Ding! New Year round-up
Ding! New Year round-up
The Kickstarter for An Audiobook of Noises is fully funded!
On 2 January 2024 the Kickstarter for An Audiobook of Noises reached its funding goal, and we are go! Unless a nasty cough persists, I will be recording the book next week at Electric Breeze Audio in Oxford.
Thank you to the more than sixty people who pledged, and especially to Cat Bohannon, who generously matched a portion of those pledges to take us over the line!
There is still time — up to 10.30pm UCT on 7 January — for additional pledges. Funds in excess of the target will help buy music rights and get the audiobook to a wider audience.
Here are a couple of sonic wonders* that I happen to have come across in the last few days. First, New Scientist reports:
Human cells have a resonant frequency – and it’s just barely audible. Like a tuning fork, living human cells have frequencies at which they naturally vibrate – and now we have estimates for what some of them are...
The researchers estimate the resonant frequency range of human cells to be between 10 and 30 kilohertz, and between 150 and 180 kilohertz. The former is on the border between audible sound and ultrasound.
Pay attention. Tiny cells are singing!
Second, a recording of a thrush made by the monks at Pluscarden Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery in Morayshire. The monks have put the recording up alongside their own plainchant, and it is a thing of wonder and beauty:
* I’d like to say ‘auricle’ for sonic wonder, on the model of ‘miracle.’ But the word is already in use for the part of the ear visible outside the head.