Museum of Portable Sound

01/08/2026

A Programming Note: Museum of Portable Sound Staff will be on annual leave in Lisbon until the last week in August.

We will post sporadically until the end of the month, then will resume regular service in September.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

31/07/2026

Billionaire with vocal fry Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, declared on a podcast (of course) this past Saturday that "We are now, like, in the singularity. I've been waiting my whole life for this."

The Singularity, for those of us who haven't drunk the AI kool-aid, is the magical moment that AI becomes smarter than the human race (per futurist Ray Kurzweil, the scientist who coined the technology-related term).

Of course, this has nothing whatsoever to do with OpenAI's imminent Initial Public Offering on the global stock market.

(In the future, when it becomes clear we have not yet reached this magical point of existence, Altman will, of course, be able to claim his use of the word "like" as a qualifier)

****it

30/07/2026

One Cubic Meter of Broken Silence (2009-2010)
Sarah van Sonsbeeck (Dutch, b. 1976)
Vandalised glass object, glass, brick, steel
40 9/10 × 40 9/10 × 40 9/10 in | 104 × 104 × 104 cm

(Image via Artsy.net)

29/07/2026

Legendary pioneering digital lifestyle magazine Mondo 2000 published its satirical 'R.U. a Cyberpunk?' in 1993 featuring lots of now-outdated technology, including our own beloved Sony MiniDisc format.

28/07/2026

A 2022 study of audio deepfakes at the University of Florida reverse-engineered the shapes of the vocal tracts of the AI-generated “speakers” using fluid dynamics.

The scientists discovered the vocal tracts of the deepfake voices had no correlation to human vocal tracts, even when a human listener was unable to distinguish the deepfake from the real voice.

Source:
Blue, L. and Traynor, P. (2022) Deepfake audio has a tell – researchers use fluid dynamics to spot artificial imposter voices, The Conversation. Available at: https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.9x57f5jvy.

27/07/2026

130 years ago, Guglielmo Marconi made the world's first public demonstration of wireless radio signals in London.

It would have happened sooner had the British Customs officer Marconi encountered when he arrived in Dover in early 1896 had not opened Marconi's luggage and assumed his radio equipment was a bomb – which he promptly ordered destroyed. It took Marconi nearly half a year to rebuild the apparatus.

25/07/2026

It was so great to see yesterday's visitors giving our collection a workout! Generously donated by themselves, our visitors enjoyed going hands-on with a vintage 1960s OG Stylophone, a limited edition Stylophone (he played one on the song Space Oddity!), and an awesome Stylophone Drum Machine!

Get your own time with our Physical Objects Collection and book a visit to the Museum of Portable Sound TODAY!

24/07/2026

24/07/2026

Director Brian De Palma's film Blow Out (which premiered in 1981)is a remake of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blowup with a twist: while the original told the story of a photographer, De Palma's version features a film sound designer played by John Travolta, who accidentally records the sound of a political assassination, seen in this clip.

23/07/2026

According to a recent Bloomberg email newsletter, Apple has begun to make audio recordings of their employees' conversations with customers at their stores' Genius Bars, which are then AI-analysed and summarised. The recordings are opt-in by both parties, the employee and the customer.

Apple Store managers are allegedly unable to listen to the recordings or read the summaries.

Apple insists the recordings aren't stored, and the summaries are only accessible to the employees involved in the conversations (not their managers) – the summaries are produced only so that the employees themselves can refer to them.

In completely unrelated news, in 2025 Apple paid $95 million to settle a 2019 class action lawsuit against the company for "illegally intercepting customers’ conversations through its Siri virtual assistant and sharing snippets of those conversations with human reviewers" (per Gizmodo).

Sources:

https://gizmodo.com/apple-has-reportedly-started-recording-and-ai-summarizing-conversations-at-the-genius-bar-2000787507

https://gizmodo.com/apple-agrees-to-95-million-settlement-in-siri-eavesdropping-lawsuit-2000544806