Posts Tagged ‘noise’
“Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?”*…
The relentless progression of human technology leaves us with many relics: the Walkman, the Game Boy, the payphone, the VCR. But there’s an aspect to these devices that isn’t preserved when you let them gather dust on a basement shelf: their signature beeps, clicks, and whirrings.
In the interest of salvaging these obsolete noises, Brendan Chilcutt has since 2012 maintained the Museum of Endangered Sounds, for which he aims to complete data collection by 2015. Then he’ll “spend the next seven years developing the proper markup language to reinterpret the sounds as a binary composition.” Suggestions of exhibits to include are welcome.
The site is already fascinating place to click around; depending on your age, you’ll be transported by the original default Nokia ringtone, or the Windows 95 startup chords. The AOL Instant Messenger alerts in particular take me back—someone wants to chat! Is it the devastatingly cute girl I have a crush on? No, just one of my fellow nerds. But hope lives on.
When technology reaches a stage of silent frictionlessness, Chilcutt says, these audio files will offer some of the most direct links to our mechanical past. Nice to have them all in one place…
The din of typewriters and Tamogatchis lives on: “Museum of Endangered Sounds keeps vintage noises alive.” Explore the museum here.
See also: Conserve the Sound’s “Projekt.”
* Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
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As we listen carefully, we might recall that it was on this date in 1830 that the Anti-Masonic Party, the official first third-party in United States political history, convened its convention. The Anti-Masons formed, as the name suggests, to combat the perceived secret government influence Freemasonry held in the U.S. While the party quickly dissolved after anti-Masonic public feelings died down (most of its members folded in the Whig Party), It did pioneer presidential nomination conventions and the adoption of a party platform.
For more on the Anti-Masons see “Nearly two centuries ago, a QAnon-like conspiracy theory propelled candidates to Congress.”
“Soon silence will have passed into legend”*…
The idea behind myNoise is to use the noises you most enjoy to mask the noises you don’t want to hear: chatty colleagues, your tinnitus, or even your inner voice when you can’t shut it down! The concept is simple, works extremely well, and doesn’t require expensive noise-cancelling headphones. Thanks to its sound quality and unique audio engineering, myNoise sets the standard among online background noise machines…
Missing the buzz of the coffee shop? Anxious to mask unwanted audio distractions? Need to concentrate (or sleep)? MyNoise is ready to help.
[Image above: Flickr user Sascha Kohlmann, via]
* “Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.” — the censorious Jean Arp (who, if he were alive today, might or might not agree that “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”…)
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As we bathe in sound, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that that Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” reached number one on the Billboard charts– the first rock and roll record to ascend to that pinnacle.
Exactly one year later, Dick Clark began one of television’s longest-running stints as a host when he debuted Bandstand on WFIL, a Philadelphia TV station. The show was eventually picked up by ABC-TV and changed its name to American Bandstand.
“I see by hearing”*…
Daniel Kish navigates the world like a bat does—and he does so without ever leaving the ground.
After losing his vision as an infant, Kish taught himself to move around with the help of echolocation. Like bats, Kish uses his mouth to produce a series of short, crisp clicking sounds, and then listens to how those sounds bounce off the surrounding landscape. (Our winged neighbors tend to emit these clicks at frequencies humans can’t hear, but Kish’s clicks are perfectly audible to human ears.) From there, Kish makes a mental map of his environment, considering everything from broad contours—like walls and doors—down to textural details.
Kish now teaches echolocation, mostly to students who are blind. For these students, Kish believes that an echolocation practice can buoy confidence and independence. Kish’s own experience is persuasive—he famously bikes along hilly, car-lined streets—and a growing body of scholarly research has begun to unpack exactly how expert echolocaters do their thing. This research has also backed up the idea that this skill is highly learnable. When researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, asked novice echolocators to use tongue clicks to determine which of the two objects in front of them was larger, the newbies were soon able to do so in a way that the scientists couldn’t attribute to chance.
Whatever your sightedness, there’s something to be said for learning to listen more attentively to sonic scenery. Kish believes that vision has a way of blunting the other senses unless people work to really flex them. Deft echolocators, he says, are able to perceive fine differences—distinguishing, say, between an oleander bush (“a million sharp returns”) and an evergreen (“wisps closely packed together, which sound like a bit like a sponge or a curtain”). They’re discovering sonic wonder wherever they go…
A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound: “Teach Yourself to Echolocate.”
