartet born from a preceding sequence of projects. And who knows where it will go, and when those various phases may circle back around.

▰ 2: BUILDING BRIDGES: Ambrose Akinmusire at an Exhibition

There’s a great concept in art, and in literature, among other fields, of works being “in conversation” with each other. Hang two paintings on a gallery wall, and let them converse in the mind of whoever happens upon them. Read two books at the same time, and notice as ideas, characters, settings, and literary devices find connection. A more immediate and direct take on that idea, Bridges is the name a program from Jazz at Lincoln Center that puts musicians in conversation with parts of the collection at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. (The concept itself is not unusual. Gagosian Gallery, for example, had a great video series of musicians responding to art in situ, among them Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s Body/Head, John Zorn and Bill Laswell, and Jason Moran. Modest Mussorgsky was, of course, ahead of the pack.) As of this writing, there have been four Bridges videos. This one features the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire playing solo amid the fragile, colorful silk panels of artist Marie Bannerot McInerney’s “Trace Me Back.” It’s a unique pleasure to hear him on his own, taking his time, working at the sort of pace that going temporarily solo makes possible, a pace that correlates with the McInerney piece’s hovering quality. He’s also been experimenting with electronics of late, as on his recent collaborative album with guitarist Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings. Here the echoing space and the slow pace do a facsimile of processing. There will be six entries in Bridges. They’re hosted on the jazz institution’s YouTube channel. Akinmusire’s was the third. The fourth featured Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara (artist: Edward Steichen). The first two were Elena Pinderhughes (artist: Lenore Tawney) and Joel Ross (artist: Julie Mehretu).

▰ 3: QUARK STAR: Sarah Belle Reid Goes App

Sarah Belle Reid is a prolific musician and gregarious educator who often uses her synthesizers to process her horns and her voice. “Ritual” is a haunting, electrified piece for trumpet and processing from her recent album, Manifold, which is, as with the quartet with Kraft up above, mid-step between one phase of her work to another. What began as a touring opportunity for live processed horns became a location-specific quadraphonic experience, and will soon become an app (name: Quark) to provide immersive listening to the vast majority of us who don’t, you know, have quad setups at home — a weathered copy of the old Who album doesn’t count. (Learn more at the Manifold release’s album page on Bandcamp.) Of the three trumpeters heard in this issue of Throughline, Reid does the most to loosen traditional modes of playing. Sounds gets warped and splattered and twisted, and yet the horn is always there.

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, design, politics, science, ecology, interfaces, 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.

Some of this week’s topics:

▰ Pickleball hazards
▰ Novel audiobooks
▰ Sonic rainbows
▰ NSFW ASMR

This Week in Sound also occasionally includes, as a thank-you to paid subscribers, Listening Post issues consisting of annotated recommendations of ambient (and adjacent) music. I’m always trying to think of better ways to reward paying subscribers.

Your support of This Week in Sound is appreciated, as are sound-related observations, anecdotes, and links from your own life and work. There’s substantial long-form writing I’ve committed to, with more planned. If issues of This Week in Sound go missing (as has been the case recently), that is why.

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On the Line

Some favorite recent writing

▰ In a Pickle

I can hear what’s happening behind that fence long before I see it: the pops, plinks, thwacks and smacks of pickleball matches. Players say the sound is joyous. Neighbors say it’s dreadful.

That’s Bishop Sand in the Washington Post writing about why pickleball noise is so annoying.

. . .

▰ Novel Feature

We recorded underwater sounds, winds, volcanic eruptions, rainstorms, church bells, fish markets, and other sounds in Sicily and the Aeolians. The idea is that those sounds accompany and thread through the narrative like a kind of chorus made not from human voices but from the elements. My hope with the sonic book is simply that reader-listeners can fully immerse and feel anchored in time and space through sound.

That’s Valeria Luiselli interviewed by Scott Heller in the New York Times about the work that went into the audiobook version of her novel Beginning Middle End.

. . .

▰ Walk-a-Thon

Sound carries faster through water than through air, and soon we heard a plink-plink-plinking. It was followed by what sounded like bacon sizzling in a frying pan, which turned out to be a bubbly photosynthesizing elixir of microbes, decaying muck and insect larvae. Then there was a clicking — possibly aquatic snails, Smolicki said — and the quiet pops of fish mouths opening and closing, a miraculous sound that this lapsed fly fisherman thought she would never hear. Somewhere in the humid thickets a bullfrog croaked.

That is Patricia Leigh Brown in the New York Times, tagging along on a soundwalk with artist Jacek Smolicki.

Credit Due: Thanks, Mike Rhode (pickleball).

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Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

70,000: Estimated number of pickleball courts in the U.S.

