Phonosynthesis & Aids to Hearing
Plus: comic book sound fx, earbuds made of fungus, and device eavesdropping
Dear Fellow Listeners,
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 else it might resonate. My name is Marc Weidenbaum. I live in San Francisco and at Disquiet.com.
Your support is appreciated, as are sound-related observations from your own life and work. I also publish an issue as a thank-you to paid subscribers; currently it consists of annotated recommendations of ambient (and adjacent) music. Hitting the books: There’s substantial long-form work I’ve committed to, with more planned. If issues of This Week in Sound go missing, that’s why.
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On the Line
Some favorite recent phrases
▰ Suit Up:
Kirin said Acknowledged at the same time all the others on the strike team did, their voices blending into a single sound that the suit parsed for him — their names going from yellow to green on his display.
I’m always interested in the role of sound in user interfaces — even if those interfaces are in fiction, and especially if it’s science fiction. This bit is from the new novella Livesuit, by James S.A. Corey (also author of the Expanse series, and actually two authors — Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — who use one shared name).
. . .
▰ Queen’s Throat:
I’m always frustrated because my DynaVox is monotone. Because of my sass, I would like to show more emotions. When I say, "Darling it’s lovely to see you, may I please have a friendly kiss on each cheek?," my DynaVox Maestro isn’t as flamboyantly gay as I am.
That is Mark Steidl. “Steidl has cerebral palsy and speaks through an augmentative and alternative communication (or A.A.C.) device, which can make ordinary interactions painfully slow.” He is the star and co-librettist (with Katherine Skovira) of an opera, The Other Side of Silence, composed by Robert Whalen (New York Times gift link). The work involves “a generative synthetic voice taught to sing opera.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
. . .
▰ House Music:
Then the wee hours
awake in bed,
rocking and meditating,
strangely blissful loneliness
and insomnia, the sound of my own
humming and the house ticking,
the first tears after
the first death—
That’s a segment of the poem “Meaning of the Word ‘Never’” by Deborah Garrison. It was published on October 21, 2024, by the New Yorker. There is something beautiful about the “house ticking,” all the more so because the section preceding this one introduces a clock, which suggests a tick, which doesn’t arrive until now.
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Sound Ledger
Audio culture by the numbers
40 billion: number of plastic earplugs made per year
43: number of years since Ronald Reagan, then president, defunded the EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control
45: decibel level exceeded by two-thirds of habitual snorers
Sources: earplugs (dezeen.com), EPA (fox8live.com), snoring (newscientist.com)
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Doorbel (Sic)
Where to begin? The counterclockwise — and bleached-by-the-elements — numbering? The requisite additional text information for visitors? The damage to said information — notably to the words “button” and “can”? The misspelling of the word doorbell itself (and subsequent missing apostrophe)? The odd, solitary logo on the NuTone button? The fact that of the four buttons, there seem to be three different types?
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The Ears Have IT
Everyday consumer devices are the new hearing aids
Restaurants are getting noisier, and the noise gets harder for people to deal with as they age. Both those things are true, and they combine to make the situation even worse. Fortunately, in the wake of revised FDA regulations back in 2022, over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids are becoming available, dropping the price significantly (from the thousands of dollars to the hundreds), and increasing innovation in the marketplace.
The new hearing health tools in Apple’s AirPods became the FDA’s first authorized OTC hearing aid software device, as announced last month. Without that regulation change, the situation would not have improved as quickly as it has.
As Chris Welch reports in the Verge, the initial trio of Apple featues includes “clinical-grade hearing aid functionality, a hearing test, and more robust hearing protection.”
Rebecca Hamilton at Slate reports on the scale of need: “[J]ust 16 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 69 years who would benefit from hearing aids ever use them. Some 20 million go without.”
Pete Wells in the New York Times notes a particular use case that predates the hearing health additions: “What you may not know is that the AirPods Pro 2 already come with a setting that can turn up the volume on the voices of people you’re talking to and another one that tamps down background noise. Other earbud makers, including Sony, Samsung, Beyerdynamic and Soundcore, also offer functions meant to make conversation easier in noisy places.” Wells was a long time restaurant critic, so if anyone knows something about noisy rooms, it’s him.
Technology will help, but a major next step is going to require changes to cultural norms. Right now, AirPods and earbuds in general send a visual signal of isolation, that someone is paying attention to something other than the world around them. We’ll need to get comfortable sitting across from someone and not take the presence of their earbuds as a physical indication that they aren’t paying attention to us. No one sees a traditional hearing aid in someone’s ear and thinks they’ve checked out of the conversation, quite the contrary.
Related stories on the topic of things we put in our ears:
▰ Up to 11: For some with extreme hearing loss, the answer in the future may be an SCBI, or “spinal computer–brain interface,” which can “effectively convert sound into interpretable spinal cord stimulation patterns, offering a novel approach to sensory substitution for individuals with hearing loss.”
