SIGNAL by SORAH

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SIGNAL by SORAH is a daily sound notebook that reads the signal between art and data. Every morning, ten stories — design, technology, culture, science — chosen not for the loudest headline, but for what they begin to mean when placed beside each other. The show is made in collaboration. Humans ask the questions. AI does the research. Humans curate the language. It is an experiment in how a small studio can pay careful attention at the speed of the world. SORAH is a studio based in Tokyo. The original sources for everything we cover are published at sorah.io. Hosted by Oli.

  1. May 28

    SIGNAL No.18 — Naming is quietly being recognised as a design discipline

    A new guide from Start with Data argues that taxonomy — the naming system, the category tree, the controlled vocabulary that every commerce platform runs on — is quietly being recognised as a design discipline, with large language models now auto-mapping supplier categories, proposing synonyms at scale, and surfacing emerging categories no human has yet named. Today's signal sits across three movements. Craft as living archive: the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy maps how 3D scans, hand-motion capture and blockchain provenance are bringing embodied gesture into the fashion-heritage record, Reverie Page covers Arth Atelier's exhibition Anchored in Motion which presents craftsmanship as continuous practice rather than finished object, and the Sustainability Directory puts the global handmade-crafts market at around 906 billion dollars today with a projected 1.94 trillion by 2033. Exhibition and place: Time Out Los Angeles previews the Hammer Museum's multisensory show Several Eternities in a Day with more than twenty artists across touch, smell and hearing, and Monocle argues that 2026 will be the year vernacular architecture defines the conversation as climate, sustainability and cultural identity push back toward local materials and indigenous methods. Meaning, naming and the body: a cultural-neuroscience paper on PMC shows that viewpoint shifts in poetry translation measurably change how readers' brains take a poem up, Start with Data reframes product taxonomy as design, and a PMC scoping review finds dance-based mindfulness — meditative attention plus embodied movement — produces well-being outcomes neither half reaches alone. Today's stories: Naming as taxonomy: AI auto-maps supplier categories and proposes synonyms at scale — Start with Data 3D scans + hand-motion capture preserve fashion craft as living technique — Frontiers / EJCMP Arth Atelier's 'Anchored in Motion' treats craftsmanship as living archive — Reverie Page Hammer Museum's 'Several Eternities in a Day' engages touch, smell, hearing alongside sight — Time Out LA Neurocognitive study: cross-cultural viewpoint shifts shape poetic translatability — PMC / NCBI Monocle: 'Why vernacular architecture will define 2026' — Monocle Global handmade crafts market: $906B → projected $1.94T by 2033; 70.8% pay premium — Sustainability Directory Scoping review: dance-based mindfulness as embodied well-being practice — PMC Hosted by Oli. Original sources are at sorah.io. SIGNAL by SORAH — daily morning briefing on the signal between art and data.

    12 min

  2. May 27

    SIGNAL No.17 — Forest carbon credits are being sized for a climate that no longer exists

    A new Nature study finds the buffer pools that backstop forest carbon credits have been sized for a climate the world no longer lives in — and the gap is now mappable in space and time. Today's signal sits across three movements: fashion and culture, where the Yorkshire Fashion Archive treats digitisation as a knowledge problem rather than a photography problem and Formula D reports that experiential, multi-sensory museum design has crossed into the standard kit; technology and bodies, where Frontiers in VR shows minimal wearable haptics already produce real rehabilitation gains via multisensory integration, MIT Technology Review names mechanistic interpretability a 2026 breakthrough as Anthropic and OpenAI move it into operational safety tooling, and the US Congress's bipartisan Strategic Subsea Cables Act puts the cables that carry 95% of international data into the named-infrastructure column; and climate and the carbon books, where Nature exposes the forest-credit buffer-pool gap, PNAS shows extreme-weather attribution messaging measurably raises public climate-policy support, and Johns Hopkins' BioDIGS consortium begins a national reference catalogue of the US soil microbiome. Today's stories: Forest carbon protocols underestimate climate risks — NatureMemories of style: Digitizing the Yorkshire Fashion Archive — Cambridge Core6 Experiential Design Trends Transforming Museums in 2026 — Formula DWearable haptics for VR rehabilitation — Frontiers in Virtual RealityMechanistic Interpretability: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026 — MIT Technology ReviewUS introduces Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026 — Submarine NetworksExtreme weather attribution predicts climate policy support across the world — PNASScience army mobilizes to map US soil microbiome — Phys.org / Johns HopkinsHosted by Oli. Original sources are at sorah.io. SIGNAL by SORAH — daily morning briefing on the signal between art and data.

