Webhamster Henry's Top 10 Imaginary Sound Events of 2024
- Thoughts and Prayers Compilation Vol. XLVIII God Help Us (2024)
"Thoughts and Prayers" aren't just cynical excuses to take no action on the epidemic of gun violence in the USA, their efficacy has been studied extensively at George Mason University. Dr. Geoff Pfarrer-Landrieu and his grad students have staked out sanctuaries of many religions and a few cults to collect the prayers. And like automated Buddhist prayer wheels, a clever app plays these prayers continuously and monitors news feeds to see which of these is the most effective.
The results will supposedly be ready in Fall 2025, if nobody gets shot.
- Living Flute The Wind In The Reeds (2024)
Well known musician, nature lover and tree hugger Roth Davison has a new release out where he's playing an actual bamboo grove without cutting down the plants. That is, the wind and tone holes are cut into living bamboo shoots, which he then plays (using a rig where he can lie sideways). Larger bore plants are used as percussion. I don't know why nobody has done this before.
- The Warm Sound of 0x766a4e6c /A/A/D/ Records (2024)
Here's what has been said so often: that vinyl has an intangible, immeasurable warmth that you never get from digital sound reproduction. And /A/A/D/ Records proves it by pressing their releases on a special polymer that warms in the presence of ammonia, and eventually combusts. It comes with a little atomizer.
This was an example of one of their one-off records, a kind of minimal effort, but under the right chemical circumstances, the warmth comes through with breaks, mushy tracks, and craquelure like you've never heard.
- Seconds Marky Christensen Installation (2024)
As you walk into a darkened gallery, you hear the sound of of about a dozen amplified pocket watches ticking, with more and more being added, making a pulsing wave of prickly white noise. The speakers are actually precisesly phase controlled so you hear different textures in different parts of the room. Slowly, filters cut in using the noise as excitation of vocal filters that pronounce which second it is in various languages.
- Fix the Mic Over Tunes, You Tube (2024)
Everyone knows the Trump Campaign of 2024 was full of speeches laced with ideological dog whistles,
but the weird [he said "weird"] thing is that there was actual ultrasonic content present at those rallies, up in the high frequencies of the mic squeaks and all the recordings of "Ave Maria" in his infamous 30 minute playlist. Trumps nerdy billionaire pals may have helped with this, based on totally fallacious arguments about subliminal messages.
Over Tunes helpfully has slowed this audio down for you to hear these high frequency messages, most of which are urging people not to leave the rally, which more or less proves the poor efficacy of this psi-ops technique.
- Six Transistors Social Media Service (2024)
This is the year people started leaving Twitter or whatever it's called, en masse to cast their social net to a service that is (hopefully) not surveilling them as much. The Fediverse, known mostly for the Mastodon messaging service, is a very flexible protocol, and with Six Transistors, a social network was created that is 100% audio based, having no textual content whatsoever. Bringing up the native app or web app, it presents a transistor radio like interface with a tuning dial and volume wheel that is also the on-off button. Yes, there is a Raspberry Pi version that fits into an actual 60s era transistor radio case, or 3D printed facsimile thereof! Enjoy it before it gets run over with ads and bot content!
- Dusty Epitaph Omniplast (2024)
We are now coating our future Anthropocene geological strata with microplastic. Microplastic is literally everywhere, from the top of our mountain peaks, clouds, the surface and depths of the ocean, and in our blood and the blood of all blood pumping creatures. I'm sure it's also in a lot of plant and fungal life as well. It's a stunning achievement in pollution.
And a remarkable thing about nano plastics - plastic fragments smaller than one micrometer - is that they reach a limit of breaking down and will last forever.
Using precision UV lasers and microscopes, you can actually scribe sound on these tiny bits of dust, like tiny LPs except it's only a second or two. Yes, this is a thing.
Omniplast, in Yekaterinburg Russia, gets its raw supply of nanoplastics by filtering rainwater, and uses that scriber to put a tiny grain of audio on each of these fragments. As they naturally swirl around in the air currents, a laser scans the dust and sonifies it, for true granular synthesis!
- C1440 Boom Room Back Tracks Installation (2024)
Cassettes are back now, and that means boom boxes might be next! And to go the next level in analog tape recording and playback, concept artist Back Tracks has scaled up the cassette shell and player to room sized, and now half a day's audio fits on each side of the giant cassette, which uses 2" Ampex videotape! They have made about a dozen of these, which need to be carted around with forklifts.
- Make it With Music! Respective accounts on Social Media (2024)
Everyone knows what a fan I am of Industrial Musicals, and I'm happy to say that sales meetings at AI Music making companies Suno and Udio have brought back this tradition in ways that only they can. With all lyrics, songs and MC dialog generated in twenty languages and fifteen musical styles on the fly to match the latest sales figures and projections, it's kind of a taxing listen. But keep in mind: they mostly have to motivate salesbots, which eat this kind of stuff up! (And use it for training, of course).
Normally this kind of production is kept inside the walls of the companies involved, but this is the age of letting-it-all-hang-out on TikTok!
- Simulacra Sound Fakebook Goomatic Virtual Synths (2024)
And speaking of Machine Learning, I must mention this fascinating project from Goomatic Virtual Synths, where well known analog patches implemented on an exhaustive catalog of modules were coded up and correlated to the sounds they made. A dataset was then made of popular "switched on " cover albums and bleepy-blorpy originals of the 60s and 70 which seemed to come out monthly by the dozens, and this dataset was back translated into diagrams of the patches that went into their creation. These patch diagrams have been collected into a "fakebook" so you can get the exact cheezy sound you need on your meticulously restored old modular!