▰ Fungus Among Us: Mycelium is a fungus with manufacturing utility and reported antibiotic properties. Also, the fungus is the sole ingredient in a brand of earplugs made by Gob (gob.earth), a company based in San Francisco. “The result is a hypoallergenic earplug with a secure fit that moulds to the ear with a similar action as memory foam,” writes Ellen Eberhardt in Dezeen. The makers claim certain unique qualities: “Unlike traditional foam earplugs, which can muffle certain frequencies, our mycelium-based earplugs provide superior sound absorption while maintaining clarity and comfort.”
▰ Ear Ache: A conservative political commentator was involved in a recent humorous kerfuffle. He reportedly attended a sports event wearing earplugs, and later was accused of editing the plug out of a selfie. Reminder: the year is 2024, and everything is political, including the perceived manliness of hearing protection.
▰ Say What?: “[Researchers] have found those who experience hearing loss are more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease later on. … But if hearing aids are prescribed right off the bat, the risk of diagnosis appears significantly dampened.” The chart below is from the latest issue of JAMA Neurology, published by the American Medical Association.
(And thanks to Lynda Hansen for the New York Times piece.)
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More Week in Sound
A lightly annotated clipping service
▰ ROOTS MUSIC: Call it “phonosynthesis,” as scientists confirm that sounds can improve the growth of fungus, per the New York Times: “Playing sound to Trichoderma harzianum, a green microscopic fungus that defends tree roots from pathogens, led to growth rates seven times as fast as those of fungus grown in the sound of silence. If the laboratory findings can be replicated in nature, then sound could be an unexpected new tool for improving the health of forests, encouraging beneficial microbes to take root and thrive.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ SCREEN OFF: One thing I love about the Diary section of the London Review of Books is it often doesn’t announce its topic. It’ll just say “Diary” at the top, along with the entry’s author’s name, and unless you read the piece, you might not know what it’s about, and when you begin to read, you don’t necessarily know what’s ahead. A Diary by Dani Garavelli earlier this month waits until its second paragraph to introduce the topic at hand, movie theaters, and while you might guess it’s about their decline, it doesn’t get around to that for a spell. Eventually we do get around to the introduction of sound in the 1920s and ‘30s, and eventually to the unfortunate results of haphazard cost-cutting decades later. With one theater, by way of example: “They simply dropped a wall from the circle downwards and then divided what they had behind that into two more cinemas. There was no soundproofing: you could quite often hear the film in the neighbouring auditorium.”
▰ BOTTOMS UP: Noni Hazlehurst was a presenter on the longrunning Australian TV series Play School from 1978 to 2011. I hadn’t heard about the show until she was interviewed by the Guardian. Here she describes an inflatable raft that caused what she says was the most chaotic thing to ever happen on the show’s set: “Now, the thing is, it’s meant to inflate in 30 seconds into a two-person rubber dinghy, which it did – but it made the most extraordinary farting sound that you’ve ever heard in your life. For a full 30 seconds. It exploded and just about knocked the whole set over. We were in absolute hysterics, to the point where someone wrote in and said we were obviously drunk. You couldn’t have written it. It was just so funny.”
▰ 21ST CENTURY FX: “I’ve never really used sound effects in comics much. I don’t like them. As a kid, they fascinated me, but after a certain age they started to take me out of the storytelling, so I’ve tried to avoid them. I was part of the generations that helped kill the sound effect and the thought balloon, I guess.” That’s the opening of a great consideration the sound effects (and related topics) of comics in the latest issue of Warren Ellis’ newsletter, Orbital Operations. There was also a heap of inventive sound in his recent audio drama, The Department of Midnight, which I need to get around to unpacking.
▰ GRACE NOTES: Listen Up: Paranoia about whether or not smart devices are listening to us got a nudge when 404 Media shared a leak of an “active listening plan” that proposed to use “‘real-time intent data’ from smart device microphones to deliver ads to consumers.” ▰ No Fooling Around: A multimedia feature in the Guardian on life — especially sonic nocturnal life — during wartime: “people can see almost nothing in the darkness and so strain their ears to hear the noises that haunt them afterwards.” ▰ Punctured: Inconsistency is cited in research on the use of breath sounds in respiratory evaluations. ▰ Battle Bots: Robot vacuums across the country were hacked in the space of several days, [allowing] the attackers to not only control the robovacs, but use their speakers to hurl racial slurs and abusive comments at anyone nearby.” ▰ Just Browsing: A Chrome extension keeps alert for audio deep fakes.
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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 also find knowing I will 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 take weekends off social media.
▰ Two seasons into For All Mankind, very much digging it, even if it’s more soap opera than space opera at times. I sure hope they start introducing pop songs that exist only in this alternate timeline (sorta like the Prince bootlegs in Counterpart).
▰ I’m about a decade and a half late to the documentary Thunder Soul (2010), about a Houston, Texas, jazz-funk band that gained much-deserved acclaim, toured the world, and then reunited 30 years later. It should come with a box of tissues, I’ll tell you that.
▰ Afternoon drone trio for idling bus, fog horn, and passing jet plane
▰ I’m definitely a sucker for a thriller in which the mark has an earbud in the whole time and they’re taking directions from someone else, be it antagonist or not. I imagine that mode doesn’t last this full movie, but I’ll be checking it out for sure.