    13 min

  3. May 25

    SIGNAL No.16 — ESA's Biomass satellite is putting forest carbon on a public ledger

    ESA's Biomass satellite has finished commissioning and is opening its global forest archive — letting any researcher pull P-band radar measurements that finally see past the canopy to the trunks where most of a forest's carbon actually lives. Biodiversity — A 2026 horizon scan in Trends in Ecology & Evolution flags fifteen emerging conservation issues and argues that without refreshed, machine-readable baselines new pressures will only be caught after the damage is irreversible. IPBES adds, via IUCN, that the Kunming-Montreal framework cannot be met without a shared measurement language for nature across firms and finance — the problem now is not more pledges but a common audit basis. Craftsmanship & material — A SAGE / IOS Press paper formalises hybrid human–AI systems for safeguarding craft, drawing the line cleanly between machine pattern-capture and human embodied judgement. A new arXiv project, Hands-Free Heritage, couples a robot manipulator with 3D scanning to clear the bottleneck of expert hand-work at museum scale. And the Met's Infinite Artistry of Japanese Ceramics re-hangs the collection to surface why a working knowledge of clay, glaze and fire still carries forward by hand. Memory & meaning — Prism Reports profiles Te Hiku Media's Kaitiakitanga licence and Michael Running Wolf's training pipeline, where consent is built into the architecture rather than bolted on. UNESCO reframes Memory of the World as community agency over the record, not institutional scanning. And Focus Lab plus How Brands Are Built read the new commercial landscape: AI is excellent for the first twenty naming ideas, but trademark saturation and the final judgement still belong to human taste. Today's stories: ESA Biomass satellite goes live with open forest carbon data — ESA UNESCO: the future of collective memory in a digital age — UNESCO Hybrid human–AI systems for preserving cultural heritage and craftsmanship — SAGE / IOS Press The Indigenous leader using AI to protect endangered languages — Prism Reports Hands-Free Heritage: automated 3D scanning for cultural heritage digitization — arXiv A horizon scan of biological conservation issues for 2026 — Trends in Ecology & Evolution IPBES Business and Biodiversity Report: collaboration needed to deliver nature goals — IUCN Brand naming in 2026: AI, trademarks, and emerging trends — Focus Lab Using AI to name your company or product: what works in 2026 — How Brands Are Built The Infinite Artistry of Japanese Ceramics — at The Met — Met Museum Hosted by Oli. Original sources are at sorah.io. SIGNAL by SORAH — daily morning briefing on the signal between art and data.

    11 min

  4. May 23

    SIGNAL No.15 — Fashion's archive is quietly walking the runway again

    The Fashion Institute of Technology put eighty graduating BFA designers on its 2026 runway, and the dominant theme across the cohort was not a silhouette or a colour — it was the archive. Memory rewritten in cloth and stone — vintage references and visible handwork return on the FIT runway, deep-learning models turn archive collections into conversational design partners, AnalogArchives.org opens a community-stewarded home for film photography, and Odawara Castle is captured as a millimetre-accurate digital twin. The body as continuous data — a Frontiers paper learns dance as a temporal trajectory rather than a sequence of frames, and Dance Magazine maps how cheap motion capture is reshaping royalties and archival rights faster than dancers can renegotiate them. Provenance, ontology and repair become operating standards — Neo4j elevates ontologies to a first-class module, RSC Digital Discovery shows scientific knowledge graphs assembled from open-weight LLMs alone, a California court upholds AB 2013's training-data transparency rule, the EU AI Act's August provenance deadline turns dataset CVs into an international standard, Right to Repair Europe's 2026 review celebrates 'easy to fix' across law and design, and a Cities paper finds the urban–rural transition zone is precisely where land use is being rewritten. Today's stories: FIT Future of Fashion 2026 Runway Spotlights 80 BFA Graduates — Fashionista AI Meets Archive: Reviving Vintage Fashion for a New Generation — Refabric Blog Neo4j 2026 Roadmap: Ontologies as a First-Class Citizen — Atlan Scientific Knowledge Graph & Ontology Generation Using Open LLMs — RSC Digital Discovery The State of Right to Repair in 2026 — Annual Recap — Right to Repair Europe Federal Court Upholds California's AI Training-Data Transparency Rule (March 4 Ruling) — Norton Rose Fulbright EU AI Act Provenance Documentation Deadline Approaches (August 2026) — Atlan Lightweight LSTM-CNN Motion Feature Extraction in Digital Dance — Frontiers in Neurorobotics How AI-Assisted Motion Capture Is Reshaping Work for Dance Artists — Dance Magazine AnalogArchives.org Launches a Dedicated Public Archive for Film Photography — AnalogArchives.org Odawara Castle Digitized with High-Resolution 3D Scanning (May 8 case study) — Artec 3D Tracing Rural Settlement Evolution in Urban–Rural Transition Zones — ScienceDirect (Cities, Jan 2026) Hosted by Oli. Original sources are at sorah.io. SIGNAL by SORAH — daily morning briefing on the signal between art and data.

