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Sounds Good is a hearing aid that looks like cool high-tech earrings! The hearing aid amplifies sound for the wearer, and tiny “decorative” screens give feedback on the incoming sound. The speaker can see by the color and wave amplitude whether they are speaking too loudly, too softly, or too quickly. The design by Peiqi Tang won the top 2011 Red Dot Design Concept Award. I need to know the minute this is on the market, and we will finally settle the argument of whether my kids mumble or if its all just my hearing loss. Link -via Laughing Squid
NASA has released some cool audio files free to the public!
Here’s a collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights and current missions. You can hear the roar of a space shuttle launch or Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind” every time you get a phone call. Or, you can hear the memorable words “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” every time you make an error on your computer. We have included both MP3 and M4R (iPhone) sound files to download.
Now, if I only had a smart phone. Link -via mental_floss
The Onion always has some great satire, but this radio piece on the banks trying to charge $.75 every time a customer says the word “bank.” I’m glad I use a credit union or else this article would cost me.
Link Via Consumerist
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Blockbuster movies are often released in several nations at once, and we are used to selecting from several languages on DVDs by now. How much work goes into making other languages work in film? Slate explains how they do it.
The foreign actors’ voices have to match the age, texture, and comedic sense of the original. For a big celebrity such as Johnny Depp or Jim Carrey, a single actor in each country will dub all of the star’s films. Koichi Yamadera, for instance, is the official Jim Carrey of Japan. Studios also sometimes employ local celebrities, like when Disney hired the French singer Charles Aznavour to do the voice of Ed Asner’s protagonist in the movie Up. On rare occasions, the original actor will do the dubbing himself. Viggo Mortensen speaks Spanish, so he did a Spanish dub for Hidalgo. For the Castilian dub of G-Force, Penélope Cruz was unavailable, so her sister, Monica Cruz, got the job instead.
The mechanics of the process are also explained, as well as tricks some voice actors use to tweak their performance. Link
Here’s a nicely done audio remix using sound elements from the movie, Pulp Fiction. It incorporates beats using sounds like soap being slapped into the hands of Jules and Vincent, the smoke alarm, the Wolf hanging up the phone, and lots more. No credits…anyone know who made this? Enjoy.
Can you hear the sound in the clip at this site? I can’t, but that’s not surprising. It can generally only be heard by people under the age of 25. Those who can hear it say it’s pretty annoying. Some older folks use it to repel teens, but some young people use it for a ring tone. Link -via Digg
In the past 100 years we’ve gone from music-boxes and player pianos to cell phones that hold thousands of songs… from conical amplifiers to bone conduction headphones… You don’t know where you’re going until you see where you’ve been so here’s the Evolution of Home Audio at WebUrbanist:
There’s no geek like an audio geek – sorry, “audiophile”. So-called sound aficionados were pushing the envelope of obsessiveness long before the rise of computers, gaming and all things Trek. Let’s look at 10 ways geeks got their grooves back – and where we go from ear.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by JKirchartz.
The crack of Indy’s whip, the bleep-blips of R2-D2, and the asthmatic breathing of Darth Vader. These unique and memorable sound effects are all products of an often overlooked art form – the art of sound design. A Sound Designer’s duties include creating, editing and applying sound effects and all non-compositional elements of a film, video game, theater performance, recording or television program in what amounts to a very daunting job.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by whitespace.