22,000: Cost, in $U.S., of acoustic barrier mats placed at one Braintree, Massachusetts, pickleball court to reduce noise

3: The number of sound machines that comedian John Mulaney jokes he has installed by his infant’s crib.

Sources: The Washington Post (washingtonpost.com), crib (nytimes.com). Credit Due: Thanks, Mike Rhode (pickleball).

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This Week in Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

▰ COLOR CODED: “To create a rainbow from any source of light, you must sort that light by frequency. For instance, a patch of red light consists of light waves oscillating at one frequency, and waves that make the orange patch next to it oscillate at another. Similar sorting ought to be possible for other types of waves, including sound or vibrations within materials, but researchers have struggled to make such ‘elastic rainbows’ other than across tiny areas in the corners or edges of materials.”

▰ DARK MIRROR: “AI has made [Chinese voice actor] Shen Anyu’s voice cheap to copy and nearly impossible to control, drawing him and his wife into a widening fight over income, identity and ownership.”

▰ RUB-A-DUB: “The most wow-inducing feature arriving with Pixel 11 phones is an automatic dubber for videos and podcasts. While a user is watching a YouTube video or listening to a podcast, a window will appear offering to dub the audio into the user’s chosen language. The A.I. will even try to imitate the speaker’s voice.”

▰ ICED OUT: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement has prohibited its employees from wearing Meta’s smart glasses, the latest workplace to ban the devices out of privacy concerns. In a memo about the policy on Tuesday, ICE said it considered the glasses, which can discreetly record video and audio, as a body-worn camera.”

▰ NSFW ASMR: “YouTube banned a wave of ASMR artists this week for violating the platforms’ rules against ‘sexually gratifying’ content, leaving creators confused and angry.”

▰ CRUISE CONTROL: “When the New York Police Department started using the Rumbler in 2009, one opponent called it an ‘acoustic assault’ on citizens. But L.A. Police Cmdr. Blake Chow says the new low-frequency siren is the solution to a dangerous problem. It’s a story that he says plays out for officers far too often. They’re on their way to an emergency with the siren blaring, but a driver fails to clear the path for the police cruiser.”

▰ GRACE NOTES: (1) Red Zone: Bad soundproofing can be a fire hazard. ▰ (2) Mail Voice: You can talk to your email inbox instead of searching. ▰ (3) Perfect Drug: To celebrate the video game Quake’s 30th anniversary, Nine Inch Nails released, among other things, a keychain with “button-activated Quake ‘jump’ sound.” ▰ (4) Ear Worn: News on tinnitus treatments.

▰ Credit Due: Thanks, Nicola Twilley (rainbows).

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Record Your Voice — Just 35¢

A reflection on technology, novelty, and continuity

I caught an old movie a while back at a theater that’s walking distance from home. Released in 1958, The Lineup is a film noir that has aged well despite such period idiosyncrasies as the men uniformly wearing hats, and the police relying on those old red locked phone boxes (which do still stand, long dilapidated, on some street corners) to communicate with headquarters. There will be more about voice-related technology further below. First, however, let’s set the scene — the crime scene, that is.

Today’s audiences are primed for certain aspects of The Lineup. If nothing else, we’re used to the idea of a spinoff of a spinoff that, along with the initial source material, collectively move freely across multiple media formats. The Lineup is a feature film that was based on a TV show that was based on a radio serial. From start to finish, this franchise — regardless of whether that word was in such use at the time — ran for a decade, from 1950 through 1960.

Even given San Francisco’s strong association with film noir, this viewing made for an especially local experience. The Lineup is set in San Francisco, and the film seems at times seems like a team-up between the Chamber of Commerce and the SFPD. It glides comfortably, and realistically, around the city, with an emphasis along the coastline.

The local movie theater, named the Balboa, knew what it was doing when it put The Lineup on its schedule. I live in the city’s Richmond District, which is featured heavily in the film. Much of the movie’s climax — or the first of two successive climaxes, really — takes place within a mile of the theater. I walk by numerous of the locations several times a week. The X on this map below is where the movie theater is. Keep note of where it reads “Sutro Baths,” to the left and up a bit.

The Lineup is a tidy noir, and a welcomingly off-kilter one, given that it kind of forgets about the police protagonists after a while and decides to mostly closely follow the charismatic criminals on their violent errands. It was directed by Don Siegel, who specialized in San Francisco movies. He would go on to make Dirty Harry (1971) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979). The Lineup came two years after another of his numerous classics, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The climax in question occurs at the Cliff House and the Sutro Baths, situated high above the Pacific Ocean, right at Ocean Beach. For locals, The Lineup is a unique opportunity to see Sutro Baths, because the structure was destroyed in the mid-1960s and never rebuilt. Today its remains look more like Greco-Roman ruins than like something that outlived JFK. What in the movie is a massive entertainment complex built around an ice skating rink is now mostly open land filled with native plants and graffitied concrete. The Cliff House remains, as does another, smaller restaurant up the hill, though both are currently closed. (The Cliff House is being renovated and is due to reopen.)

