The Science of Calling a Cat

Plus: sound gadgets for infants, onomatopoeia ingenuity, and subscriber rewards

This Week in Sound: The Science of Calling a Cat

May 9, 2023

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In This Issue

▰ sound gadgets for babies
▰ biometric politics
▰ ecommerce noise pollution
▰ voice-to-text poetry

And those are just a few of the stories, observations, and projects This Week in Sound. Welcome (back) to my newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, storytelling, warfare, art, society, and anywhere else it might cackle.

Your support is appreciated. Also appreciated: sound-related stories you come across from your field of specialization. My name is Marc Weidenbaum. I live in San Francisco and at Disquiet.com.

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Paid in Full

There’s currently no particular benefit for paying for a subscription to This Week in Sound, aside from old issues being behind a paywall. I figured I’d get some input from readers regarding the situation. Hence this poll:

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Sound Ledger¹

Audio culture by the numbers

30%: Goal to reduce “the share of people ‘chronically disturbed by transport noise,’” per the European Commission’s Zero Pollution Action Plan

30%: Percentage of adults exposed to excessive noise, per “a study Apple conducted using data from its Apple Watch”

$20,000: Reported top asking price, per minute, for deepfakes on the darknet

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This Week in Sound

A lightly annotated clipping service

JUST KIDDING: There is a Kickstarter (I have no association with it) for a “smart pacifier.” The little device, which seems to combine a harmonica and a binky, is designed to “activate the creative mind at an early age, making passive listeners into musicians before they can say their first words.” … And separately, news about a nursery device that turns “patented auditory sequences into soothing melodic and other background tracks to help the infant brain do its job of paying attention to environmental sound changes.” It’s the Smarter Sleep Sound Soother from RAPT Ventures.

WHISKER WHISPERERS: “Scientists in France might have just found the most effective way to catcall an unfamiliar cat. The team discovered that cats living at a cat cafe responded most quickly to a human stranger when the stranger used both vocal and visual cues to get their attention. The cats also appeared to be more stressed out when the human ignored them completely,” writes Ed Cara at Gizmodo. Here’s a helpful diagram of how the experiment, by Charlotte de Mouzon and Gérard Leboucher at Paris Nanterre University’s Laboratory of Compared Ethology and Cognition, was undertaken:

THE THIX OF IT: “Irish inventors Rhona Togher and Eimear O’Carroll created an advanced acoustic material that reduces noise and can be used with household appliances, as well as in the automotive, construction, and aerospace industries." The material is called SoundBounce, and it “has a cellular structure that works in tandem with a thixotropic gel placed inside the cells that allow sound to be dampened, reducing noise transmission from one space to another.” FYI, “thixotropic” means “Becoming a fluid when agitated but solid or semi-solid when allowed to stand.” Togher and O’Carroll are currently in the running for a European Inventor Award 2023.

CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC: The ecommerce/delivery reality is making life louder: “With millions of Americans now living in close proximity to a warehouse, it’s time to start treating these drab, feature-less buildings like pollution hotspots, says a recent report by the Environmental Defense Fund. Warehouses are quickly popping up all over the US, bringing truck traffic and tailpipe emissions with them. And yet there is no federal database to see where current or proposed warehouses are located, unlike other major sources of pollution like oil and gas facilities. ... [T]here’s significantly more traffic, air pollution, and noise in census tracts with warehouses compared to those without them, another study based in California found last year.”

QUICK NOTES: Rim Shot: Netflix has a news desk (I don’t know how new it is) and it’s called “Tudum” — i.e., onomatopoeia for the network’s sonic brand logo — and that is sorta genius (netflix.com/tudum). ▰ Bank Teller: Voice biometrics was the focus of a letter sent by Senator Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, reportedly to JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab and TD Bank. ▰ Moon Man: Austin Kleon did a new blackout poem inspired by comments I made in recent issue of This Week in Sound. ▰ Bull Market: The Shriek of the Week was the bullfinch, “adept mimics” that “can be taught to whistle a human tune like a parrot.” ▰ Mo’ Mojang: There's new ambient music in Minecraft (update 1.20) and Rohan Jaiswal knows where to find it. ▰ Street Scene: Check out this microtonal composition based on data related to Krasnodar Public Transport in Russia. (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!) ▰ Blue Jay Way: Soundfly, which offers courses for musicians and connects them to mentors, has a story about bird song — I love the idea of musicians having an avian tutor.

