When Max Schich @schichmax & Mikhail Tamm invited Carla Scaletti to @cudanlab on Morse Code Day, their discussion took an unexpected turn along the path to 'Ensoniment'. Check out the lecture/discussion on data sonification & analytical listening youtu.be/hQXgs2os4vc?...

Carla Scaletti: Auditory Analytics.

YouTube video by CUDANLab

youtu.be

Benjamin Van Doren is making Chicago safer for millions of birds by installing acoustic monitors on the tops of skyscrapers. Most birds fly at night so the best way to track & identify them is by sound which is processed in near real time & shared on a public dashboard. news.wttw.com/2026/05/05/i...

It’s Open Mic Night on Chicago Rooftops, Where Acoustic Devices Will Listen for Migrating Birds

Most birds migrate over Chicago at night. A new network of acoustic monitors is tracking their movements by listening for what can't be seen.

news.wttw.com

Thanks Max! Looking forward to meeting with the CUDAN Open Lab!

Maximilian Schich@schichmax.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Join us Monday @cudanlab.bsky.social for a lecture & discussion with #CarlaScaletti of @symbolicsound.com on #AuditoryAnalytics 🎶🔬 Data Sonification and Analytical Listening for Exploration and Discovery. 16:00-18:00 Tallinn time UTC+3 Zoom & details: cudan.tlu.ee/events/2026-... #synthsky

A new kind of bass trap! Low-frequency sound absorption achieved by replacing the high-stiffness neck of a Helmholtz resonator w/ a soft, viscoelastic cylindrical shell for tunable viscoelastic damping. Greater than 97% absorption of 227 to 329 Hz with deep-subwavelength thickness (λ/15 at 227 Hz).

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences@pnas.org · 4mo ago

Join us in celebrating our 2025 Cozzarelli Prize–winning paper for Class III: Engineering and Applied Sciences, “Viscoelastic structural damping enables broadband low-frequency sound absorption.” Read the article here: https://ow.ly/W7Ov50YImko

Bumble bees learned to discriminate rhythmic patterns; generalized those patterns to slower & faster rates; and transferred learning of 2 vibrational patterns to their equivalent flashing light patterns. Suggests that bumble bees have truly flexible rhythm perception. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech, but thus far, it has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. In this work, we show that bumble bees also form ...

science.org

Researchers design a passive acoustic scattering structure that converts broadband white-noise into an acoustic rainbow — passively decomposing a radiated sound into its spatio-spectral components with “above unity” efficiency. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @science.org

"La sonificazione qui non sostituisce le misurazioni, non sostituisce l'analisi quantitativa e non è marketing. Serve a rivelare pattern in serie temporali molto dense.Il passaggio dall'intuizione percettiva alla misurazione è ciò che rende il metodo interessante" sbircialanotizia.it/articoli/202...

PNIPAM e collasso in acqua: cosa raccontano i ponti d’idrogeno mediati dal solvente

Uno studio su PNAS (febbraio 2026) mostra che, durante il collasso del polimero PNIPAM, l’acqua forma “ponti” tra segmenti della catena e stabilizza il globulo. Meccanismo, metodo e implicazioni per m...

sbircialanotizia.it

Excited to share results from our new PNAS paper. We studied PNIPAM—a shape-shifting polymer that collapses from an extended coil to a compact globule near body temperature — making it a prime candidate for drug delivery systems and soft robotics.

Water-mediated hydrogen bonds and local side-chain interactions in the cooperative collapse and expansion of PNIPAM oligomers | PNAS

Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM), a thermoresponsive homopolymer, is a well-established model for investigating coil-to-globule transitions. He...

pnas.org

For those interested in the "Auditory Analytics" method used to analyze this data, the full methodology was just published yesterday in the Journal of Chemometrics: doi.org/10.1002/cem....

