Talking to Oneself (In the Car)

Plus: Harry Caul’s tragedy, regulating ice cream trucks, and Alan Moore on John Cage

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:

▰ Harry Caul’s tragedy
▰ Talking to oneself in the car
▰ Ice cream truck regulations
▰ Ambient music as a feature

Your support is appreciated, as are sound-related observations from your own life and work. 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. It’s been a while since I sent one out; things are feeling back on track. If it’s any consolation, I’ve been writing — a lot.

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Frame by Frame

The illustrator Hannes Pasqualini and I revived our 2020 comics series in late December of 2024. We have posted two more comics since that one (“Audiobook” and “Stroll”), and this one, “Megaphone Redux,” continues the run, revisiting both the cultural context and a specific comic from when we initiated the series. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf, which features a special index page just for the episodes. And check out more from Hannes at hannes.papernoise.net.

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On the Line

Some favorite recent phrases

▰ Coach Class:

The train's whistle, which twenty-four hours ago had lulled her to sleep, took on a new, urgent keening: repeated triple blasts radiating across the infinite prairie like smoke signals in the dark. It was, she well knew, a way of summoning medical help to the next whistle-stop. ... Those who lived in such places were accustomed to rolling over and going back to sleep after being wakened by the long blasts of the Empire Builder's whistle, and some could even identify the engineer by his signature. The triple blast, however, would visit their sleep as a nightmare and draw them toward the station in an unsettled frame of mind.

That is from Polostan, the recent novel from Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon), and the first in a trilogy, though it reads more like he turned a characteristically monolith-size book, and someone finally convinced him to break it into thirds. And just as a side note, if you read Stephenson’s 2019 novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, then this moment serves as a conscious chronological premonition of the brutal futuristic road trip in that book: “This was the bad side of the high plains: communities so remote that people could get away with anything, and, lacking contact with settled places, could wander far down strange thoughtways from which there was no route back to sanity.”

. . .

▰ On Brand:

I wanted a day when the enemy would be so overwhelmed by the sound of my ancestors dragging their chains that they would be killed by the clamour.

That is Canadian poet and novelist Dionne Brand, as excerpted in an appreciation by Andrea Brady in the London Review of Books. The same issue has Anne Carson writing about, in part, a friend “who wanted to compose an entire symphony out of the sound of people sighing,” and Frances Morgan surveying the work of Yoko Ono (“The liberating conceptual shift proposed by the Fluxus movement, which made a flushing toilet or a struck match a performance, is not unrelated to the process that puts an audiotape in a vitrine or transforms a dead musician’s clothes into an auction lot”). It’s quite the issue.

. . .

▰ By the Numbers:

So, then, silence it is, Cage's 4'33" on infinite repeat, which, basically, has been this place's playlist for the last year and a half, a soundtrack ambient in its absence.

That is Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta) on the penultimate page of his recent novel, The Great When, which like the Stephenson one mentioned above is the first in a new series — and also like the Stephenson, is uncharacteristically brief for this author. Thanks to my friend Darko Macan, who read the book before I could get around to it, pointed out this but to me, and says “this epilogue is mostly about the coming attractions.”

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Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

15: Number of minutes an ice cream truck is allowed to be in one place (unless there is a line) in Coral Gables, Florida, if rules currently under discussion are enacted

55: Years of age after which, in a recent study, individuals with hearing loss who didn’t employ hearing aids had a measurable decline in cognitive function

26: Percent of UK residents who have reported receiving deepfake phone calls in the past 12 months

Sources: ice cream (miamiherald.com), cognitive (nature.com), and deepfake (msn.com).

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Greeting Gene Hackman

And the tragedy at the heart of The Conversation

Gene Hackman arrives at the Pearly Gates. Saint Peter welcomes him in without even looking up. Hackman asks, “How did you know it was me?” Saint Peter replies, “You have a certain way of opening up the door. Y’know, first the key goes in real quiet, and then the door comes open real fast, just like you think you’re going to catch me at something.”

I’m not sure there is a movie that took my head, and in particular my ears, and put them squarely on the rails they were meant to be on quite like the The Conversation did, in large part thanks to sound designer Walter Murch, and of course the embodiment of the fraught act of listening that is Hackman’s surveillance expert, Harry Caul. I’ve been uncovering the deep truths of this 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film ever since.

My attempt at a joke in the first paragraph above cribs directly from what Teri Garr’s character, Amy, says to Hackman’s Caul.

