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:
▰ Sonic fertilizer
▰ Boom times for acousticians
▰ Quiet ride’s unforeseen consequences
▰ Dorm RAs on mediating noise
This Week in Sound also publishes, as a thank-you to paid subscribers, Throughline issues that consist of annotated recommended listening, each installment focused on a different topic. I’m always trying to think of better ways to reward paid subscribers, and have an additional one, directly tied sound studies, that I may introduce in the next month or so.
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, that is why.
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On the Line
Some favorite recent writing
▰ Carry On
The nightjar carries it lightly
But the world’s heavy as a lamp in a gale.
I watched it move through the olives and the hush,
Over rooftops, stones, and cragged hills,
Unclenched as it glistens in the gloam,
Indifferent, sonorous, and true.
That’s the opening stanza of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ poem “The Nightjar” from the August 20, 2026, issue of the New York Review of Books.
. . .
▰ Novel Feature
Every home has its own sound world.
That’s musician and sound artist Alice Boyd, who was invited by the estate agent and journal the Modern House to produce a soundscape of one of its locations, a place in South Oxfordshire.
. . .
▰ Idyll Chatter
The driver muttered something that sounded like a dog trying to speak, and without understanding, Paul said yes. Never had he understood the people here and their bizarre accent, and he sometimes had the sense that they spoke unintelligibly to him on purpose, which he in turn quite liked.
That’s from Air, the novel by Swiss writer Christian Kracht, recently translated by Daniel Bowles
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Sound Ledger
Audio culture by the numbers
59: Percent greater yield measured in a plant submitted to specific acoustic signals
340,000,000: Estimated number of people worldwide with “blindness or moderate-to-severe visual impairment,” and who would benefit from better audio tools, such as personalized audio guidance
40: Percent of organizations where employees have “encountered a deepfake combined with social engineering during an audio call”
Sources: plants (newscientist.com), blindness (nature.com), deepfake (biometricupdate.com)
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This Week in Sound
A lightly annotated clipping service
▰ JURASSIC BARK: “Very little is known about the acoustic landscape of long-gone environments, such as the Jurassic forests. The sounds made by dinosaurs and other charismatic vertebrates are not definitively known because their vocal organs rarely preserve well in fossils. Unlike tetrapod vocal cords, the sound-producing organs present in the sclerotized cuticle of some arthropods do fossilize well. … One species called above 20 kHz, suggesting that ultrasonic communication in insects was established long before the emergence of bats in the Eocene. Evolving mammalian hearing thresholds suggest early predators imposed acoustic pressures before bats. This arms race with singing ensiferans likely drove Jurassic insect song diversity and the evolution of mammalian and insect auditory systems.”
▰ MEASURE TWICE: “We also advocate for an independent investigation into infrasound noise pollution for data centers near residences and schools.” That’s the Federation of American Scientists weighing in on the expanding data center construction controversy. An especially interesting detail: “Existing Colorado laws do not effectively regulate data center noise because of their low frequencies. Colorado’s maximum permissible noise levels are measured according to db(A). (In a possibly premature statement, the editors of The National Review determined “most of the concerns about noise or pollution are unfounded.”) Per the FAS: “This measure biases towards audible, higher frequencies, as shown by the curved red line in the figure below.”
▰ BAD DATA: “Unlikely Winners of the Data Center Boom: Sound Consultant. The sprawling facilities get a lot of attention for their water and energy usage, but it’s the threat of constant noise emission that has nearby residents up in arms. That’s where the acousticians come in.” The Bloomberg article’s title is odd, given that sound consultants are unlikely beneficiaries here the way dentists are unlikely to benefit from Halloween candy — but in any case, you know noise concerns are pressing when sound technicians are called in.
▰ WITHIN EARSHOT: “Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a double identity. He is an artist who, in 2019, jointly won the Turner prize; and one of his works is, for my money, among the most striking on show at this year’s Venice Biennale. But he is also the director of a young NGO, founded in 2023, called Earshot, which investigates human rights abuses using sound evidence. In less euphemistic language, that means, on occasion, investigating horrific killings.”