Cluster of Excellence RESOLV@solvationsci.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🌊🎧 Did you know we can hear polymer-water interactions? Researchers from @ruhr-uni-bochum.de and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign turned PNIPAM’s collapse into sound, revealing water’s role. A new way to ‘see’ molecular changes! Read more: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #SolvationScience

Hearing relies on the ear actively enhancing its responsiveness. New research shows mammalian cochlea performs amplification, frequency tuning, compressive nonlinearity & generation of distortion products locally & near criticality at a Hopf bifurcation. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Isn’t it time we added "Analytical Listening" to the scientific method? In our talk @FlatironInst, we make the case for #AuditoryAnalytics — sonification as part of the research cycle. Watch the 15' talk by M. Gruebele, K Hebel, C. Scaletti: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJOV... #sonification #DataScience

Scaletti, Gruebele, Hebel: Auditory Analytics for Scientific Exploration & Disco (October 22, 2025)

YouTube video by Flatiron Institute

youtube.com

"[E]very design is a decision, and every decision shapes the future of musical thinking." Andrew Telichan-Phillips interviews the developers of SuperCollider, ChucK, Max, and Kyma, concluding that "symbolic systems do not merely describe the world; they organize it." direct.mit.edu/comj/article...

Encoding Sound: Perspectives on Cultural Bias in Music Software Design

Abstract. This article investigates questions and concerns about the embedding of cultural and individual programmer biases into music programming languages (MPLs) and music software. A key contention...

direct.mit.edu

Synchronizing movement to music is a hallmark of human culture. New study demonstrates that macaques can spontaneously synchronize to a beat, contradicting the “vocal-learning hypothesis” that only species with learned complex vocalizations can synchronize. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Monkeys have rhythm

Synchronizing movements to music is a hallmark of human culture, but its evolutionary and neurobiological origins remain unknown. This ability requires (i) extracting a steady rhythmic pulse, or beat,...

science.org

And this vocoder! mixwiththemasters.com/videos/rich-...

Supermassive Black Hole Muse Deconstructing a Mix #60 - Videos - Mix With The Masters

Learn the entire process of music production, mixing and mastering from the world’s top engineers and producers through seminars and online videos.

mixwiththemasters.com

Matteo Milani - U.S.O.@matteomilani.bsky.social · 11mo ago

How far can you push sound design in a rock track? Rich Costey reveals how he reshaped a @symbolicsound.com Kyma sound for Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole."

Otophysans, known for their enhanced hearing comprise 2/3 of freshwater fish. Recent discovery of a fossil places their origin ~154 million years ago. Their distinctive hearing abilities evolved in conjunction with fusion of hearing ossicles & freshwater adaptations. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Marine origins and freshwater radiations of the otophysan fishes

Otophysans, known for their enhanced hearing enabled by the complex Weberian apparatus, comprise two-thirds of extant freshwater fish species. Previously, they were thought to have originated in fresh...

science.org

The Science is Sound! From acoustic analogs of electron entanglement, to positioning heart cells, to hydrogen bond sonification & more, check out the July Shaastra cover story by Pallab Roygupta on some unexpected ways sound is being used to probe nature. shaastramag.iitm.ac.in/lead-story/s...

The science is sound | Indian Institute of Technology Madras - IITM Shaastra

Sound waves are being increasingly channelled to probe nature, with significant potential applications.

shaastramag.iitm.ac.in

SonicBoom, an autonomous robot that uses sound to sense objects in visually cluttered environments. Small differences in signal intensity & phase across an array of contact mics can localize the sound source & thus the point of contact with accuracy of ~0.4 to 2 cm spectrum.ieee.org/farm-robots-...

This Robotic Arm Senses Branches With Sound

SonicBoom lets robots "feel" their way through farms using sound. Could this be the key to affordable and efficient harvesting?

spectrum.ieee.org

Can the sound of laughter encourage optimistic behavior? Study shows that bonobos approach ambiguous stimuli to search for rewards more often after hearing laughter. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bonobos tend to behave optimistically after hearing laughter - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Bonobos tend to behave optimistically after hearing laughter

nature.com

Concert for pipe organ & live Kyma electronics: 5 June 6:30 pm St Paul's Cathedral London. While performing the pipe organ, Franz controls Kyma processing with an EEG scanner & a MIDI glove! www.stpauls.co.uk/whats-on/cel...

