Discarded sounds, audiophiles, white men's bodies, all the quietest places, dredging

1. These are all the sounds discarded when Suzanne Vega’s ‘Tom’s Diner’ was compressed to MP3.

“Right now, you’re probably listening to music on your computer. The source of that music — whether you’re listening to an mp3 file or streaming — is a compressed version of a file that was much more detailed, but way larger. It’s worth interrupting your music for a moment and asking: What sounds are you missing? To get a sense, watch the video above, created by Ryan Maguire, a Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia Center for Computer Music, for a project called The Ghost In The Mp3. It’s a song made with only the sounds that were left out when compressing Suzanne Vega’s ‘Tom’s Diner’ to mp3.”

2. And yet, beyond a certain point, most people can’t hear the difference between audio formats.

“Bottom line: Not one person had any clue whether they were listening to the Pono or to the ‘inferior’ iTunes track. There was zero confidence in determining which was which. When forced to state a preference, six out of seven people actually picked the iPhone as the higher-quality experience. An eighth person refused to guess because he simply had no idea. These folks were in their 20s and 30s, all avid music listeners. A couple of them write about music professionally and one is a video producer.”

3. The supercut of white men that opens this interview with artist Hannah Black about embodiment, activism, and technology is disquieting.

“In the end it was too sci-fi an idea and didn’t work out as an essay, so instead became the video My Bodies. I wanted to say something about how there is no generic body, no such thing as ‘the body’; bodies are raced, gendered, and assisted differently in the world. I collected images of white business executives, and you hear the voices of African-American female singers—Aaliyah, Beyonce, Whitney Houston, Jennifer Hudson, and many others—all singing the phrase ‘my body.’ I also use Ciara’s song ‘Body Party.’ There is a whole tradition in black philosophy of trying to think about to what extent white thought is able to conceptualize black people as having bodily integrity.”

4. All the quietest places.

“Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day. After feeding acoustic data into a computer algorithm, the researchers modeled sound levels across the country including variables such as air and street traffic. Deep blue regions, such as Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, have background noise levels lower than 20 decibels—a silence likely as deep as before European colonization, researchers say.That’s orders of magnitude quieter than most cities, where noise levels average 50 to 60 decibels.”

5. Gotta love the dedication these people have to creating awesome events around dredging, including a new one planned for this summer in Minnesota.

“The Dredge Research Collaborative investigates human sediment handling practices, through publications, an event series, and various other projects… DredgeFest Great Lakes is an event — symposium, workshops, and tours — about the human manipulation of sediment on North America’s fourth coast, the Great Lakes.”

Today’s 1957 American English Language Tip

diamond. Properly three syllables; popularly (US) two.

The Credits: 1. deathandtaxesmag.com / @caradefabio 2. slate.com 3. rhizome.org / @jessedarling 4. sciencemag.org 5. dredgeresearchcollaborative.org