This Week in Sound: Speaker Bag
Plus: snoring in the bunker, data center noise, and whales that yell
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:
▰ Snoring in the bunker
▰ Whales that yell
▰ Sonic signatures of bacteria
▰ Data center noise pollution
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
▰ Gimme Shelter
“Always take spare socks,” the instructor advised. And you might want earplugs, he added. There are always lots of snorers in emergency shelters.
That is from an article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times about Poland’s wGotowości (or “Readiness”) civilian defense training program.
. . .
▰ Time Warp
The reader might notice a ripple of trouble in what Tara tells us about her marriage: they used to travel together but have stopped; their phone conversation ‘lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble’.
That is Joanna Biggs writing in the London Review of Books about Solvej Balle’s series of novels, On the Calculation of Volume. Tara, the main character in the books, wakes every day having to live the same day all over again — sort of like in Groundhog Day, but not exactly. A New York Times story by Hilary Leichter about Balle’s books reminds the reader of the “infraordinary,” the late George Perec’s term (l’infra-ordinaire in the original French) for “the perplexities of the habitual and the banal.” Seems as well like a good term for hyperawareness of the quotidian, including everyday sound.
. . .
▰ Dream Weaver
In the car, an oscillating whine I mistook for engine noise played over the stereo: bursts of light between long stretches of darkness, gentle rocking back and forth between frequencies, dissonant cries bubbling up as if from inside a well, more alien than any impressionism I was familiar with. My sister was the one playing, the instrument she had played from childhood unrecognizable. She sent these to him instead of letters.
That is from Daydreamers, the recent novel by my friend Alvin Lu. The book was published by FC2 last year. The narrator here is the brother of the musician in question. In a book steeped in matters of translation, gaps both generational and cultural looming large, the avant-garde music played by the sister provides a striking example.
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Sound Ledger
Audio culture by the numbers
100: The decibel level, 24 hours a day, near some data centers
20: The estimated percentage of Europeans whose health is at risk due to noise pollution
13.4: The percentage by which the organ density of grasshoppers in noisier habitats is higher than that of grasshoppers in quieter habitats
Sources: data centers (techradar.com), pollution (msn.com), grasshoppers (Nature)
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This Week in Sound
A lightly annotated clipping service
▰ Head Trip: “A new study by Britton Elliott Brooks argues that medieval religious images were never truly ‘silent.’ Instead, they could evoke imagined soundscapes in the minds of viewers, creating immersive experiences that blended sight, memory, and sound. The research focuses on the Harley Roll, a medieval English scroll depicting the life of Saint Guthlac, and suggests that pilgrims and worshippers may have mentally ‘heard’ winds, hammering, animal cries, and demonic noises while viewing its images.” Brooks received a PhD at Oxford in English and is an associate professor at Kyushu University in Japan.
▰ Bio Drone: “Scientists from TU Delft, SoundCell and RHMDC (the laboratory at the Reinier de Graaf hospital) have discovered that different bacterial species produce their own characteristic sounds. Building on an earlier development from the same team, they have now shown that bacteria can be identified and their antibiotic susceptibility determined simultaneously, based solely on their sound. This combined approach delivers results within hours instead of days, offering a major step forward in the diagnosis and treatment of bacterial infections.”
▰ Radio On: The great ongoing Cities and Memories project — developed and maintained by Stuart Fowkes — of field recordings and sound works based on field recordings now has its own dedicated online radio station: “an uninterrupted flow of more than 8,000 sounds and reimagined pieces from across more than 140 countries.”
▰ Buzz Killers: The New York Times ran a wonderful online feature by Gina Ryder, with photographs by George Etheredge, about the city’s intercoms and doorbells, and as anyone who follows my Instagram account might imagine, I enjoyed it immensely. It opens: “When a visitor presses a button on an analog New York City apartment intercom, they enter a time portal to somewhere in the last century when the wiring was likely installed. If they’re lucky, someone upstairs will hear it: a metallic, almost offensive clang that sets the dog barking and sends cortisol spiking. Then comes the electric sigh of the lock releasing, and they’re let inside.”
▰ GRACE NOTES: (1) Disintegration Tapes: A study in Nature measures how mildew degrades analog tape. ▰ (2) We All Scream: Whales have learned to “yell” to compensate for the noise of ship traffic. ▰ (3) Volume Matters: A New Yorker cartoon (by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski) joked about loud bird song as a form of, er, compensation. ▰ (4) Ether Madness: A recent XKCD cartoon joked about the absurdist concept of “soniferous aether.” ▰ (5) Coma Dose: Brains under anesthesia may still hear and process the sound of podcasts.
▰ Citation Credits: Thanks, Nicola Twilley (bacteria), Michael Rhode (cartoons), and Rich Pettus (anesthesia)!
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Speaker Bag
This past week I again visited the Audium, a special sonic space in San Francisco, and one that I have spent much time in over the course of many decades. The Audium has 176 carefully arranged speakers in a small room kept dark during performances, which often are explorations of spatial musique concrète — that is, of sound works made from recordings of sound, rather than using live instrumentation.