Celebrity Organ Recital by Franz Danksagmüller | St Paul's Cathedral

stpauls.co.uk

Kyma 7.44 is HERE! New synthesis/processing Sound objects, !SongPosition from MIDI, new Smalltalk messages, roll the dice on a single component of VCS, selectable MPE mode, Community Library access & tons of UI/workflow improvements. Free update from the Help menu in #Kyma #SoundDesign #MusicTech

Prosody — pitch contour, stress, rhythm & loudness of speech — found to have its own vocabulary, semantics & simple syntax. Study finds Intonation Units (IUs) which when stripped of text consist of a pitch contour — as an element of a prosodic vocabulary doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Structure in conversation: Evidence for the vocabulary, semantics, and syntax of prosody | PNAS

Prosody, the musical facet of speech, is pivotal in human communication, and its structure and meaning remain subjects of ongoing research. In this...

doi.org

What’s Behind the ‘Pop and Slosh’ When Opening a Beer? Using high-speed video, audio recordings, & computational fluid dynamics simulations, researchers say the sound is explained by a sudden expansion of CO2 + a drop in temp to -50C which slows the speed of sound publishing.aip.org/publications...

What’s Behind the ‘Pop and Slosh’ When Opening a Swing-Top Bottle of Beer? - AIP Publishing LLC

WASHINGTON, March 18, 2025 — In a fun experiment, Max Koch, a researcher at the University of Göttingen in Germany — who also happens to be passionate […]

publishing.aip.org

Audible enclaves: Delivering audio to a targeted listener located at the intersection of 2 nonlinear ultrasonic beams without disturbing others nearby www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Audible enclaves crafted by nonlinear self-bending ultrasonic beams | PNAS

Delivering audible content to a targeted listener without disturbing others is paramount in audio engineering. However, achieving this goal has lon...

pnas.org

Science X / Phys.org@sciencex.bsky.social · last yr.

Advancements in audio engineering have led to the development of 'audible enclaves,' allowing private listening without headphones by creating localized sound zones using ultrasonic beams.

In memory of Kaija Saariaho, the Sons of Chipotle (Anssi Karttunen + John Paul Jones) are performing w/ piano, cello, various controllers & live Kyma processing this Saturday 15 March 2025 @ the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam — part of the first Saariaho Festival news.symbolicsound.com/2025/02/sons...

Study of human hand claps finds Helmholtz resonators to be a good model for the dominant sound generation mechanism & for physically separating factors contributing to different aspects of the sound. doi.org/10.1103/Phys...

Check out Cork by Phil Maguire & Anne La Berge (flutes, Kyma System, laptops & synthesizer), mastered by Jim O'Rourke. On March 7, Bandcamp waives their revenue share & passes the funds directly to artists maguirelaberge.bandcamp.com/album/cork

Cork, by Maguire/La Berge

3 track album

maguirelaberge.bandcamp.com

Hearing triggered by molecular 'spring': Researchers at Göttingen’s Max Planck Institute identify an elastically suspended molecular spring that opens an ion channel in the human ear: "it is not the spiral but the flexible joint that bends under mechanical tension” www.mpinat.mpg.de/4945389/pr_2...

Hearing triggered by molecular “spring”

A Göttingen research team has discovered the molecular “spring” that opens ion channels in the auditory sensory cells in the ear.

mpinat.mpg.de

Franz Danksagmüller: live Ciné-concert: Kyma electronics & 1937 Wurlitzer organ to accompany Fritz Lang’s Metropolis Friday 7 March at 8 pm in Geneva at Collége Claparède. Masterclass on Thursday 6 March 2 pm. news.symbolicsound.com/2025/02/metr...

A novel method uses sound (24 kHz/400W) to change glass to have either a hydrophobic or a charged surface. Sonochemical modification has applications in filtration systems & biofuel cells advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Sonochemical Functionalization of Glass

A new method for functionalizing glass using ultrasonication of aryl diazonium salts. Aryl radicals generated by ultrasounds react with glass, forming a stable, covalently bonded organic film. The fu....

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

From an interview with Lowell Pickett, Senior Audio Engineer at Zoox: "A well-considered audio experience improves workplaces and recreational spaces alike." According to Lowell, "Every company should have an audio professional on staff!" news.symbolicsound.com/2025/02/driv...