This Week in Sound: Musical Trainspotting

These following sound-studies highlights originally appeared in the May 20, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Reader support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. An occasional annotated mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks. ▰ Keeping Tine: “In order to document bird songs, Mathews hiked through the thickets of the heavily forested White Mountains with a tuning fork and a notebook. Some contemporaries toted a stopwatch, too. He would have had to listen for birds calling repeatedly and long enough to decipher them. He might have tapped the tuning fork with a mallet to determine the key of the bird’s song. Then it was penciling each note onto the staff. Ironically, he called his notations ‘recordings’—not recordings in the analog or digital form, but a handwritten record of each song.” (From the always excellent newsletter This Week in…