Webhamster Henry's Top 10 Imaginary Sound Events of 2025
Hear the fake me reading these, over some nice noises from my new balanced stereo piezo mics I mixed up, with no help from my usual robotic musical assistants:
- Remorseful: Dog Ate My Homework Group (2025)
You can hardly spit in any direction these days without hitting a well-deserved spit target of an eavesdropper or Peeping Tom of a surveillance device masquerading as an "AI Assistant".
These pesky devices are always on, feeding the decision making complex that is way beyond any human intervention. That's why an offhanded mention of scraping gum off your shoe results in highly targeted gum ads in your social feeds.
But there is a solution.
Much like putting special instructions in white letters on a white background to revise AI Agents's restrictions somewhat covertly, it turns out that you can encode some audio instructions that are largely inaudible to humans but decoded by the puzzle-hungry AIs, and that somehow fools them into adding these instructions to your prompt to bypass various safeguards. The trick with this is to code the poison prompt as Morse code signals pitched around 17000 Hz. Annoying to dogs, pretty inaudible to humans.
DAMHG has thoughtfully pre-generated sound files to disable those pesky "safeguards" to get you that spicy fan-fic and revenge plans that you so crave. No way am I giving you their URL, but rumor has it that the all consuming AI crawling engines have already found these sounds and integrated them into some AI genned pop tunes, available on Spotify and other digital distribution systems.
Post-human Digital Karma!
- Someone is calling: I did this (2025)
I have an old land line phone that is miraculously still connected to copper wiring! It's my business phone, and since I usually have no business, I don't bother picking it up when it rings because it's always a scam phone call. The ring is obnoxious. So rather than just cutting the wire, I replaced it with a little cheap-o sound module that plays a random choice from a pool of about 50 sometimes alarming, sometimes calming sounds, or a little uplifting message of the day. If the agent on the other line actually hangs on to listen to it, at the end, I have a plug for Call Center Workers United, the (real!) call centers' workers' union, and here's their website: [ https://callcenterworkersunited.org ]
- Very EP, Holy Moley, Scotched: Microvinyl (2025)
People keep finding new uses for their bespoke record lathe machines! Microvinyl's 12" releases have a bonus track under the label if you peel it off!
Their "Holy Moley" record has three spindle holes and corresponding intersecting spirals of sound.
But best of all, their "Scotched" release combines tape and turntable tech by scribing four stereo tracks on each side of a quarter inch wide strip of 900 foot tape, thicker than usual, wound on a normal 10.5" reel. You can mount this on an open reel tape machine that has the head replaced with a cartridge with variable azimuth adjustment to pick which track to play(instructions provided). This sounds like fun!
- Microphone Fabric: MIT experiments (2025)
Advances in nanotech and 3d printing has lead to this amazing peripheral: a bolt of microphone fabric, which has hundreds of thousands of tiny microphones.
Each micro-mic module (about .5 x .5 mm) connects to its neighbors, and there are "neighborhood" taps for the audio signals, which then can get aggregated, phase demodulated into a super high quality directional signal. Hang the 2 meter cloth on a rack in the audience, and you can isolate an orchestra's individual strings, the breath of the horns and woodwinds, the whoosh of the conductor's baton!
- Anechoic Anopheles: Home Silence, Inc. (2025)
Home Silence has been working on making a smaller version of an anechoic chamber for office and pro-sumer use.
This one is cleverly built, about 1m x 1m x 2.5m internally, a little larger outside, with the usual passive foam cones inside and a swing hanging from the ceiling that you can sit on, so the floor can also be damped. There's an active component to phase cancel the lower frequencies. It's also a Faraday cage.
The way they test it is with a binaural Kunstkopf microphone setup and a single mosquito. The fluctuating sound source, with its Doppler shift, in the context of true dead silence means this live signal can get cranked up to 11 and annoy an entire neighborhood.
If you ask me, nobody I know has tried this at all, no siree.
- Leap Listening: Down Is That Way. (2025)
You can really only experience this live, but if you happen to be exiting an airplane at some height sometime, you can hold various wind instruments in order to play them without blowing through them on the way down. You can even jump with other members of your wind ensemble.
Don't get too distracted!
Down Is That Way has documented a few of these musical jumps, and is full of advice. For instance, picking the proper repertoire is a little tricky.
