Musical Trainspotting

Plus early bird-song transcription, a game controller that screams, sound on Mars

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:

▰ Early bird-song transcription
▰ A screaming game controller
▰ Data center infrasound
▰ Sound on Mars

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 of late), that is why.

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On the Line

Some favorite recent(ish) writing

▰ For You and Me

In being silent, voiceless, the land itself is often left out of politics and economics.

That is from Soren Callo’s “A Quiet That Cannot Defend Itself” at the website of the Sierra Club.

. . .

▰ Top Score

I thought about the stockings that Willy buys for the other woman, and I thought, If those stockings had a sound, what would it be? Or when Willy talks about his admiration for an older salesman who settles down in the evening with his green velvet slippers: If those green velvet slippers had a theme of their own, what would that be?

That is composer Caroline Shaw speaking in New York magazine with Justin Davidson about her score for the revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

. . .

▰ Chasing Waterfalls

Trump’s phone could be heard ringing during a recent press conference in which he discussed a proposed 50 percent tariff on Apple. The familiar sound of the default “Reflection” ringtone—you know the one, the synthesized waterfall of xylophone tones—was a reminder that the tariffs targeted the company that makes his beloved device.

That is Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer (with additional reporting from Jonathan Lemire) in The Atlantic on the sitting president’s phone, security concerns, and the history of White House inhabitants’ affection for making and taking calls.

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Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

60: Percent of UK adults estimated to be adversely affected by their sonic environments.

60: “The 60-60 rule asserts that you shouldn’t listen to music at a volume louder than 60% of maximum for more than 60 minutes at a time.”

70: The percent slower that sound moves on Mars than on Earth.

Sources: UK (pipedown.org), 60-60 (zdnet.com), Mars (nature.com)

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This Week in Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

▰ Keeping Tine: “In order to document bird songs, Mathews hiked through the thickets of the heavily forested White Mountains with a tuning fork and a notebook. Some contemporaries toted a stopwatch, too. He would have had to listen for birds calling repeatedly and long enough to decipher them. He might have tapped the tuning fork with a mallet to determine the key of the bird’s song. Then it was penciling each note onto the staff. Ironically, he called his notations ‘recordings’—not recordings in the analog or digital form, but a handwritten record of each song.” (From the always excellent newsletter This Week in Birding, by Bob Dolgan.)

▰ Round the Bend: The sound of a Siemens automotive called the Taurus makes when getting going is something to behold: “The power converters have to adapt the current from the overhead line to convert it to the three-phase motors of the locomotive, and that generates a rising tone. The engineers decided to change the logic to increment the tone in precise few steps resembling a musical scale, rather than allowing it to rise continuously.” (From Marchin Wichary’s Unsung.)

▰ Volume Control: “Now we can add a new gripe [about data centers] to the list: in addition to just being noisy, a sustainability nonprofit called the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) is claiming that data centers are emitting ultra-low frequencies [or “infrasound”] — think the powerful sub-bass at an EDM festival — that, while not picked up by a conventional decibel meter, cause an unsettling rumble for nearby residents.” (From Krystle Vermes at futurism.com.)

▰ Button Mash: The new video game controller from Steam has some tricks up its plastic and metal sleeve: “[A user] recently discovered that one of those easter eggs is how the controller literally screams when you drop it. More specifically, it will recreate the Wilhelm scream, which originated in a 1950s Western and is now considered the ‘most famous scream of all time.’”

▰ GRACE NOTES: (1) Lip Service: Tips on controlling your phone with your voice (Wired). ▰ (2) Wave Form: Why not build yourself a radio wave detector with aluminum foil? (Wired). ▰ (3) Sound Art: Jeff Koons’ iconic “balloon dog” sculpture is now a speaker. ▰ (4) Smoking Jacket: “Experimental clothing brand Vollebak has created the prototype Sonic Jacket, which is fitted with 180 inward-facing speakers.” ▰ (5) Dynamic Duo: A pair of pristine WWII-era radio transmitters “survived the war in brand new condition in their original shipping crates.” ▰ (6) Public Venture: Industrial-music legend JG Thirwell (Foetus) has a Tumblr and apparently he sees music performances all the time and posts clips of them, among other things.

▰ Citation Credits: Thanks, Lowell Goss (WWII)!

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Recommended Listening

Home/office playlist

▰ Solo ambient cello, heavy on the texture, from Ukrainian musician Fedir Tkachov:

▰ On July 17, Kate Carr will release Vertical London (New Year’s Day), a collection of field recordings that aim to collate the sounds of London from minus 20 metres below sea level to 240 metres above, hence the album’s title. As of this writing, four of the set’s 22 tracks are online: “Early birds and planes in Loughborough Junction,” “I am not sure which tube station is the furthest below sea level, but I am visiting quite a few,” “Under the Thames with cyclists, joggers and echoes in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel,” and “Popping up at Island Gardens.”

▰ The two-track EP Graceless is driving industrial noise, made with no-input feedback loops, from Chia-Chun Xu, based in Taipei City, Taiwan.

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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