Super Mario Clouds for 10 Minutes

Plus: Listening to number one, birding with the blind, the evolution of EV sound, and more

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:

▰ a sound-art controversy
▰ listening to number one
▰ blind birding
▰ porting Cory Arcangel’s Clouds

This Week in Sound also includes, as a thank-you to paid subscribers, occasional 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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Frame by Frame

The illustrator Hannes Pasqualini and I revived our 2020 four-panel comics series in December 2024 with a “Fireworks”-themed entry just in advance of the new year. We also gave the series a name: Frame by Frame. The episode titled “Settings,” shown above, is the ninth of this new, ongoing phase, bringing the total to a 15.

A new installment should be out this coming week (sneak peek here), and a full index of past Frame by Frame comics — no paywall — appears at disquiet.com/fxf. Check out more of Hannes’ own work at hannes.papernoise.net.

Robin Sloan (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Moonbound) had some nice words about Frame by Frame in a recent issue of his “main” newsletter, and the musician ioflow rewardingly wrote up his close reading of the installments thus far.

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On the Line

Some favorite recent writing

▰ Whale of a Time:

“You ever hear about the loneliest whale in the world? Whales have songs, right? They sing to each other, and the songs are at, like, 160 MHz, something like that. I forget the specifics, but they're all within that range, yet there's this one whale who sings at, like, 50 MHz. No one knows why. But none of the other whales can hear him. So he just goes around singing, and the other whales don't even know he's there.”

That is Agent Copano (voice: Joseph Lee Anderson) in the animated series Common Side Effects (season 1, episode 7, “Blowfish,” written by Karey Dornetto), from Joseph Bennett, one of the two creators of the fantastic Scavengers Reign, and Steve Hely. This moment occurs right after Copano’s newly assigned partner turns off the car radio and says, “I don’t like music. It’s distracting.” Copano misses his previous partner, Agent Harrington, with whom he’d often listen to music while on stakeouts. Fortunately, unlike Scavengers Reign, Common Side Effects was renewed for a second season.

. . .

▰ Locked In:

“I am seeking ways to recognize that we are part of that world, not dominant and not separate. And sound is so powerful for that. It affects our blood pressure and muscle tension. You can’t control it.”

That is composer Annea Lockwood, profiled in The New York Times by Joshua Barone.

. . .

▰ Mic Drop:

“Some of the conversations inside the embassy were picked up by bugs. The various branches of British security, sometimes unaware of one another’s activities, devoted much effort and ingenuity to inserting tiny microphones through the 22-inch-thick wall of the embassy and the 15-inch wall of the building next door. This required drilling holes by hand through granite and dense Victorian brick to avoid making a sound likely to alert the gunmen to what was going on. Fake roadworks were staged outside, to hide the noise of the drill. The aim was to come out behind an electric socket, so that the microphone would be hidden behind a piece of plastic. In the event, the field telephone which had been given to the gunmen for communications with the police, and which contained a permanently active bug, appears to have been the most useful listening device.”

That is Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books summarizing information from Ben Macintyre’s book The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama.

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Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

3,000,000: Number of views of one TikTok video parodying EV sound.

37: Number of countries collaborating to tackle underwater noise pollution.

30: Number of seconds of recording from which someone’s voice can be cloned.

Sources: EV (fastcompany.com; tiktok.com), underwater (nature.org), clone (saturdayeveningpost.com)

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Super Mario Clouds for 10 Minutes

“Playing” Cory Arcangel's Nintendo remix on a modern handheld console

I spent all of my mornings this past week writing about sound in video games, and in the process, I kept coming back to the Nintendo GameCube, which led me to think in particular about gaming in the early 2000s, since the GameCube debuted in 2001.

My subject was, and remains currently, the contemplative aspects of video games and video game sound, notably when one is encouraged — or acts on the instinct — to pause without hitting pause, to situate oneself in a virtual space and observe, especially by listening, to the digital world in which one and one’s on-screen counterpart(s) are engaged. Think of this practice as gaming transcendentalism. In our time of highly popular long-form gaming videos that document digital environments, it’s a fascinating subject that brings media archiving into the realm of the somatic.

Throughout this writing I’ve been doing, an inevitable reference point, for me, has been Cory Arcangel’s classic media art piece, the deeply reflective Super Mario Clouds, which he created in 2002 (and which was featured two years later in the Whitney Biennial). This despite the fact that Super Mario Clouds is, in fact, entirely silent.

