From the August 19, 2026, issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter:
▰ In a Pickle
I can hear what’s happening behind that fence long before I see it: the pops, plinks, thwacks and smacks of pickleball matches. Players say the sound is joyous. Neighbors say it’s dreadful.
That’s Bishop Sand in the Washington Post writing about why pickleball noise is so annoying.
. . .
▰ Novel Feature
We recorded underwater sounds, winds, volcanic eruptions, rainstorms, church bells, fish markets, and other sounds in Sicily and the Aeolians. The idea is that those sounds accompany and thread through the narrative like a kind of chorus made not from human voices but from the elements. My hope with the sonic book is simply that reader-listeners can fully immerse and feel anchored in time and space through sound.
That’s Valeria Luiselli interviewed by Scott Heller in the New York Times about the work that went into the audiobook version of her novel Beginning Middle End.
. . .
▰ Walk-a-Thon
Sound carries faster through water than through air, and soon we heard a plink-plink-plinking. It was followed by what sounded like bacon sizzling in a frying pan, which turned out to be a bubbly photosynthesizing elixir of microbes, decaying muck and insect larvae. Then there was a clicking — possibly aquatic snails, Smolicki said — and the quiet pops of fish mouths opening and closing, a miraculous sound that this lapsed fly fisherman thought she would never hear. Somewhere in the humid thickets a bullfrog croaked.
That is Patricia Leigh Brown in the New York Times, tagging along on a soundwalk with artist Jacek Smolicki.
Credit Due: Thanks, Mike Rhode (pickleball).