There is a lot of tragedy in this film, and for me the essential tragedy is Caul’s inability — and keep in mind, this is someone whose job is to discern people’s hidden truths by observing them — to recognize Amy as his soulmate. He gets outwitted several times in The Conversation, but his worst error of judgment is his lack of real appreciation for Amy. The fact that she catches him spying on her should be reason enough for him to see in her something special — countersurveillance as foreplay. But here, in this scene, she makes it clear that her ear is as good as, if not better than, his.

Whenever I watch the movie, I can’t help but wonder if Amy would have noticed the misunderstanding at the heart of the audio recording that Caul, fatally, doesn’t. If only Caul had let her in.

RIP, Gene Hackman (1930 - 2025)

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Talking to Oneself (Effectively)

The voice memo app I’ve been waiting for

I don’t drive much, though these days I drive more than I had for a couple decades. This recent driving has, as I mentioned in a blog post here two years ago (“Message to Self: Lessons, conundrums and opportunities in voice-first EV interfaces”), helped me catch up on the role of audio interfaces in a mode of life that had become unfamiliar to me. As a result of the gap, I leapfrogged right into fairly mature CarPlay, which is Apple’s system that lets your phone become the car’s interface. The experience has been interesting, informative, and sometimes even useful. I’ve managed to come up to speed on various ways that sounds, including voice commands, have gained utility in digitally mediated vehicular activity.

I’ve touched on numerous aspects of this topic in blog posts and my This Week in Sound email newsletter. Throughout, the one thing that really seemed (note the past tense) to be missing, at least for me, was an easy, dependable way to record a voice memo. I won’t go into the details of the benefits of recording voice memos here; if you don’t find voice memos useful, more power to you, and if you do find voice memos useful, then you know what I’m talking about. I will add that with the recent rise of affordable excellent voice-to-text transcriptions (my primary app for this is MacWhisper, though I use the rev.com service on occasion), voice memos are more useful than ever.

As it turned out, CarPlay was (again, note the past tense) really lacking when it came to voice memos. Apple’s iOS operating system even comes with an app literally called Voice Memos (and in a recent update, this app came to include automatic transcription, though I find MacWhisper to be superior), and I use it every day at my desk and when I got for walks. However, unlike Messages and Maps and Podcasts and other such apps — even many non-Apple apps, like YouTube Music and Libby and Hoopla — Apple’s Voice Memos app has zero presence in CarPlay. I’ve mentioned this functional void routinely on social media, and I’ve summed up my frustration and confusion in the article linked to above.

And I’m not alone. A search for variations on “CarPlay voice memo” (and for its Google equivalent, Android Auto) yields numerous online discussions about makeshift fixes, such as leaving yourself a voice mail or texting yourself a voice recording. None of these options, I’ve found, has been particularly useful. The best I’ve been able to do is to use Apple’s Shortcuts feature to create a button on my phone’s home screen and lock screen to record right into the Voice Memos app — which works well, except it means I still have to use my phone, physically, which is not great when you’re driving a car.

And then, out of the blue, a person named David Kellas added a comment to my two-year-old blog post, saying he had gone ahead and made the app himself. “I wanted an app like this for ages,” he wrote in his post, “so built it for everyone to use without any subscription.” And it’s true: the app, which is named Auto Memo Recorder, costs just $1.99, a one-time fee. And it does what it says.

I installed Auto Memo Recorder on my iPhone (an iPhone 13 Pro) and I have been trying it out. It works well. It’s nothing fancy, just pure function. I generally am more of a touchscreen user than a voice-activation user, so my habit so far is to have the app on the home screen, which makes for a two-click or three-click process. I click on the app, and then I click to start recording. The third click is if CarPlay already has an app open (like Maps or Plex or YouTube Music), which actually is most of the time.

Right now, pretty much the only thing that, for my purposes, would improve upon what Auto Memo Recorder offers is for it to sync recordings via iCloud or Dropbox. I’ll keep using it, and I’ll report back on any other observations I have.

Auto Memo Recorder is available through the App Store. More details at invisiblestorm.co.uk/auto-memo. The website mentions “AI enhanced applications,” but the only apparent AI in Auto Memo Recorder is that it will transcribe the voice recording to text. The above image is a screenshot from the app’s website.