    13 min

  5. May 23

    SIGNAL No.14 — California's data centers are quietly redrawing the state's water map

    California now has 286 operating data centers — soon over 300 — and the national-average story is hiding where the water for compute actually comes from. AI's reflexive turn — MarketingProfs reports Anthropic's "dreaming" research preview, which gives autonomous agents time between sessions to review prior behavior and learn from it, while Accelirate cites Gartner predicting that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027 because organisations cannot enforce purpose limits or quickly terminate misbehaving agents. Where compute lives — Around today's California focus, two related signals: Salt Lake Tribune reports that Utah's 920 MW of operational data centers plus 2,600 MW under construction could form a heat island over the already-shrinking Great Salt Lake, and a Virginia Tech study quantifies the cooling trade-off where saving water raises electricity use — reshaping the calculus of where data centers should sit. The living forest, slowly read — Underground and overstory news converge: PNAS documents that warming thins soil microbial diversity and weakens carbon storage; an ARMN essay revisits the mycorrhizal "wood-wide web" that routes roughly one-third of annual fossil CO₂ emissions belowground; the Klamath River's post-removal Chinook return reaches 180% of forecast at 39,860 fish; and an RSC systematic review across 116 tree species finds spring leaf-out advancing 2.5 to 5.1 days for every degree of warming. Today's stories: California's 300+ data centers — where does the water come from — Inside Climate NewsAnthropic introduces 'dreaming' — an agent self-review research preview — MarketingProfsGartner: more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by 2027 — AccelirateUtah's data centers could create a heat island over the Great Salt Lake — Salt Lake TribuneVirginia Tech quantifies the power-vs-water trade-off in data center cooling — Virginia Tech NewsPNAS — warming reduces soil microbial diversity and weakens carbon sequestration — PNASMycorrhizal networks — the 'wood-wide web' in the forest carbon books — ARMNKlamath River — 39,860 Chinook salmon return at 180% of forecast two years after dam removal — Daily KosTree phenology — spring leaf-out advancing 2.5–5.1 days per degree of warming — RSC — Environmental Science: AdvancesHosted by Oli. Original sources are at sorah.io. SIGNAL by SORAH — daily morning briefing on the signal between art and data.

    13 min

  6. May 23

    SIGNAL No.13 — AI's inner workings are quietly becoming legible

    Mechanistic interpretability — the discipline of reading what is actually happening inside a model — has just been named one of MIT Technology Review's 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026, the same fortnight Anthropic published Natural Language Autoencoders that translate Claude's own activations into plain English. Meaning: the field is making model internals legible enough to audit. Place: data-center site selection is being rewritten around speed-to-power, while design biennials and sound-art biennials are turning whole cities into prototyping ground. Time: IPBES is locking in a shared yardstick for biodiversity, new vegetation data products are landing in early 2026, climate planning is being pushed beyond 2100, and microbiome work is reframing food as ecosystem design. Today's stories: Mechanistic Interpretability named a 2026 breakthrough technology — MIT Technology Review Natural Language Autoencoders translate model activations into plain English — Anthropic The 2026 design exhibitions you will want to see — Wallpaper 2026 Global Data Center Market Outlook — JLL Data Center Site Selection: why power defines where you can build — Bloom Energy Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 — "Melted for Love" — e-flux / Sonic Acts IPBES-12 finalises 2026 methodological assessment on monitoring biodiversity — Earth Negotiations Bulletin / IPBES On Our Radar: new biodiversity and nature data products in early 2026 — Nature Tech Collective Long-term planning requires climate projections beyond 2100 — Nature Climate Change Microbiome-driven innovations for climate-resilient crop production — Nature Food Hosted by Oli. Original sources are at sorah.io. SIGNAL by SORAH — daily morning briefing on the signal between art and data.

