TWiS: Digital Voices & Intimacy in 'Sunny'
And other voice-related news, like chatbot issues and larynx transplants
Dear Fellow Listeners,
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 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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Experimenting with Format
As you can tell from the piece on the TV series Sunny in this week’s issue, I’m experimenting with format. I want the newsletter to feel less like I’m offloading homework onto the reader. Much as I like being fairly upstream with news, much as I like observing topics coalesce over weeks and years, data points not necessarily evident as a through-line except in retrospect, I think there’s value in my clustering these sound studies findings. Thus in this issue I have, among other things, a “lead” story about digital voices in Sunny, followed by a variety of other current stories that engage with voice, technology, assistants, and culture but that have no direct ties to Sunny. It’s an experiment.
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On the Line
Some favorite recent phrases
▰ RIVER SONG:
“London is out there, not muted, but blurred into a saltmarsh soundscape. The sense of being surrounded calls to my drowsy mind a line in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are: ‘That night ... the walls became the world all around.’”
The Country Diary in the Guardian is “the oldest newspaper column in the world. This is Amy-Jane Beer writing not from Crook, County Durham, or North Hertfordshire, but from River Roding in London.
. . .
▰ FULL CYCLE:
“‘I ride an 1800cc BMW,’ Sahara said. ‘Of all the BMWs, this one has the highest displacement and the engine makes the nicest, boldest sound.’
Kaho didn’t say anything. I couldn’t care less what you ride — a BMW motorcycle, a tricycle, or an oxcart — she silently muttered to herself.”
The “silently” carries a nice amount of weight in this moment from “Kaho,” a Haruki Murakami story in the July 1, 2024, issue of The New Yorker.
. . .
▰ SOMETHING BORROWED:
"Music scaled a height
Past fire escapes, so that I heard
A tune that scored itself
Across the paper sky: a bird
Perched on the tree's top shelf"
That is from “Blackbird at Dawn,” a poem by A.E. Stallings in the July 18, 2024, issue of the London Review of Books.
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The Intimate Sound Technology of Sunny
Audio interfaces get their own voice in the new Rashida Jones TV series
Note: In the version of this article I emailed out, I had the name of the robot, Sunny, and the name of the bartender, Mixxy, mixed up. That’s what I get for fact-checking-while Covid. Thanks, Ernie Dulanowsky, for the alert!
The new TV series Sunny, from Apple, stars Rashida Jones as an apparent widow in Japan, her husband and son having disappeared during a plane crash. I say “apparent” because as of this writing we’re two episodes in and very little is certain. Jones’ grieving character, Suzie, is left alone in the family’s Kyoto home until a robot, named Sunny, is delivered by a colleague of Suzie’s husband. The robot is quite advanced, nudging the story from our own Roomba-and-Alexa present to something slightly further into the technological future — along the lines of WALL-E meets Severance.
There is an array of unfamiliar gadgetry in Sunny, from ambiguous handhelds to textile-like product design, and sound is a factor in many of the interfaces. Yes, there’s no small irony to this being an Apple production, all the more so given how fraught some of this technology’s presence is, at least as far as Suzie is concerned. (The series is based on the novel The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan.)
In the first episode of Sunny, the emphasis is on a secondary device, an earbud translator, which lets Suzie, who doesn’t speak much Japanese, participate more freely in society than she might otherwise. The show, which grapples with various forms of new technology, has moments when unintended consequences surface, such as when someone accidentally overhears Suzie and then admonishes her for speaking within earshot while they still have their earbuds in. This happens, as well, with Suzie’s mother-in-law, a fierce yet sympathetic Judy Ongg, and the moment marks Ongg's character as more stranger than relative.
In the second episode, we witness the meet-cute moment between Suzie and her husband, Masa, who may or may not be an inventor of the robot Sunny and its ilk. At one point Masa, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima (who was fantastic in the movie Drive My Car, by Ryusuke Hamaguchi — who has his own intense relationship with sound in filmed narrative), struggles with the correct English words for something he wants to express, and Suzie reaches for her earbuds to make it easier for him to communicate.