For the work, Arcangel took a cartridge of the game Super Mario Bros. and hacked it to remove everything but the blue sky and the cartoonish white clouds. Absent are Mario, and his various obstacles, and even Koji Kondo’s musical score. All that remains are a static sky and those passing clouds, which tellingly resemble thought balloons.

Super Mario Bros. ran on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), aka the Family Computer (Famicon), and was the very first Super Mario game. It came out in 1985, two years after the NES debuted. What may be useful to note is that Arcangel was born in May 1978, so he was about seven and a half years of age when Super Mario Bros. appeared. An impressionable phase of one’s life, to say the least.

While reading up on the topic, I checked out, among other resources, the Whitney Museum’s archive, its online catalog, video of Super Mario Bros. gameplay, and the Whitney page for the Arcangel work, which includes the following description and question:

“By tweaking the game’s code, the artist erased all of the sound and visual elements except the iconic scrolling clouds. On a formal level, the project is reminiscent of paintings that push representation toward abstraction: how many elements can be removed before the ability to discern the source is lost?”

And then I made my way to Arcangel’s own website, which has a page dedicated to Super Mario Clouds, displaying his hacked cartridge — and including a link to his own version/remix of the original Super Mario Bros. software.

I downloaded the Zip file, de-archived it, and recognized the file’s suffix, .nes, from the ROMs for old NES games. We live in the golden age of cheap small portable game consoles that allow one to play outdated video games, so on the chance it might work, I popped the microSD card out of my Anbernic RG35XXSP, a small, clamshell device that pointedly resembles a Game Boy Advance SP. I put the SD card into my laptop, dragged the .nes ROM (file name: arcangel-super-mario-clouds.nes) into the folder titled FC (for Famicon), safely ejected the microSD card, and slid it back into the slot on my SP.

On his website, Arcangel notes that Super Mario Clouds remains, to some degree, a work in progress: “I still need 2 get around 2 cleaning up all the different versions of this code.” So, I wasn’t even sure if his ROM would run, or if it might even freeze up my SP. I turned on the Anbernic, found my way through the menus to the arcangel-super-mario-clouds.nes file, and hit play — and it worked, immediately. The screen turned blue as the brightest day of summer, and the little white clouds began to pass by slowly from right to left.

The dimensions of the image, however, left wide black spaces on either side of the screen, and I recalled that Arcangel’s site had a note that read “Dims: Dimensions variable.” Taking that allowance as a cue, I went through the menus in the alternate firmware I’d installed on my Anbernic SP (in essence, I was running modded software on modded firmware), made a few changes to the arcane settings, and Super Mario Clouds proceeded to fill the screen from edge to edge.

This is when I had the urge to record a long, continuous segment, 10 minutes, to share online. Though Super Mario Clouds is, of course, itself silent — the absence of sound being one of myriad ways Arcangel chiseled his work from larger, more complex source material — that silence speaks to the contemplative opportunities inherent in video games.

I also recalled that game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario, had, early on in his work at Nintendo, been tasked with finding a creative reuse of thousands of abandoned arcade consoles originally designed for a failed game called Radar Scope (1980). In Radar Scope, the screen shows an image that goes off toward a distant horizon, providing a sense of three-dimensional play. Miyamoto dispensed with 3D, and embraced the creative constraint of merely two dimensions. The result was Miyamoto’s first classic (of many), Donkey Kong (1981). There’s a connection to be drawn between Miyamoto’s reduction of the arcade game format to two dimensions, and Arcangel’s further reduction of Miyamoto’s original Mario game to merely its backdrop.

Now, on the one hand, my video of Super Mario Clouds on a modern handheld is, like Arcangel’s original work, entirely silent. On the other hand, the piece’s elegance and its (virtual) environmental focus make it part and parcel of the gaming transcendentalism that I happen to explore mostly through video game sound. To reinforce this point, I almost edited my video to a length of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, following John Cage’s template, but then I decided that 10 minutes allowed for a more immersive experience.