Living as I do in this neighborhood, I paid particular attention when the story arrived at the Sutro Baths. I’ve seen photos of the place in the past, but being able to tag along as the camera explored it fully felt like a privilege, all the more so on the Balboa’s large screen. The experience was heightened further because I hadn’t known what I was getting into. The movie starts at the Ferry Building, across town, and spends time in the Opera House, and the old aquarium in Golden Gate Park (also near where I live), among other places. Even aware The Lineup was set in the city I’ve called home since the mid-1990s (I was raised in New York, on Long Island), I had no idea it would hit so close to home.

Which brings us around to the matter of technology, in particular voice technology. Paying close attention to the film, as I was doing, so excited to be “in” Sutro Baths, I noticed that when the hitman named Dancer — played by Eli Wallach (The Magnificent Seven; The Misfits; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) — first walks in, he passes by a collection of coin-operated machines, including an ice hockey game and a photo booth. I was especially enthused to see these arcade objects, because this corner of the city is also the former home to one of the best collections of retro-futuristic San Francisco, the Musée Méchanique (long ago relocated across town), which I have visited numerous times. (I also have a great vinyl album of sounds from the museum, Player Pianos and Other Sounds from a Penny Arcade.)

Among those coin-op machines was one that I didn’t have the opportunity to linger on. I felt my muscle memory in action as I reached for an imaginary remote control — but of course I was, rare for me, inside a movie theater, bereft not only of captions but, of course, of the ability to hit pause. I did notice something to look back at later, which is this (see below): a machine that allows you to record your voice, at the low cost of 35 cents, which I believe is roughly four bucks today.

You see, I’m a frequent recorder of my own voice, and I’m particularly interested in the growing role of that voices playing in user interfaces. I’ve long felt that voice was under-appreciated in this regard, and now that voice is gaining, there are a lot of changes to keep track of — between phones, and cars, and wearables, and AI/LLM assistants, and so forth.

The primary use of voice technology is among its simplest: voice-to-text transcription. Great transcription algorithms, for example, can run on your phone or laptop, with no need to tap into the resources of data centers, and your privacy easily controlled.

I make particular use of voice-to-text when I go for long walks. And my standard long walk takes me up along the steep stretch of Point Lobos Avenue, right where the Sutro Baths were located, and where the Cliff House still stands. And while I try, for the purpose of exercise, not to stop, occasionally I do, and sometimes recording a thought is what leads me to stop — or gives me an excuse to stop.

And so in that moment when Wallach’s character walks right by the 35-cent machine, I realized that I frequently stand very close to where it would have cost me 35 cents to do something eerily similar nearly three quarters of a century ago. Nowadays, I use various tools for voice recording. When I’m out and about, it’s either the Voice Memos app or voice-to-text within a piece of software, like Apple Notes or Obsidian, or it is this one app I like in particular, Whisper Notes.

And so it occurred to me that while I’m standing there, I am routinely enacting something that would have felt incredibly futuristic at the time, and yet is tethered by a certain continuity that mashes up technology, novelty, and utility. The frisson really hit me in the theater, and so when I got home I tracked down the movie online (the whole thing is on YouTube).

In turn, I thought about what other technologies were novelties and have evolved to become everyday experiences, and how quickly today a nifty little oddity becomes part of everyday life, or evaporates from the collective memory. I tried to situate myself in the time of The Lineup, when rock and roll was, if not in its infancy, still a toddler — before the idea of a televised presidency, or of an administration brought down by secret tape recordings. When The Lineup came out, the consumer-grade transistor radio was still a fairly new thing, just a few years old.

In addition, the concept of voice recording, in the broader sense, has a bit more of a narrative tug in the movie because of a running minor thread. The character Julian, played by Robert Keith (The Wild One, Twilight Zone’s “The Masks”), is an oily creep of a killer, and something of a mentor to Wallach’s Dancer. Julian has a very special habit: he maintains a pocketable notebook in which he writes down the last words of people he witnesses die.

And so it is somewhat tragic, in the sense of poetic justice, that when Julian himself is killed toward the end of the movie, he dies too soon to speak. Dancer taunts him as he lies there: “Say something for the book.” Julian expires, speechless.