They’re both damaged people. Masa has emerged from his own dark period, whereas Suzie seems to be just now entering her own. Masa stops Suzie from using the earbud, and it’s a touching moment. We see that Masa would rather risk being seen as ineloquent than have their fledgling relationship get mediated by technology. (Maybe he knows something she doesn’t.) I don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say it’s a double effort on his part, in this scene, to be seen as struggling — and that his concern about technology rubs up against what we at least seem to know about him in the story’s present tense. Again, this scene is their origin story, set a decade earlier.
And then there is, also in the second episode, Suzie’s other main relationship so far — not the one with her nuclear family or her somewhat distant mother-in-law, but the newly arrived robot, Sunny. With Suzie’s husband and son out of the picture, so to speak, most of Suzie’s relationships are with women (there’s also the bartender Mixxy in the first episode), of which Sunny appears to be adjacent, as is de rigueur, problematic as such e-gender modes may be, for domestic virtual servants (not least among them, Apple’s own Siri). At the end of the second episode, Suzie and Sunny end up next to each other in bed — it’s not sexual — and the following brief conversation occurs:
Suzie: “Are you breathing?”
Sunny: “Just a sound effect. I thought you’d like it. I can stop.”
Suzie: “No. I like it.”
Now, Sunny was introduced to us, and to Suzie, as primed for Suzie as her user. There are lingering questions as to whether Masa himself was part if not of Sunny’s overall development and design, then at least of its optimization and personalization for Suzie. In this moment, though, it is not a third party, but Sunny itself/herself who is doing the interpersonal-alignment fine-tuning: adjusting tone to match the needs of not just her interlocutor but, for all intents and purposes, her owner. (The character is voiced by Joanna Sotomura.) It says something about their interaction that Sunny can employ a term as purely functional as “sound effect” without negating the realism of its/her own seeming humanity.
. . .
VOICE ACTIVATED
On the topic of voice, technology, and culture — more items:
▰ AI Tolerance: There’s an actual robot bartender — combining, as it were, two of Sunny’s characters — by a company called Cecilia.ai
▰ Chat Trick: The in-the-works higher-end Alexa, called Remarkable Alexa, may be in jeopardy if it can’t deliver results.
▰ On Background: Google’s Gemini assistant/service/chatbot may have an always-on mode, stoking privacy concerns, based on a peek at the underlying code that revealed “a string that mentions a ‘background_mode.’”
▰ Speaker Box: The Mayo Clinic reports the “first known successful total larynx transplant.”
▰ Logic Branch: Mat Eric Hart wonders “What Sounds Do Trees Make?” — opening with a quote from Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory: “they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.”
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Jedi Field Recording Expedition
From the seventh episode of The Acolyte
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On Susie Ibarra on Nature’s Rhythms
This is a review I wrote for the July 2024 (Issue 485) of The Wire. It appears here with some very light edits:
Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm
Susie Ibarra
Habitat Sounds Pbk 158 pp
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 recognize the water is, in fact, the music.
There are ecological and musicological facets to Ibarra’s efforts in deploying, as a composer, the sounds of everyday reality. On the one hand, she focuses on the matter of our rapidly changing planet, and to that end has collaborated with Dr. Michele Koppes of the University of British Columbia, most recently for an ongoing project called Listening to Climate Change. On the other hand, as a musician, Ibarra is deeply engaged with how the cycles of the natural world as well as the sounds inform art and the human experience.
In her new book Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm, Ibarra channels her hard-won insights into a sequence of examples that might appeal to numerous readers — listeners, environmentalists and fellow musicians.