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This Week in Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

▰ Mic Centennial: February 2025 marked the 100th anniversary of the first use of a microphone in a professional recording studio. ▰ Girl Talk: The mother of Gabby Petito, whose murder is the subject of a Netflix documentary, talks about the AI reenactment of her daughter’s voice. ▰ WHO Dunnit: [T]he World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are highlighting the first global standard for safe listening in video gameplay and esport activities” (PDF). ▰ Tik’d Off: “Apple says it will issue a software fix for an unusual and ill-timed transcription issue that's been shown in multiple TikTok videos.” The issue is that some iPhones showed the name of the current president of the United States “when performing voice-to-text transcription with words that include ‘racist.’” ▰ Apple of My Ear: Now iOS is turning ambient music into a proper feature: an update in iOS 18.4, currently in beta, “gives you quick access to ambient music in the categories of Sleep, Chill, Productivity, and Wellbeing.” ▰ Wages of Silence: “More than 1,000 musicians — including Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn and Kate Bush — released a silent album … in protest at the UK government’s planned changes to copyright law, which they say would make it easier for AI companies to train models using copyrighted work without a licence.” ▰ On Scripture: Yale professor Shawkat M. Toorawa talks about how consideration of sound informed his Qur’an translations. ▰ Big App-le: “A new accessibility program based on an app for deaf and hard of hearing users is being tested on the New York MTA system.”

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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.

▰ I entered a tiny bathroom stall at the back of a bar, only to be greeted by a voice. The voice belonged to David Attenborough: a recording of him from Life on Earth. As I flushed, I Iearned that the “identity of species is proclaimed by the plumage.”

▰ Wasn’t expecting the first episode of the new season of Reacher to have a Thee Headcoats song playing during the end credits. (I’m wondering if a music supervisor just did a lyric search for a song talking about something context-specific, in this case a young girl.)

▰ I have no idea the extent to which this makes me an economic boycott scab, but I did manage to jump over various e-commerce hurdles to purchase a ticket to attend the Autechre / Mark Broom concert in a little over seven months. It’s at the Regency. Last show I saw there was the Atarashii Gakko! concert.

▰ Afternoon trio for … a trio of electric vehicles (two autonomous, one driven by a device called a human) whirring by at once

▰ I’m with Milchik on this one topic. “The theremin works best in moderation.”

▰ I watched and liked a video of a saxophone quartet doing what was originally a string quartet, composed by Philip Glass. Now I’m getting solo guitar versions, guitar quartet versions, solo piano versions, theremin versions. YouTube radicalization is real. :)

▰ I am sitting in a gulf different from the one you are in now …

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And a Little Music

Home/office playlist

▰ Under the Boardwalk: I’m not sure it is accurate to say that the four tracks of artfully mangled and repurposed tracks that comprise Boardwalk by Grey Tissue (aka Gabe Konrad) necessarily proceed from whisper to scream. Why, the very first track on the release, “Boardwalk I,” has a protracted feedback screech midway through that may keep some listeners from proceeding further, but doing so is highly recommended. There is, from “Boardwalk I” through the especially chaotic and boisterous “Boardwalk IV,” a persistent sense of consideration here, of sounds both sourced and utilized with particular ends in mind, more narrative than abstract, also haunting yet enticing. In the Drifters’s classic “Under the Boardwalk,” Johnny Moore sang, “From the park you hear the happy sound of the carousel,” and while quite different sounds are deployed on Grey Tissue’s Boardwalk, it is still very much a depiction of a place, a time, and a mood. The album was released by the Japanese label NEUS-318.

▰ Self-Erasure: The Germany-based musician Jeannine Schulz has an approach to releasing music that I’m still wrapping my head around, a mix of singles and albums and EPs that mark her as prolific but are also so understated that they feel less like a torrent and more like a steady trickle. A note at the end of the release page on Bandcamp reads: “Please make sure you download the music after the purchase as the musical content of the site sometimes changes. Tracks or albums are occasionally removed from the catalog.” Her latest, two tracks under the title All Is Found, is absolutely perfect for this mode, as it sounds like music being erased as it is being recorded.

▰ Enemy — actually all caps, ENEMY, apparently — is a trio consisting of Kit Downes, piano; Petter Eldh, double bass; and James Maddren, drums. I’ve been getting deep into Downes since hearing him on Breaking the Shell (my favorite album of 2024), the trio record he recorded (playing organ, not piano) with electric guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Andrew Cyrille. I like a lot of the Enemy album The Betrayal, in particular the first track, which does this thing Robert Glasper, among others, does, where the piano sounds as if it had been sampled, the way the lines are fragmented and repeat little snippets frequently. The idea of a pianist simulating the sound of a seam in an audio loop makes me ecstatically happy. This is “post-MPC jazz” (the MPC being the sampling instrument made by Akai). Downes appears to split his time between London, England, and Berlin, Germany.

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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