6,500: estimated number of spoken and written forms of communication used by humans 100: number of languages that Meta’s SeamlessM4T can translate and transcribe 4,000,000: number of hours of (publicly available) speech mined to achieve the result Source: engadget.com.That is from “The Autopsy,” a short story by Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, translated by by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (it’s in the August 28, 2023, issue of The New Yorker, and in Ulitskaya’s collection The Body of the Soul: Stories, due out at the end of October.) . . . That is Philip Sherburne, writing at Pitchfork about the great ambient musician Brian McBride (half […]This shop breeds and cares for hybridsThis went out yesterday as a weekly bonus — a thank-you to people who financially support This Week in Sound. It supplements the free Tuesday and Friday issues, which feature a broader array of material from the field of sound studies. It contained an annotated playlist of recommended music. I wrote about (1) a video from FM3, best […]