Dear Fellow Listeners,
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
"It’s mid-2026, and I’m still complaining about this." = YES