The different kinds of sounds that carmakers have had to come up with to make EVs audible to pedestrians, bikers, and other drivers are wild: orchestras, pitch-shifted didgeridoos, gas car noises.

For over a century, the internal combustion engine powered vehicles with an intricate combination of moving parts and tiny explosions. That combustion process inevitably made noise, and that noise came to define the background soundscape of our roads, cities, and day-to-day life. But as hybrids and EVs became increasingly mainstream — and more of their near-silent electric motors filled the streets — it became clear that silent vehicles didn’t fit in the ecosystem we’d built around cars.

Spearheaded by associations of the blind and visually impaired, legislation eventually began to require electric vehicles to emit an artificial engine noise out of hidden external speakers. These hidden speaker systems, called “Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems” — or AVAS — had to meet certain sonic criteria. But they were also a blank slate for sound designers to decide how the cars of the future should sound.

Reminder: cities aren’t noisy, cars are.

Tags: audio · cars · video

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YouTuber Nerrel takes James Cameron to task for releasing 4K remasters of Aliens and True Lies that have been, well, ruined by using AI to clean them up.

The best 4k releases tend to follow a pretty simple template: clean and scan the negative, repair any obvious signs of damage, and restore the colors to match the original grading, with as little meddling beyond that as possible. The process should not be about modernizing the style or forcing film to look like digital video. 35mm film was capable of incredible picture quality, and 4k is the first home format capable of delivering most of that detail — that should be enough. A well done 4k is like having a pristine copy of the original negative to watch in your own home, with the full data from that celluloid — grain and detail alike — digitally preserved forever. And that’s the problem with deep learning algorithms — they can’t preserve details. They make their best guess about what an object is supposed to be, then pull new details out of their digital assholes and smear them across the screen.

If Hollywood and one of its best directors don’t care enough about their movies to do them right, how are they supposed to convince us to care about their movies?

Tags: artificial intelligence · film school · Hollywood · James Cameron · movies · video

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The Man Who Killed Google Search, i.e. how “growth-hungry managerial types” from Google’s ad business chased out the old search team “to make Google worse to make the company more money”.

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Love this Letterboxd movie list title: “Definitely there was love, oh but the circumstances”. Films include Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Past Lives, Normal People, Brokeback Mountain, Titanic, and Lost in Translation.

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Moira Donegan: “OJ Simpson died the comfortable death in old age that Nicole Brown should have had.” He abused, stalked, terrorized, and then killed Nicole Brown & Ronald Goldman. Finally, a truthful obit of OJ.

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This is quite a paragraph from Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review (titled The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers (subhead: “The Nazi leader didn’t seize power; he was given it.”)) of Timothy Ryback’s new book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power:

Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

I got this via Clayton Cubitt, who says “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

Tags: Adam Gopnik · Adolf Hitler · books · Germany · Nazis · politics · Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power · Timothy Ryback