My friend Łukasz Langa, who went with me, took this shot of the interior after the performance we attended:
Founded by Stan Shaff and Doug McEachern, the Audium’s first dedicated physical space, with a quarter as many speakers, was in my longtime neighborhood, the Richmond District, in what is now a small office between a day spa and a hair salon. That was back in 1967.
By 1969, the Richmond District space had expanded to 61 speakers. Then in 1975, following an NEA grant and substantial construction work, the Audium moved to its current location, a former donut shop on Bush Street, not far from the major thoroughfare of Van Ness Avenue. Here’s a shot of my hand holding a photograph of the current space when it was still under construction, in the context of the space as it appears today. That’s Shaff’s son, David Shaff, in the baseball hat on the right.
There’s a lot to be said about any Audium show, and in addition to hearing everyday sounds and synthesized fragments move in three dimensions, I’ve had the pleasure of listening to a live jazz band perform, also in the dark. Something new-to-me always is happening at the Audium, and this time what struck me in particular was a thoughtful little design touch.
The lobby of the Audium serves as a gallery for an ever-changing series of sound art installations, and the current one plays through wall-mounted speakers. The exhibit is an audio-visual collaboration between Alex Abalos and Roco Cordova. What I noticed as I walked around wasn’t just the sounds or the projected images. It was how the sounds were being emitted: Each of the speakers is inside a cloth bag, which is pulled tight.
The carefulness of the speaker presence at the Audium reminded me of the snaking cables that caught my eye at a Marina Rosenfeld sound art exhibit back in 2021. In that case, rather than the bulky black cables being casually arranged out of necessity, they were artfully, even playfully, placed, and thus they became, in essence, part of the work, rather than a necessary byproduct.
In the Audium’s lobby, it was, frankly, nice not to be surrounded by a bunch of hard plastic and metal commercial objects, which is the standard mode for sound art. I also couldn’t help but connect the hand-tied cloth bags with the handcrafted nature of the space itself. It’s a simple touch, and one I’m surprised, in retrospect, that I don’t see more often in sound art exhibitions.
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Recommended Listening
Home/office playlist
▰ Italian sound artist Emiliano Pennisi (aka Avenir) develops software instruments that range from complex drum machines (Assembly-7) to geographically determined environment generators (Interfera) to “unstable” noise sources (Vortessa). This example video features an instance of Envion, another Pennisi project, which he describes as an “ecosystem … designed for algorithmic and procedural composition, musique concrète, and experimental sound processing.” Read more.
▰ Robert Henke’s new album, Signal to Noise – Volume II, is all about time, or more to the point, can be experienced as an expression of, a reflection on, time. This is meditative music that is, itself, a meditation on these various interwoven concepts: immersive listening, harmony and texture as artistic ends unto themselves, the long influence of ancient machines, and the through lines of individual artistic legacy. Read more.
▰ This track, “Steel Mill,” is a taste of the forthcoming Daniel Lanois album, Belladonna Nocturne, due out June 19. The core band is Lanois (piano, pedal steel, and “dub orchestration”), D’Angelo veteran Jermaine Holmes, and bassist Jim Wilson, of Rollins Band. In addition to drummer Brian Blade, Emmylou Harris is listed among the guests, so presumably it won’t be entirely an instrumental album, but this glitchy soulful ambience is certainly appreciated.
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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 tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.
▰ I would have recorded and shared the dulcet sizzle of my dolsot bibimbap lunch, but the K-pop playing on the restaurant stereo would have earned me a takedown notice. (I did get a good pun out of it. I also learned a new-to-me word: “nurungji,” or “scorched rice,” the flavor of the sucking candy that came with my bill.)
▰ These endless automated spam calls for fake loans and other phishy hijinks just can’t be sustainable. The prevalence must be impacting how people even use their phones, how (not) responsive people are to inbound calls in general. It’s kind of bizarre robocalls can legally persist like this.
▰ My go-to speech-to-text app transcribed “Disquiet Junto” as “Disquatento” and I’m like, “Do you even know me?”
▰ We live in the golden age of vaporware.
▰ A friend DMd me the transcription of a voice message from an elder relative, whose accented English was impenetrable (i.e., ignored) by the automated voice-to-text tool. I thought immediately of novelist Malka Older talking about writing for people whose names are underlined in Microsoft Word.
▰ Was discussing a new and still quite inexplicable piece of music gear with friends, and we were flummoxed by the contrast between its reported capabilities and its exceedingly minimal input interface. I found myself replying, “My money’s on neural chip implant or plant-based telepathy,” which is the most it’s-Friday thing I’ve said since … well, maybe last Friday. In any case, I took it as a sign to log off social media for the weekend. (Also, I think the input answer is that the screen is a touchscreen, and likely most of the scripting happens on a laptop, to be ported over.)
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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