The book is as much a supplement to as it is an overview of Ibarra’s work as an educator and composer. It is broken into six main sections, one each on glaciers, oceans, trees, birdsong, deserts, and natural echoes (combining canyons and — stretching the definition of nature — human-made metal cisterns). Throughout, Ibarra exudes a holistic, imperturbable sense of humankind’s place in the larger natural order. An investigation of glaciers leads to the realisation that the rhythms of water are equivalent to that of popular music around the globe: “We are continually playing, listening, and seeing water rhythms while out in the field.”
The book isn’t merely a study of the sound of the world. It’s a study of the structure of sound. An exploration of glass informs her understanding how liminal states — “moving from one moment to another” — are essential to her art. Work with trees yields an appreciation for fractal mathematics. “The anatomy in the tree,” she writes, “reveals the sonic rhythms.” In addition to her descriptions, there are numerous photos (so many, in fact, that you might think they’re included to expand the page count to book length) and fascinating bits of scores (for those who read music).
The book’s main downside is it bears the imperfections of self-publishing, with more than its share of typos, as well as descriptive text that could benefit from an editor. Nonetheless, the reader reaches the conclusion to which Ibarra has served as a naturalist guide: pondering our place in the world. As she puts it at the end, she doesn’t know “if I am the rhythm or maybe I am the landscape.” It’s a small world, after all.
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TWiS SOUND BITES
A lightly annotated clipping service
Hum Dinger: An Indian village is shaken by unidentified sounds: “Amit Jirange, a geologist with the Sangli GSDA, told TOI: “We found no sign of any seismic or sub-surface activity that eventually leads to tremors. The possible explanation we thought of was the release of the air trapped inside dried-up borewells.” ▰ Public Speaker: Are people ditching headphones more and listening to devices out in the open? ▰ Sound of Money: Noise from crypto mining apparently out of (regulatory) control in Texas. ▰ Sonic Weaponry: Updates on the Havana Syndrome investigation. ▰ For Eyes: A Chinese robot aids the blind with reportedly 90% accuracy. ▰ Pedal to the Metal: The 99% Invisible podcast covers John Cage’s extremely long organ composition. ▰ Bird Brain: The June 7, 2024, Rhymes with Orange comic strip by Hilary B. Price had my number. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
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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.
▰ It’s that time of year when one finds oneself explaining, “Being interested in fireworks isn’t the same as enjoying them.”
▰ There’s even more silence in season 3 of The Bear than in previous seasons. It’s become a moody soap opera, concerned with the characters’ lives rather than with any plot beyond basic goals (a star) and hurdles (money). A highlight is in episode 5, when Marcus turns on his recently deceased mother’s medical devices for the comfort of the beeping.
▰ Browser tabs are the pile of dirt left over when you go down a rabbit hole
▰ Listening to noise drone music while writing makes my life feel way more dramatic than it is
▰ Title of a panel discussion for music educators in 1970
▰ The foghorns this morning certainly seem to be glad to have yesterday’s fireworks behind them — which I now realize is also a joke, ’cause the fireworks were literally behind the fog yesterday, as is pretty much always the case here on the 4th of July
▰ My daily life is evidence that this sound cue can be factually accurate yet say nothing meaningful about what is actually occurring
▰ My MacBook Pro and my iPhone are up to date software-wise, and yet regularly my Notes and Voice Memos won’t sync between them. What is up with that?
▰ How many minutes before a late meeting finally starts before Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” starts playing in your head?
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And a Little Music
▰ Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community that I moderate, a new compositional challenge is emailed to the 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 was week 0653. Check out the project that came to a close Monday, July 8, 2024: Stop doing something you always do. Listen to the results in the project’s SoundCloud playlist. Learn more about the project and the Disquiet Junto at disquiet.com/0653.
▰ An anatomy of a synth flourish
▰ The creative re-use of an old theme in the recent Beverly Hills Cop movie
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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
Hi Marc,
I think the robot in Sunny is actually named Sunny. Mixxy is the bartender at the bar that Suzie and Masa frequented.