To play legally, street musicians in Bangkok must be licensed. The licenses restrict when and where one can play – unlike some cities, the subway is not at all fair game – but they also protect musicians from getting hassled by the cops or anyone else.

The fellow we met was blind – music is a common vocation here for people with disabilities. Like many people from the rural Northeast, he came to Bangkok because he was no longer able to make a living in the provinces.

The field recording above has two parts. First, a song, and then (around 4:00) a short conversation, translated within the audio. The piece he’s playing is Northeastern string music, and he’s accompanied here by recorded drums from a tape deck. You see the instrument, the Phin, pretty often on the street, but the double-necked version is rare. Thanks to B for help with translation.

A spectrogram is a three-dimensional picture of sound – any sound. The three dimensions are time, frequency, and amplitude. Spectrograms usually look abstract, like successions of clumsy paint strokes or stills from Tron. They’re useful for sound engineers, but not all that good to look at. However, some software can also conduct spectral analysis in reverse, translating images into sound. In this case, the images are clear and the audio typically abstract.

The sound clip above, for example, was created from the picture(s) of me, moving from left to right and reading discrete clusters of color and texture as frequencies. The line of my thumb moves diagonally upward from finger to nail, causing its attendant sound to rise in pitch.

Photosounder.com, home of Photosounder, has a great demo video of how their program works with various images:

This kind of graphic sound creation has actually been around for several years (though newer programs are increasingly sophisticated), and musicians and sound artists have toyed with it extensively as a way to create strange noises that don’t otherwise exist.

I bring it up today not only because it’s fun, but because of the rhetoric of truth and discovery it inspires. People encountering this software for the first time quickly figure out that it can be used to encode information. As an experiment, you could take a screen shot of an email, turn it into “abstract” spectrographic sound, and then send it as an .MP3 to a friend. If your friend knew how you’d created the sound, she could then translate it back into an image, and read your original message. Likewise, you could embed translations of any image or text in a song or movie soundtrack as an ambient layer. The mind races at the probability that this has already been done many times, as a prank, an easter egg, a subtle political gesture, or even a means of legitimately covert communication.

Says one blogger about Photosounder:

I can see people … maybe hid[ing] messages in photographs or art work.

The hermeneutic exercise can, of course, encompass not only human communication, but universal structures as well. Several posters on Photosounder’s Youtube page imagine the applications of spectral analysis for science or pseudo-science:

The potential in this concept is far more than many people realize.

You could, for example, create hidden coded messages insides pictures/fractals, and/or DECODE incredible secrets of the Universe with very little modification. ;)

It would be interesting to hear whether electronic voice phenomena (EVP) could be detected in these complex sounds.

These posters understand implicitly that visualization is the standard best mode of reading data, that sound as we hear it fares poorly against image in revealing patterns and broad trends. Thus, they assume that phenomena in the world (say, ghosts) may exist under our noses, present but undetectable until we invent a light that can shine on them.

For both the spiritual and science-minded, this suggests that natural sound could be worth divining spectrographically in search of patterns we haven’t been able to pick up with our ears. Sonic images that appear orderly invite claims of design, intelligent or incidental.

A recent photoessay of whale and dolphin sounds, rendered with a program similar to Photosounder and published in the London Telegraph, is a great example:

These images may look like just pretty patterns, but they are visual representations of songs sung by whales and dolphins

The sounds were recorded by American engineer Mark Fischer and transformed into visuals using a mathematical tool called wavelets

Mark used to work on US Navy sonar and software for defence and aerospace companies but he now records the underwater conversations between whales and dolphins and transforms the waves into art

Mark then uses a branch of maths called wavelets which creates these intricate structures

"To look at a spectrogram you will see a simple, boring blur with a few harmonics," he said....