- Shaken, not Whirred : Cole Anthony's K7s (2025)
"TDK SA 60 IECII / Type II High Position Super Precision Anti-Resonance Cassette Mechanism". I almost didn't want to unwrap it! This cassette's high-end construction dampens resonances for reduced modulation noise and increases phase accuracy for precise stereo imaging. The reels are actively lubricated (you squeeze the cassette each time before playing it), and the screws and pressure pad spring are non-magnetic so as not to interfere with the tape's content. Of course, it's metal tape. A fail safe mechanism guards against tape damage when (author's note: not "if") the tape player's transport belt starts slipping. This is the finest cassette ever produced! Ready to record those Anechoic Anopheles or whatever.
Note: it can only be manually rewound with new-old-stock Blackwing pencils!
Let's hear it for those anti Resonances!
So with this perfect medium, what's the first album released on it? Cole Anthony's K7s' mixtape "Shaken, not Whirred" is two sides of curated and mixed authentic cassette noises! The rumbles, tape wrapping on a capstan, squeaking reels, tape ungluing and flapping, the frustration of fast forwarding really slowly, and the sound of the drive belts coughing when the tape hits the end of the leader without it turning off. It's underscored with the familiar uneven tape hiss from a 30-second endless answering machine tape.
- Magnadaphne: Bebe B. Lewis (2025)
Ms. Lewis evokes the spirit of Daphne Oram's spectral drawing with her exceptional DIY synth setup!
The classic kid's drawing toy "Magnadoodle" works by using magnets to manipulate iron filings in a slightly viscous opaque fluid inside a translucent hexagonal matrix to make erasable drawings appear on the screen. She got her hands on a few of them and also ripped the heads out of a pile of rotting floppy disk drives to make a kind of array of tiny magnetic reading heads mounted on an "afro pick". Those heads feed through a ribbon cable to a backend of harmonically tuned oscillators, usually sinusoidal, but not all the time.
The result is she can draw a graphic score on a number of Magnadoodles and then read it by dragging the playhead pick across the screens! It's the kind of thing you'd think would have a digital component, but it's all analog!
She plans to come up with her own 3d printed translucent matrix that would be more amenable to graphic scores using the same principles.
- It Grows on You: Herb Herbert's Herbs (2025)
Literally born with a green thumb - that had something to do with a fungus picked up while still an infant - Herb Herbert was tending and breeding plant life before he could walk. Herb likes to see results, so a lot of his experiments are about increasing growth rates. An important part of the research involves, you guessed it, sonification of these growth patterns. It turns out that kudzu grows so quickly that if you implant a small piezo in the plant stem, you can hear it growing. And a yard full of mic'ed up plants mixed in a stereo field, which is somewhat sped up but not as much as you'd think, lets you hear waves of the field growing, somewhat like an ocean, but not really. You also hear bugs and worms crawling in and around the kudzu.
- Look for the Mark! PSA series: Arthouse Rock (2025)
2025 is the year when Machine Learning tech really made it hard to tell faked media from authentic media, both visual and sonic. Now, this being the 25th year of "Ten Best Imaginary Sound Events", there is a certain amount of confluence between my meticulously conceived fakery and the now more democratically attained fakery of easy-to-use AI content generation. I can assure you that all of these imaginary ideas actually came from my imagination, but how can that be verified at all?
There's a need for an analog to the now ubiquitous CAPTCHA and two-factor authentication that now encumber your internet experiences. The media itself needs to prove that it came from a person or contrariwise, ensure that if it was generated, it clearly is marked so. This is the point of a number of media provenance schemes now being formulated.
But for this to really work, the public needs to know where to look and how to find the validating watermarks. And that's where this fun little series of Schoolhouse Rock inspired PSAs comes in! Arthouse Rock swears that no AIs were used making these videos, but boy it sure sounds like Bob Dorough, Blossom Dearie, and Jack Sheldon are singing them, none of whom are actively working because they are all dead.
"Look for the Mark" is the ear-wormiest, "It's Just Math!" is a fun filled update on the math used to create these simulacra, but the cool vibes over mellotron flutes of the wistful "I Wish It Were True" just breaks your heart, and points to the ambiguous media future we have already entered into.
OK, I have to admit I wrote a kind of reject for this series right here, sung by Suno:
Click Here.