▰ FISH STORY: “A master’s thesis defended this spring found that offshore wind farm noise causes herring schools to disperse near the source, but the fish can swim away from noisy areas when necessary and their spring spawning was unaffected. Kirke Paris examined in a master’s thesis defended at the University of Tartu how low-frequency noise typical of offshore wind farms affects the behavior of Baltic herring. A field experiment showed that herring schools were less dense near the noise source. However, the preliminary result does not mean wind farms necessarily cause significant harm to fish.”
▰ EYE DUNNO: Details on a smartglasses competitor: “RayNeo focuses on capturing what the user and their counterpart are saying as precisely as possible. For this purpose, in addition to an array of four microphones, the glasses contain a VPU bone conduction sensor that captures the vibrations of the wearer’s vocal cords to ensure precise speech transcription even in noisy environments.”
▰ SONG LINES: Abstract for a fascinating research article: “The human capacity to construct and share subjective experiences from diverse sensory inputs is central to human cognition, and is vividly exemplified through music listening. Direct, focused music perception has been extensively studied while free, imaginative listening, typical of real-world engagement with music, has not. Here, we identify shared neural representations for imaginings evoked by matched excerpts of music and speech across listeners. Twenty participants freely imagine stories while listening to ten music excerpts in an fMRI scanner, then recount their imaginings. Stories for each excerpt are highly similar between listeners. Stimulus-specific spatial patterns are observed in auditory regions for music perception, speech perception, and music report. Triple pattern similarity across all conditions reveals unique spatial patterns in default mode, language, and association regions. These findings demonstrate that music elicits detectable, modality-general brain representations specific to particular excerpts, pointing to a shared neural basis for meaning-making across diverse sensory inputs.”
▰ GRACE NOTES: Cruise Control: “The Hollywood theme park built a ‘whisper quiet’ ride to avoid angering nearby neighbors. They didn’t fully account for the enthusiasm of the riders.” ▰ Negotiation Room: Dorm RAs recommend how to cope with noise. ▰ Backseat Driver: Tips when Siri doesn’t work in your car. ▰ Whale Tale: Research into how ocean noise affects whale songs. ▰ Qubit Much: The possible future of quantum computing music.
Credit Due: Thanks, Geoff Manaugh (Jurrasic)!
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Waiting Room Zombies
Hyper-realistic TV like The Pitt can still bend toward the fantastic
With the January 2027 return of the TV series The Pitt just announced, it’s a good time to revisit a keen and telling moment of sound design from the most recent season, its second, which came to a close back in mid-April.
First, just in case you’re recovering from a medically induced coma in the ICU and aren’t aware of The Pitt, it’s an acclaimed scripted drama running on HBO Max about doctors doing the best they can in an underfunded ER in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The show won the Best Drama Series award at the 2025 Emmys; this year it has more Emmy nominations, 25, than any other show. The Pitt stars Noah Wyle, who previously played a doctor on the long-running E.R.
Even with all its persistent matters of mortality, including medically accurate gore, the show is at its core a workplace drama, of the categorical sort that highlights how just about everyone involved, even if they don’t get along, does an exceptional job under extraordinary circumstances.
The intensity of those circumstances is heightened in The Pitt because of its naturalistic structure: in a format reminiscent of the old thriller 24, all the episodes in a given season take place sequentially from start to finish in the exact number of hours as those episodes. Which is to say, both of The Pitt’s two seasons so far — each of which consisted of 15 episodes — took place over the course of 15 consecutive hours. Aside from occasional state-of-mind flashbacks (often relating to PTSD), the episodes remain in the persistent present. Where one episode ends, the next begins. As viewers, we have the relative comfort, cliffhangers and deaths aside, of experiencing those hours one week at a time, while the characters experience them within one highly compressed day. 24 originally ran from 2001 to 2010, overlapping with E.R., which ran from 1994 to 2009.
Furthering the realism of The Pitt is the paucity of any sort of musical score. Instead, the sounds of the ER are highlighted, even heightened, throughout each episode. Much as with the beeping terminals and cellphones of Industry, another workplace drama on HBO Max (which produced The Pitt alongside BBC Two), here the EKG machines, defibrillators, and rattly wheelchairs collude in a quotidian suite that serves as the sonic backdrop for the episodic storytelling.
The limited non-diegetic — or out-of-scene — score in The Pitt is by Gavin Brivik, whose experience working in horror films serves him and the series well. A full album was released for season one, with a brief track for each of the episodes. The “3:00 P.M.” entry (each episode in the show is titled simply by its hour) so sounds like medical machines that it could easily be mistaken for merely that.