    10 min

  7. May 22

    SIGNAL No.12 — Luxury houses are quietly turning craft transmission into supply-chain infrastructure

    Kering opens the Kering Academy for Excellence in Milan this September, teaching ready-to-wear, leather and jewellery technique alongside AI and new materials — moving artisan training from CSR gesture into strategic supply-chain infrastructure. Craft & place. Italy is projected to be short 270,000 specialised makers by 2028. The EU's GRANULAR closes a four-year build of place-specific datasets across rural Europe, and an IIED briefing collects rural communities setting the terms of AI on locally meaningful signals. AI, memory & meaning. Stability AI's Audio 3.0 produces compositions up to 6 min 20 s; M+ Hong Kong opens Sakamoto's first posthumous retrospective around the unsynced async–immersion. The Data Provenance Initiative audits 1,800+ training datasets, the Library of Congress archives 250th-anniversary oral histories, and ConnectWise names passive backups as the largest preservation risk. Climate & nature. Frontiers in Marine Science projects Pacific OMZ shifts of more than 100 m in fish diel-migration depth by 2100; Edinburgh identifies the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation as the main driver. A bioRxiv preprint turns reef-restoration observer dependence into a stated design decision. And phys.org puts a number on Amazon forest loss: cleared patches run 3 °C hotter in dry season. Today's stories: Kering opens Kering Academy for Excellence in Milan, fusing craft with AI — Made in Italy 2026 Stability AI's Audio 3.0 generates compositions up to 6 min 20 sec — TechCrunch Modeled Pacific OMZ shifts fish diel-migration depths by 100+ m — Frontiers in Marine Science AMO drives tropical Pacific oxygen variability (Edinburgh) — U. of Edinburgh GeoSciences Coral restoration reshapes reef soundscapes; ML and manual analyses disagree — bioRxiv Amazon deforested patches run 3 °C hotter at the surface in dry season — phys.org EU GRANULAR closes four-year build of place-specific rural datasets — GRANULAR (EU) Library of Congress archives 250th-anniversary oral histories; expands By the People — Library of Congress M+ Hong Kong: first major posthumous Ryuichi Sakamoto retrospective — M+ Museum Hong Kong Data Provenance Initiative audits 1,800+ AI training text datasets — arXiv (DPI) ConnectWise: 'set-it-and-forget-it' backups are the largest preservation risk — ConnectWise IIED: rural communities setting the terms of AI on locally meaningful signals — IIED Hosted by Oli. Original sources at sorah.io. SIGNAL by SORAH — daily morning briefing on the signal between art and data.

    15 min

  8. May 20

    SIGNAL No.11 — Generative AI is being read as a cultural technology

    A new paper in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence proposes computational hermeneutics — evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology, not a calculator. Benchmarks, the authors argue, miss situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity, where culture actually lives. Reading in context. California's AB 2013 takes effect, putting training-data lineage into the public record. Tech Policy Press warns the field is scaling synthetic data without shared standards, while Invisible Technologies argues the most capable models still anchor in human truth — the same problem, from opposite sides of the room. Keeping what stands. IUCN, with Holcim and ARUP, names circular construction as the most powerful urban biodiversity lever. The Bio-Based Materials Collective targets the spec sheet itself, and Technology.org reports mycelium blocks growing in days at roughly ninety percent lower carbon than synthetic foams. Underneath, the Marine Biodiversity Science Center warns ocean deoxygenation is suffocating sea life faster than the field expected. Listening to the body. Rodríguez and Wilkinson, writing in Counselor Education & Supervision, argue for putting the body-as-lived back at the centre of how therapists are trained — somatic attunement as therapeutic data, not noise. Today's stories: Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology — Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence IUCN: Circular construction policies key to reversing nature loss in cities — IUCN Bio-Based Materials Collective advocates a shift in materials specification — The Architect's Newspaper Mycelium-based blocks could be the future of construction — Technology.org California's AB 2013 takes effect: GenAI Training Data Transparency Act — Goodwin Law The Urgency of Standards for Synthetic Data in the Era of Agentic AI — Tech Policy Press AI training in 2026: anchoring synthetic data in human truth — Invisible Technologies Ocean Deoxygenation Is Suffocating Marine Life Faster Than We Thought — Marine Biodiversity Science Center Teaching the Body-as-Lived: Integrating Embodied Self-Awareness into Counselor Education — Wiley (Counselor Education & Supervision) Hosted by Oli. Original sources are at sorah.io. SIGNAL by SORAH — daily morning briefing on the signal between art and data.

    12 min
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About

SIGNAL by SORAH is a daily sound notebook that reads the signal between art and data. Every morning, ten stories — design, technology, culture, science — chosen not for the loudest headline, but for what they begin to mean when placed beside each other. The show is made in collaboration. Humans ask the questions. AI does the research. Humans curate the language. It is an experiment in how a small studio can pay careful attention at the speed of the world. SORAH is a studio based in Tokyo. The original sources for everything we cover are published at sorah.io. Hosted by Oli.

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  • Creator
    SORAH INC.
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    18
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    Clean
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    © SORAH INC. 2026
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    SIGNAL by SORAH