All of this — being in the theater watching an old movie that was shot in the same neighborhood featured therein — came even more into focus, given how much of the today’s future, for better and worse, is born in the broader San Francisco Bay Area. That coin-op recording machine at Sutro Baths connected, in an instant, to the role sound plays as a mediating force and a tool of navigation, as a subject of conflicted pressures: social, political, economic, and so forth.

It’s also worth noting that no one in that scene in The Lineup actually stops to use the voice recording machine. A small army of little girls from a Catholic school go crazy at the line of telescopes, but the 35-cent machine is left alone. It was even more ahead of its time — and more under-appreciated — than anyone knew.

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Public Scratch Pad

Bits from my online notebook

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Not only are there, per capita, a seemingly inordinate number of jazz clubs in San Francisco, but one of them serves Chinese food and another serves Ethiopian, two* of my favorites. Plan is to hit both those this week — both for quartets led by bassists.

*Mr. Tipple’s and Sheba, respectively

▰ One of my favorite things on the internet lately has been the Tumblr of Australian musician JG Thirlwell (aka Foetus), who lives in NYC, and maintains a highly active feed of snippets of the numerous concerts (among other cultural events) he attends. (Also fond of the fact that Tumblr lets you subscribe to feeds via RSS.)

▰ Yes, the mushroom dolsot for lunch was excellent, and at some point the sound of the sizzling dipped below hearing level.

▰ The door to the kitchen occasionally rattles for no apparent reason, and sometimes it rattles because of an earthquake, and when it rattled just now for six or so seconds straight, it was pretty clearly the latter. (8:30am Thursday, August 13, 2026)

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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

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, design, politics, science, ecology, interfaces, 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.

Some of this week’s topics:

▰ Early bird-son…

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This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, design, politics, science, ecology, interfaces, 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.

Some of this week’s topics:

▰ Snoring in the…

Read more

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, design, politics, science, ecology, interfaces, 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.

Some of this week’s topics:

▰ a sound-art co…

Read more

These “Listening Post” issues of This Week in Sound are intended as thank yous to paid subscribers — a bonus round, supplementing free issues that feature a broader array of sound studies coverage. Each installment of the Listening Post is a mixtape of recommended ambient and adjacent audio. Please enjoy.

Today we’ve got 3 contempla…

Read more

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, design, politics, science, ecology, interfaces, 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.

Some of this week’s topics:

▰ a silent theft…

Read more

This issue of This Week in Sound is a thank you to paid subscribers — a bonus round, supplementing the free issues that feature a broader array of sound studies coverage. Each installment of the Listening Post is a mixtape of highly recommended ambient and adjacent audio. Please enjoy.

Today we’ve got three works — one of them twic…

Read more

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, design, politics, science, ecology, interfaces, 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.

Some of this week’s topics:

▰ Harry Caul’s t…

Read more

This issue of This Week in Sound is a thank you to paid subscribers — a bonus round, supplementing the free issues that feature a broader array of sound studies coverage. It’s a mixtape of highly recommended ambient and adjacent audio. Please enjoy. (There’s substantial long-form writing I’ve committed to, with more planned. If…

Read more

This issue of This Week in Sound is usually a thank you solely to paid subscribers — a bonus round, supplementing the free issues that feature a broader array of sound studies coverage. Since I missed Tuesday’s issue — due to some escapism in the form of a lot of book-writing — I’m sending this out to the full subscriber list (…

Read more

This issue of This Week in Sound is a thank you to paid subscribers — a bonus round, supplementing the free issues that feature a broader array of sound studies coverage. It’s a mixtape of highly recommended ambient and adjacent audio. Enjoy.

Today we’ve got: a preview, a trip, and a list.

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1. A PREVIEW

LET…

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Some of this week’s topics:

▰ the evolving meaning of “soundscape”
▰ shame has a new ringtone
▰ sound design in Call of Duty
▰ films get birdsong wrong

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 migh…

Read more

This issue of This Week in Sound is a thank you to paid subscribers — a bonus round, supplementing the free issues that feature a broader array of sound studies coverage. It’s a mixtape of highly recommended ambient and adjacent music. Enjoy.

Today we’ve got: a preview, an album, and an anniversary.

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰
1. AN…

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Some of this week’s topics:

▰ hearing frontiers & threats
▰ killing comic book sound effects
▰ the promise of phonosynthesis
▰ smart-device eavesdropping update

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 e…

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Some of this week’s topics:

▰ digital communication in sci-fi Sunny
▰ total larynx transplant
▰ Susie Ibarra on nature’s rhythms
▰ noise pollution from crypto mining

This Week in Sound is a newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, business, storytelling, warfare, art, society, and anywher…

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