Hello, Bumblebee Bat
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As we take sound advice, we might send closely-heard birthday greetings to Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett, FRS; he was born on this date in 1886. A psychologist (and the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge), he was one of the pioneers of both cognitive psychology and cultural psychology. His 1932 book Remembering was hugely influential in its demonstration (via the experiments it reports) that memory is not a consultative process that retrieves facts from an immutable record, as most then believed; rather, it is reconstruction, open it a variety of influences that can shape what is recalled.
But relevantly here, he also studied sound and its impact on humans. His 1934 book The Problem of Noise is a study of “sound that is a nuisance,” and its impact, both physiological and psychological, on hearers. It was, though probably unintended, Bartlett’s contribution to “clearing the air” for echolation.
“A volcano may be considered as a cannon of immense size”*…
On August 27, 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.
It was 10:02 a.m. local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing”); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery in a north-westerly direction”); and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius (“coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”). In all, it was heard by people in over 50 different geographical locations, together spanning an area covering a thirteenth of the globe.
Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Traveling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about four hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history…
More at “The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times.”
(And for a consideration of “the noise beneath the noise,” check out “The Noise at the Bottom of the Universe.”)
* Oliver Goldsmith, Goldsmith’s Miscellaneous Works (1841), 90
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As we Bring the Noise, we might that it was on this date in 2013 that the eruption of Ecuador’s Tungurahua volcano sent a massive plume of ash, stones, and vapor soaring more than eight miles into the sky above the Andes.
Pyrocumulus clouds soaring high above the Andes due to the eruption of Ecuador’s Tungurahua volcano
“I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own”*…
Olympic National Park: the stone marking the quietest square inch in the U.S. (stolen by vandals in 2009)
Reaching the quietest square inch of land in the U.S. is literally a walk in the park. Well, a rainforest, to be precise. To find it, you hike along the Hoh River in the heart of Olympic National Park, past bigleaf maples carpeted in spike-mosses and around epiphytic ferns sprouting out of the saturated Northwest soil. Eventually you pass through the split trunk of a Sitka spruce to enter an even muddier, mossier, more verdant nook of the forest. Look to your left and you may notice a tiny red pebble resting on a mossy nurse log, marking 47°51’57.5″N, 123°52’13.3″W. That’s America’s quietest wild place.
The quietest inch isn’t a sound vacuum. It represents a place with a minimum of human-made noise. The discipline of acoustic ecology, which is dedicated to understanding the natural sounds that come through loud and clear when we’re not around, outlines an important distinction between sound and noise. The blip of water droplets from a forest canopy? Sound. The tinny din of Taylor Swift through smartphone speakers? Noise. For example, the inch, as it’s often called, is exposed to flute-like bugling from Roosevelt elk, the Morse-code chirp of the American Dipper, and assertive hooting from the endangered Northern Spotted Owl. The steady rush of the Hoh River rounding the shoulder of Mount Olympus whooshes nearby, and summer snowmelt punctuates the setting with staccato droplets. In spite of the natural sound, dense forest engulfs the inch in a hush that is, at times, below 20 decibels—quieter than most recording studios…
Understand why silence is golden at “Welcome to the Quietest Square Inch in the U.S.“; dive more deeply at “The Unintended Consequences of Noise.”
* Chaim Potok, The Chosen
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As we keep it down, we might spare a thought for Oscar Hammerstein; he died on this date in 1919. As a newly-arrived immigrant to the U.S., Hammerstein worked in a cigar factory, where he discovered ways to automate the rolling process. He patented his innovation and made a fortune– which he promptly reinvested in his true passions, music and the arts. Possessed of a sharp sense of design and an equally good acoustical sense, he built and ran theaters and concert halls, becoming one of Americas first great impressarios… a fact worth honoring, as history tends to overlook “Oscar the First” in favor of his grandson, Oscar Hammerstein II, the gifted librettist/lyricist and partner of Richard Rodgers.
Hammerstein (on left, with cigar) and conductor Cleofonte Campagnini
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