▰ I’d swear that whoever does the voice menu for the jury duty phone line in this town was hired ’cause it sounds like he did the voiceover for the opening of Dragnet
▰ The feeling when you think that’s the ice cream truck down the road and it turns out to be the especially colorful van of a plumber
▰ My friend Matt Nish-Lapidus made a fantastic piece of online art, the less said about it in advance the better. Just give it a click, and then another and …
▰ Dream last night: I’m in a band with Kathryn Hahn. We share a manager with Depeche Mode. The manager set up the four of us to record together. Dave Gahan is being lazy somehow. Hahn marches Gore and me to the mall, pulls Gahan out of his fitness class, and lectures him about his responsibilities.
▰ Perhaps the best thing about this Martin Gore video about his new (and very pretty) signature Gretsch guitar is the evidence that those famous floor-to-ceiling walls of Eurorack modules in his studio weren’t sufficient, and now he has additional massive cases on the floor.
▰ Truly odd. What seemed to be a car alarm on loop turned out to be from a bus stop. It had gone off accidentally. A call to 311 (San Francisco) led to a call to the police (non-emergency). The noise was sorted out quickly. Unlike (most) car alarms, this didn’t stop after a minute or so. Kept looping.
▰ Love when my microphone during a call thinks my allergy-induced coughing is me trying to talk and alerts me to turn on my microphone
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And a Little Music
▰ Down Under: 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 0668. Check out the project that came to a close Monday, October 21, 2024, All Right Then, Keep Your Secrets. The Assignment: Bury a secret sound until it is no longer identifiable. Listen to the results in the project’s SoundCloud playlist. Learn more about the project and the Disquiet Junto at disquiet.com/0668.
▰ Field Report: Kelly Moran tapped the great Loraine James and her percussionist colleague Fyn Dobson to do a remix of the track “Superhuman,” off Moran’s recent album, Moves in the Field. The title of the track references how Moran’s instrument on the recording is a Yamaha Disklavier, a tool that allows her to compose and perform music that would be, in effect, impossible for an unaided human to accomplish on their own. In the able hands of James and Dobson, the source material is muffled, its intricacies heard as if through glass, and that sonic shape is improvised upon with drums and synthesized tones, individual bits of the piano occasionally peeking out.
▰ Case Study: WFMU ran a tribute to the late Steve Roden on October 14, 2024. Roden died in September 2023, and for this show, its host, Daniel Blumin, played tracks selected with Stephen Vitiello and Michael Raphael, and he interviewed them, and the show also includes interview segments featuring Roden himself. I was excited to see here the recording “Sandy,” which Roden and Vitiello collaborated on for the 44th Disquiet Junto project, way back in November 2012, following Hurricane Sandy’s assault on the East Coast. The project, and this track, utilized field recordings made by Raphael. The WFMU show opens with a recording of Roden singing as a child, and includes numerous pieces of his own work, plus 7” records from his personal collection. Roden was an instigator of what came to be called “lowercase” sound, music that emphasizes small noises and quiet gestures. He was also a visual artist, and a collector, and a wonderful human being, whom I got to spend time with over the years. This broadcast is a great introduction to Roden and his music and the way he thought about and worked with sound. Check out the archived WFMU show at wfmu.org. More on the Disquiet Junto project that led to the track “Sandy” here at disquiet.com. Far as I can tell, the first mention of Roden on my site was back on October 29, 2000, a year and a couple weeks shy of a quarter century ago.
▰ Slow Fidelity: My friend Mahlen Morris, who proposed this past week’s Disquiet Junto project and who develops some very cool virtual synthesizer modules, recently came to recognize that when his phone records video in slow-motion, the resulting sound is, naturally, also slowed down. Here’s a short clip of a metal chain clanking, to provide an example of the effect. When recorded this slowly, the sound of the clank has a depth and detail that is unlike the almost binary on/off thunk of it in real (i.e., real-time) life. And in addition, there is a haunting background drone, perhaps just artifacts of the chain, or a passing plane, or something else entirely. No matter, it’s a splendid effect.
▰ Psych Out: My friend Charles Lindsay — who long ago invited me to speak at SETI, back in 2014, when he was running the artist-in-residence program there — asks: “Can AI become sentient? If AI can become sentient, can it become conscious? If AI can become conscious, can it become enlightened?” And he does so in the context of an exhibit of his art currently showing at Heron Arts here in San Francisco. It will run through October 30. In addition to a range of pieces that explore the intersection of cybernetics and enlightenment, he’s been hosting a series of events at Heron. Just this week there was an interesting conversation I attended about Art, AI, and psychedelics. There’s also this hour-long soundtrack he created, a mix of field recordings, music, voices, and other sonic effluvia. He explains that among the founds sounds heard in this flowing collage are “the persistent ‘do not forget anything’ messages delivered by synthesized voices in all manner of public transportation in Japan.” It is from those messages that he derived the name of his show, Please Forget (Everything).
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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
Thanks so much for sharing that Steve Roden show!
I miss a week or two. Then you hit. Well done, Marc.