Dear Reader,

I'll get to the sound stuff, but today I want to open with a scene from another sense: smell...and offer a small piece of advice surrounding this.

Ostensibly, I write this newsletter to muse about all things audio (sound, and voice, words). And because you read it (thank you!) it indulges me to ascribe some sort of meaning to what ever comes to mind, which perhaps amounts to a potpourri of words about noise.

Sunday night my husband and I were making dinner for the mothers (both of them widowed, both deeply enjoy a Sunday night dinner at ours). On the menu was VJ’s lamb popsicles, one of Canada's celeb chefs.

The recipe called for fenugreek leaves…which are not always easy to come by, and definitely not on a Sunday evening from my local stores.

So I dug and dug through the spice drawer, only to come up with fenugreek seeds, which I thought to be a suitable alternative, and thus, I toasted them in a dry pan over medium heat, and then my husband crushed them in a mortar and pestle to add to the recipe.

Let me cut to the point here: fenugreek seeds are not a good substitute for fenugreek leaves. They didn't get added to the marinade.

Because now, two days later, that smell has lingered, despite leaving the window open a crack all night. The smell can be described like this: the smell of burned maple syrup, which is uncomfortably close to the smell of urine on a hot brick wall (have you walked through alleyways in the heat of the summer?!)

Ok now that we've fired up our senses, let’s move on to our ears.

I discovered my new favourite writer this week. Caity Weaver now writes for the New York Times and her article about visiting a, “anechoic chamber” absolutely performed a hostile takeover of my senses this week.

Word of the week is definitely “anechoic,” means ‘without echo,’ which I discovered (genius!) makes sense when you break the word down an…echo…ic but you would officially pronounce it “ana-ko-ic,” even though to me that sounds odd and would prefer the former emPHASis.

As much as I spend a lot of time thinking about sound, this article fascinated me, because it go me thinking about the reverse:

What does a space with no sound...sound like?

Her article is funny, and muses about all sorts of abilities that feel diminished (ability, thought, reason, sanity) when you go to the effort of removing one sense.

My brain went into overdrive, asking all kinds of questions. I even took to Twitter in an attempt to ask Caity some questions (of course asking if she had actually recorded anything, like it would produce sound, duh).

Caity Weaver @caityweaver Here's a new ordeal from me, for everyone stuck in travel hell to read!!! (Or just if you are stuck in regular hell!) OK have fun, I hope! nytimes.com/2022/11/23/mag… Could I Survive the ‘Quietest Place on Earth’? Legends tell of an echoless chamber in an old Minneapolis recording studio that drives visitors insa... nytimes.com November 23rd 2022 38 Retweets 247 Likes

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Here's where my nerdy sound-focused brain went to:

• What about our thoughts; do they have a sound?
• Does blinking produce anything audible?
• Do we then just go in reverse, and start to add in sounds, because we are so very trained to hear and react to everything?
• Does it leave you with an understanding of what sound sounds like, in its little bits and pieces?
• Is it full of nothing, or does it open the doors to be able to hear things that you’ve never heard before?

According to Caity, one of the allures (and fears) of this sort of space is that spending time in this space can make people go insane. That's the warning that The Daily Mail blurted out in an article 10 years ago.

This may or may not be connected to a time when the Internet got bored last year, and TikTok and YouTube frothed up a whole urban legend that *if you could survive* this experience, of being inside THIS anechoic chamber, for more than 45 minutes, there was a $7 million cash prize up for grabs.

They got a lot of emails and phone calls about that one.

Turns out, that's not true...but it has yielded much more interest in this out of the way quiet space, a recording studio outside Minneapolis.

What do your thoughts sound like? Would a sneeze sound like a bomb going off in that room? Or are you aligned with Caity, only looking to hear the alluring slosh of your blood inside your body?

Sending audio love,

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p.s. Find all the LINKS here

p.p.s. Know someone who also wants Audio Love? Send them here​

PS are you an audio love-r who listens to LOTS of podcasts? If so, come on over and check out my Substack Bingeworthy.

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