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’Tis the Season

There's a cool recent video game called Season in which you wander the rural landscape on a bicycle, taking pictures and, quite wonderfully, making audio field recordings — all in the shadow of a looming catastrophe. I have a full page review of it in the new issue of The Wire (June 2023: the one with a bright red cover that's dedicated to The Fall).

I'll post the full text in a month when the next issue comes out. Meanwhile, here’s the opening paragraph:

Have you ever paused in the middle of a video game simply to contemplate your virtual surroundings? Not paused as in hit the pause button — not turned off the game, just eased your urge to level up: to shoot or run or jump, or whatever adrenaline-raising action the game was engineered to impel you to accomplish. Now, what if a game was explicitly designed for you to take such a pause? What if paying attention to the world around you — to the world within the game, the world of the game — was the goal of the game? What if observing — looking, listening, recording — was itself the principal game mechanic?

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Furniture Music

I just posted the 14th in the ongoing series of Q&As with participants in the Disquiet Junto music community. This is at least our fourth PhD to be interviewed, and to my knowledge the first to have studied with the composer Morton Feldman.

The subject is Paul Beaudoin, educated in Boston and currently living in Tallinn, Estonia. In addition to telling a Feldman story, he talked about how one of his own students encouraged him to add beats to his previously “beatless” music, and he shared his thoughts on whom you should (and shouldn't) be composing for. And here is Beaudoin’s Feldman story:

What a paradox Feldman was. His music lives at the border of silence (or so the canon likes us to think), but Feldman was a very imposing man. Brash and large, he spoke with the voice of an authority that was not to be questioned. In a composition seminar, there was a heated discussion about musical motion — that music somehow “moves.” Feldman insisted that music did not move, and to prove his point, he picked up a chair and threw it across the room. “There,” he practically yelled, “that’s motion.”

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20% Solution

I love the percentage allotted to the incoming rhythm guitarist on this flyer a local band posted at a neighborhood record shop

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Public Scratch Pad

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week (or in this case, the past two weeks). These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon).

▰ I signed up for the artifact.news service on my phone to check it out, and of the over 60 categories of news you are to select at least 10 from initially, music wasn’t included.

▰ Thought there was a plane flying overhead, and realized my laptop’s brown noise app had turned on

▰ Whenever someone mentions having “a part time person” as part of their project, I wonder what that entity is when it is not a person

▰ At night before I go to sleep I often record stray thoughts for morning using speech-to-text. Usually they’re comprehensible the next day. Sometimes they’re incomprehensible except as abstract song lyrics, such as what I am currently looking at: “How old I went to lock my love you got some.”

▰ Current writing font: Nunito.

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Recording Asynchronous Trios, Part 2

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members. They then have through Monday to upload a track in response. Here’s the project that came to a close yesterday, May 8, 2023. Roughly 60 musicians from around the world participated in the first round of solos the previous week. This project resulted in over 60 duets. Next week we’ll make them into trios.

Disquiet Junto Project 0592: Better Than On

The Assignment: Record the second third of an asynchronous trio.

Please note: While this is the second part of a three-part project, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which will occur over the course of three consecutive weeks.

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0591). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Important: Leave space for what is yet to come.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from. The majority are in this playlist.

Any additional non-SoundCloud entries appear in the discussion:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0591-the-loneliest-number/

(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up in or disappear from that playlist and discussion. Things are fluid on the internet.)

To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.

Note: It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.

It is strongly encouraged that you look through the above discussion on the Lines forum, because many tracks include additional contextual information there.

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right.

To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.

Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do up to two total. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet ( look at the project’s post on Lines, linked to in these instructions, or to the project playlist, which will be posted here once tracks start coming in). The goal is for as many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.

Listen to the results in the project’s SoundCloud playlist. Project details at disquiet.com/0592.

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¹Footnotes (Sound Ledger)

Goal: politico.eu. Apple: cnet.com. Deepfake: kaspersky.com.

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Elsewhere

Online locations where I generally reflect on sound publicly or otherwise hang out. I tend to take weekends off(line).

▰ disquiet.com
▰ instagram.com/dsqt
▰ post.lurk.org/@disquiet (Mastodon)
▰ soundcloud.com/disquiet
▰ youtube.com/disquiet
▰ bandcamp.com/disquiet

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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