Which brings us to “6:00 P.M.,” written by Danny Hogan and show co-creator R. Scott Gemmill (who also worked on E.R.), and directed by Amanda Marsalis. (Other key crew: music editor Lorena Perez Batista, supervising sound editor Bryan Parker, and re-recording mixers Todd Grace and Ed. C. Carr III.) The ER in The Pitt this day is more tense than usual, due to a cyberattack that has rendered all the computers useless, and has the older staff informing the younger ones what the protocol is for landlines and what “that sound” is (it’s a fax machine).
Then the moment happens. “Chairs is looking like Mullaney’s on St. Paddy’s Day,” says beleaguered nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa). By “chairs” she means the waiting room, which is overrun with impatient would-be patients. “They’re gonna break through the doors like zombies,” she warns.
Evans speaks right after two other doctors, Wyle’s Dr. Robby and Isa Briones’ snarky Dr. Santos, converse about patient satisfaction scores. By the show’s standards, the sonic bed for that conversation is quiet. This is at a timecode of roughly 16:14 in the episode. There are footsteps, and you get a sense of the cavernous space in the echo of Robby and Santos’ chatting. The silence isn’t entirely comforting: it’s a reminder that the computers are down.
That’s when Evan speaks, looking up from two handfuls of the paper the staff has resorted to due to the hacked computers. As the nurse speaks, a roar, sublimated but threatening, rises quickly. It sounds almost like a sports stadium, that moment when cheering and jeering are indistinguishable. A vuvuzela wouldn’t be out of place. It’s worth locating this moment in the episode, backing up, and then paying attention as the scene within the scene unfolds.
Now, nothing specific has changed in the moment to account for this newly introduced sound, except that the sound design is electing to underscore — word selected purposefully — the threat described in Evans’ reporting. The camera has moved just a few feet in the direction of the doors between the ER and the waiting room, and in that time, that threat, veering from anecdotal and hypothetical to looming, has become visceral.
Intentionally or not, the “zombie” moment closes with an awareness of sound, when a newly arrived patient, covered in blood and wheeled in prone on a cart, complains he can’t hear, and then that he is experiencing a lot of ringing.
The Pitt routinely trains us as viewers to listen, and the characters listen with us. Earlier in the episode, Gerran Howell’s sweet Dr. Whitaker, taking a phone call outside, hears a rapidly approaching pick-up truck before he sees it. Dr. Robby walks through the main area of the ER and, despite all his years of experience and his stature as a hospital leader, is startled by something as simple as a phone ringing. Then again, he has reason for concern: except when it signifies a steady heartbeat, sound is rarely a source of good news on The Pitt.
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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.
▰ Parent quietly to two young children at public library as they enter together: “What volume do we use here?”
Younger child, authoritatively: “Two.”
Parent: “Or even one.”
▰ When recently discussing video game sound design, a friend thought I said “Armoury” (as in the ASUS gaming software Armoury Crate) when I’d said “R. Murray” (as in acoustic ecologist and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer) and now I wanna start a dedicated game-sound channel called @armouryshaeffer
▰ Current Preoccupations: trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire + guitarist Eivind Aarset + no-vocals early CSN(&Y) tracks on YouTube + footfall sounds in video games + synthesizer player Amma Ateria + organist LJ Holoman + attending live jazz concerts
▰ Los Lobos will be playing the Hardly Strictly festival in San Francisco this October, first time I believe since 2018 (not counting a virtual performance in 2020). (I thought it was 2013, but someone informed me it was 2018, and they also played 2015.)
▰ Just a reminder that Listen to Wikipedia still exists, and is still fantastic, turning various public actions from the website into sound and, in turn, into an ongoing ever-changing piece of music. Listen at listen.hatnote.com.
▰ It occurs to me that the three words (pickleball, audiobook, soundwalk) central to the On the Line section of my August 19th This Week in Sound newsletter are all paired-noun yokings (contemporary neologisms) that would have, with the possible exception of audiobook, felt odd to me when I was young.
▰ Belated barbershop report, a day late: no music, as other barber had left for the day
▰ Afternoon trio for distant car alarm, bathroom fan, and refrigerator drone
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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
Parent entering public library with her child, D.A.R.Y.L.