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:
▰ 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