"With wavelets, however, there was an image that displayed extraordinary structure. Something was going on with this sound, even if we are not quite sure what"

The effect is even more apparent when colour is applied and the graph transformed from rectangular to polar coordinates, forming a circular graph

Atlantic spotted dolphin, wavelet graph

Recent research shows that humpback whale songs differ in local dialects and contain complex grammatical rules, showing a higher level of communication than first thought

The risk of this approach, of course, is in romantically imagining that the software has no bearing on the data represented. The complex beauty of the pictures may lead us to forget that the computational processes used to render them were designed by people who probably share many of our own standards of beauty – formal symmetry, clear coloration, sharp lines, etc. Faced with images like these, we’re inclined to imagine that god, or evolution, or some other force, created a perfectly-patterned world, one that can ultimately be “read” and understood. But no matter who or what is in charge, that isn’t the case.

Even my fancy new tea kettle (a wedding gift), which naturally has to whistle, features a lovely, train-emulating, duotone Hohner harmonica for a mouth.

As Karin Bijsterveld, Emily Thompson, and others have suggested, quieter technologies were a class-conscious response to an industrial-era love affair with noise. Whereas in the pre-Model T era the elite announced their status by being among the few who could move around town in engine-powered vehicles, by the early-20th century the roads were saturated. Traffic noise thus became uncouth, a marker of inefficient engineering and middle-class aesthetics, and the rich retreated to quieter alternatives. (Including the luxury car, with its hermetic interiority.)

Class-inflected desire for silent machinery has continued more or less unabated for the last century. So it was surprising to read, in an article from the New York Times published earlier this month, that some hybrid car companies are designing artificial sounds for next year’s models. Apparently, these companies have received complaints that their near-silent engines are a safety hazard, particularly for those less able to gauge traffic visually, such as children and the blind. As the article says about these vehicles, “they aren’t noisy enough.” A video from the British car company Lotus explains (and dramatizes) how the problem of silence is being addressed by its own engineers.

Fake speakers under the hood, with hyperbolic vroom-vroom noises designed by Hollywood sound engineers, join artificial shutter sounds on digital cameras in the category of sounds that had to be designed anew after their antecedents became obsolete. Only after engineering away the mechanical necessity of the source noises did we realize that those noises had also come to serve other critical functions in public space. For instance, warning us that two-ton motor vehicles were hurtling our way. The artificial camera click was created, in case you don’t remember the story, to thwart surreptitious picture-taking in locker rooms and the like. There are apparently certain dangers, to oneself and others, to being excessively unobtrusive.

Meanwhile, the silenced sounds of engines almost certainly promise to return, like ringtones, as customizations. That could get strange; look for future posts in this space on that subject.

One day in downtown Bangkok, I crossed paths with a blind man using a lead pipe to echolocate his way down the street. The resonance of the hollow pipe is especially well-suited to producing sonic images that can reveal large objects at a distance – walls or buildings or sets of steps, say. This is a useful supplement to the cane as a means of feeling objects directly. As the man walked, a gym in the ground level of a shopping center played a trancy jingle through loudspeakers mounted outdoors. The gym is called California WOW Xperience, and they’re all over the city, enticing natives and visitors alike with kitschy, oily body-building imagery that nevertheless gets its point across.

Music in advertisements, rather obviously, recruits consumers. Songs plug into associations between identity and sensuality that we often don’t even realize we carry around. The California WOW Xperience ad declares in sensual terms (i.e., without needing to use words) that the gym is high-tech and modern. The accelerated tempos of trance suggest not only the pace of exercise but of the modern more broadly. The use of this ad thus creates and maintains a space that might “feel” “right” enough to passersby to entice them into laying down good Baht for a personal trainer or a yoga class or whatever.

Any useful acoustic analysis has to account not only for primary sound sources as they come into contact with materials, but also for reflections and noise. Sounds interact with one another in complicated ways that can confound engineers attempting to manage sound environments. This recording gestures to another source of confusion, one that lies beyond echo or interference – listening. The taps happen to be audible acts of listening that disrupt or at least mingle with the advertisement, which is what makes this work as a piece (I think). But it should also remind us that listening is a kind of work we do every time we encounter a sound, even if it seems to be second nature.

The ad and the taps are also, finally, kind of amusingly indifferent to each other. I like this a lot, because it rightly insinuates (to my ear) that human encounters are only fleetingly cooperative and never truly systematic.