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This Week in Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

▰ WATER LOGGED: “A fiscal watchdog is taking the city’s public art authority to task for spending tens of thousands of dollars on a phone line that allowed people to listen to recorded sounds of the Bow River. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation issued a freedom of information request to the city in 2024, revealing that the Reconnecting to the Bow public art project cost taxpayers $65,194.” You can check it out at calgaryartsdevelopment.com. Story via calgaryherald.com.

▰ BLIND BIRDING: “Shah, who lost his sight in a childhood injury, was one of 11 blind people who tracked and identified more than two dozen bird species Sunday as part of an inaugural, nationwide effort to get those who are blind or visually impaired into birding. The day-long, blind birder bird-a-thon drew more than 200 participants who counted 200 species at parks, gardens and backyards in 34 states, including California, Florida, Idaho, Texas, Montana, Pennsylvania and New York.

“‘I loved it,’ Shah, a lawyer who lives near Northwest Washington, said about his two hours of birding. ‘I’ve never done this before and to be able to differentiate the birds based on their sound and identify them was big. I always thought birding was about seeing or watching birds, but I realized it’s also about listening to birds.’” Dana Hedgpeth, in the Washington Post, profiled blind birders.

▰ PISS TAKE: Using machine learning to find information in … urination: “One medical test significantly benefiting from AI is sound-based uroflowmetry (SU). This innovative technique seeks to estimate urinary flow patterns during bladder emptying based on the sound generated by urine striking the water surface in a toilet bowl. SU emerges as a remote and proactive alternative to uroflowmetry (UF), a standard clinical test performed by urologists to detect issues associated with urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), such as obstructions or voiding dysfunctions.” At nature.com.

▰ COLD FRONT: “Samsung’s latest smart fridges now support multi-voice recognition powered by the company’s Bixby assistant, which can be used to bring up personalized information on the built-in smart displays based upon which member of a household is speaking.” Via The Verge.

▰ AI? NAY: “Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) is taking a hard stance on generative AI. Today, the organization announced that any film using generative AI would not be eligible for Outstanding Use of Sound Design at its annual Golden Reel Awards. Per TheWrap, this is the first time any professional film organization has made a move like this” Per The AV Club.

▰ GRACE NOTES: (1) Words’ Worth: Tom Gauld had a funny comic about the sound of fountain pens. ▰ (2) Whirs’ Worth: The Washington Post had a multimedia piece about the sounds of electric vehicles. ▰ (3) Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is the Green Warbler (“a rapid rushing warble, often from thick cover”). (4) Mama Cassian: How the sound of Andor was created (an interview with Margit Pfeiffer, the show’s supervising sound editor).

▰ Credit Due: Thanks, Mike Rhode (Gauld, EVs) and Rich Pettus (MPSE, Star Wars).

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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.

▰ It appears a drummer now lives near the tiny office I rent. I think I can work with this, as traffic noise and distance muffle much of it. Headphones can manage the remainder. I mean, someone can’t practice drums all day. Right? Right??

▰ So much of my favorite music is glitch. Thelonious Monk is piano glitch. Kid Koala is turntable glitch. Gregorian chant and early polyphony are architectural glitch. Janis Joplin is vocal glitch. I love when the fragility of engineering is put to purposeful use.

▰ The recent documentary (really more like a commissioned group memoir) Becoming Led Zeppelin was very enjoyable, and it was fun to be reminded of Jimmy Page having, in his early work as a session musician, done work on Muzak. I’d love if some superfan had managed to track down the specific material he contributed to.

▰ Keeping an eye on my Mac Mini via Screen Sharing on an iPad connected to my MacBook via Sidecar is my mundane version of Inception

▰ My Shazam is 90% music I disliked so much I had to find out what it was (maybe call this habit “hate-Shazaming”), and 10% stuff I loved but couldn’t identify, half of that originating from the inside of taco trucks

▰ I am far more up for this Superman movie than I expected to be. The trailer roll-out is doing its job. I mean, the teeth making a sound when they hit the camera after being knocked out by a punch (at 1:15)? Bonus points for major Frank Quitely vibes. Sign me up.

▰ Update: the drummer who moved near (but not too near!) the little office I rent appears to have made a bassist friend. They dig Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath.

▰ This hold music is like a weaponized lullaby

▰ Update: The drummer near my little rental office skipped a day of practice, but filling the void was someone a few buildings away screaming on a phone for so long and so intensely that someone in a neighboring office started laughing.

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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