This week we're joined by robotics engineer, electronic music producer, and Future Fossils co-founder Evan “Skytree” Snyder — who has recently been asked to help design the sounds made by the next wave of Amazon warehouse robots. In this first part of our discussion, we explore the evolutionary and psychological considerations for designing human-compatible robot sounds, talk brilliant birds and their mimicry of people and machines, and riff on the manipulative utility of cuteness for both good and evil.

In part two, available to Patreon supporters later this week, we talk about Evan’s work to reconstruct the soundscapes of The Age of Dinosaurs, his experiments with using radioactive mineral samples to control modular synthesizers, and his reflections on the use of sound for deep-time communication with future humans and/or extraterrestrials…

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✨ Related Reading

• Set My Heart To Five by Simon Stephenson

• Unfettered Journey by Gary Bengier

• Alex & Ada by Jonathan Luna & Sarah Vaughn

• The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule The Earth by Robin Hanson

• “Smooth Operator: Tuning Robot Perception Through Artificial Movement Sound” by Frederic Anthony Robinson, Mari Velonaki, Oliver Bown

• “The maintenance of vocal learning by gene–culture interaction: the cultural trap hypothesis” by Robert F. Lachlan and Peter J. B. Slater

✨ Related Listening

• FF 13 - Rupert Till on Ancient Audio & Future Ritual

• FF 29 - Sara Huntley on Raising Robots Right

• FF 53 - Evan Snyder on A Very Xeno Christmas!

• FF 73 - Patricia Gray on BioMusic, The New Science of Our Musical Brains & Biosphere

• FF 149 - Tada Hozumi, Dare Sohei, Naomi Most on Cultural Somatics & Ritual as Justice

• FF 159 - Michael Dowd on Post Doom: Life After Accepting Climate Catastrophe

✨ Music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder

• “Telomere,” “Minas Gracia,” and “Sanitas” off Infraplanetary

✨ Support the countless hours of research and production that go into Future Fossils

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