Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 108

Scratch Pad: Rain, Noise, Forbin

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @disquiet@post.lurk.org (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ Current sounds, Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 2:51pm: rain, wind, someone talking loudly outside, cars passing, car doors slamming shut — no birds, too loud for (most) planes, no fog horns

▰ I do not think I’ll be going for a walk today. This rain is out of control.

▰ So. Many. Sirens.

▰ Concentration level: two different simultaneous brown noise sources

▰ Disappointed that Google’s Bard AI chatbot doesn’t only answer in iambic pentameter

▰ Just sorted out that Apple’s Reminders app on a Mac can have multiple lists open in separate windows. You just have to double click on the given list. This app is so much more powerful than it has any interest in letting people know.

▰ If I remember my foundational Colossus: The Forbin Project and Person of Interest education, then Bard and ChatGPT will either go to war with each other or merge into an unrecognizable force in the next 24 hours

▰ An alert I don’t think I have ever received before: “Ferry services have been suspended”

▰ There’s something unintentionally chilling about this persistent system alert on ChatGPT: “History is temporarily unavailable.”

▰ Me: I’ve bought enough ebooks to last me until the heat death of the universe. Time to hit pause.

Me soon after: Oh, cool, there’s a new, 10-book StoryBundle set (temporarily at storybundle.com) of Lavie Tidhar’s “World SF” recommendations for two bucks a pop. (Authors include Mário Coelho, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Anya Ow, Francesca T Barbini and Francesco Verso, Nir Yaniv, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Premee Mohamed, Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis, Aliette de Bodard, and Tidhar.)

▰ While typing out that this week’s Disquiet Junto project is the 586th, I came to recognize that means the 600th one is coming up. That will be 600 weekly music composition prompts since January 2012 — easily 15,000 individual pieces of music produced by hundreds of musicians around the planet. I kinda find it hard to fathom.

Bunker Archeology

When you know a new synthesizer module is right for you

Disquiet Junto Project 0586: Chance the Eraser

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 23, 2023.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

Disquiet Junto Project 0586: Chance the Eraser

The Assignment: Use probability to remove material from a track.

Step 1: Record a piece of multitrack music with at least three separate tracks. If you already have a multitrack recording of your own in mind for this project, feel free to use it.

Step 2: Go back and erase various parts of the recording from Step 1 by utilizing chance techniques. (For example, you might role dice: once to determine which of the multitrack parts, once to determine the starting point in the track of the erasure, and once to determine the length of the erasure.)

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0586” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0586” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0586-chance-the-eraser/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. You could leave it to chance.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 23, 2023.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 586th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chance the Eraser (The Assignment: Use probability to remove material from a track), at: https://disquiet.com/0586/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0586-chance-the-eraser/

End of Day

End of another day living in what can sometimes look like the lovingly detailed background of an episode of The Bad Batch

Asking ChatGPT About the Disquiet Junto

I asked ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) a question and I received a response with two interesting errors. The first error is that the Portuguese word “junto” is not the origin of the name of the Disquiet Junto. Ben Franklin’s employment of the word, which he reportedly adopted from “junta,” when christening his 1727 club served as the source. It’s a humorous mistake because the word “disquiet” does come from the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (and of course for Pessoa, the word wasn’t “disquiet”; it was “desassossego”). Second: SoundCloud no longer has “groups” functionality, and hasn’t for many many years.

I asked “What is the Disquiet Junto?”

I received the following response. I’ve underlined the two errors:

The Disquiet Junto is an online music community founded by Marc Weidenbaum in 2012. It is named after the Portuguese word “junto,” which means “together” or “joined.” The community consists of musicians, sound artists, and other creative individuals who participate in weekly music-making projects, each of which is designed to be completed in a short period of time, typically four days.

The projects, or “prompts,” are usually based on a specific set of instructions or guidelines, such as using a particular sample or instrument, working within a specific time constraint, or exploring a certain theme or concept. Participants create and upload their completed tracks to the Disquiet Junto SoundCloud group, where they can listen to and comment on each other’s work.

The Disquiet Junto provides a supportive and collaborative environment for musicians and artists to experiment with new techniques and ideas, explore new sounds, and connect with like-minded individuals around the world.

I can’t help but wonder if my having typed this correction here in public serves as a corrective: sluicing representative information so as to nudge whatever facts constitute the corpus from which ChatGPT derives its knowledge base.

. . .

Update: Whoa. A friend entered the same question into both Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, and a response from the latter included the following:

“It is named after a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in 1727, not after the Portuguese word ‘junto’ as some sources may suggest.”

It seems that in the couple hours since I made this original corrective post, a rival AI had parsed the information and folded it into its resources. And that phrase “as some sources may suggest” almost counts as snark — computer snark.

Junto Profile: Klaus-Dieter Hilf, aka RabMusicLab

This Junto Profile is part of a new series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s Your Name? My name in real life is Klaus-Dieter Hilf. And because I love rabbits and make music on my computer with technical equipment, I chose RabMusicLab as my musical avatar.

Where Are You Located? I lived all my life in southern Germany. I grew up mainly in Munich, studied Mathematics in Augsburg, worked one year in Munich, and then did my Ph.D. at Heidelberg University. In the mid-’90s I moved to Stuttgart to start working in the automotive industry. To some extent Stuttgart was a cool place for me, because it had small music clubs where very varied indie bands performed. I was an enthusiastic music fan at that time, reading specialized music magazines, listening to my favourite radio station, buying CDs from bands my friends rated as obscure, and attending every concert that seemed to be worth it.

Over the years the enthusiasm cooled down, but I am still enjoying live concerts off the beaten track. In 2012 I moved to Edingen-Neckarhausen, a small town near Heidelberg, to live there with my wife.

Klaus-Dieter Hilf: “a very rewarding experience to see how a track evolves”

What Is Your Musical Activity? As a teenager I had piano lessons for several years, and fortunately enough they also touched contemporary music. Looking back I regret having stopped having lessons in my last year before A-levels. When I started to study I bought a Yamaha DX7. But my interest in using it vanished — it wasn’t so much fun playing on my own.

The following 30 years I played on this synthesizer from time to time, mainly doing simple improvisations. But there were also times when I did not touch it for months or years in a row.

One fateful morning in January 2018 I leafed through the music magazines in the station’s bookshop and discovered a computer magazine on music. It included a Cubase LE download code, and this incited me to just try out making music on a computer. Within a short time I was totally fascinated by the possibilities to create whole tracks only with a computer while the good old DX7 served me as a MIDI keyboard. I started to dive into this world, learning from scripts and online tutorials, upgrading software, and buying virtual instruments. During the first Corona lockdown in spring 2020, and the subsequently reduced working hours, I had a lot of time and made much progress in using Cubase. Nonetheless I am still learning…

Making music now turned into my main leisure activity. I really enjoy creating music just for my own pleasure — mostly on weekends. I still use Cubase, virtual instruments and samples, and only a MIDI keyboard and MIDI controllers as hardware. I am not limited to certain genres — and I like to venture into new territories like drone music, often incited to do so by the great Disquiet Junto project suggestions. I grew more self-confident, losing the anxiety to be “not good enough,” to “not know the rules of the genre,” or to not be a “real” artist.

What Is One Good Musical Habit? One good habit is to start creating a track without a clear vision where to go. For me it is a very rewarding experience to see how a track evolves from accidental finds of sounds or presets of instruments and effects, or sudden inspirations and associations. It is important not to stop the flow by thoughts like “but I wanted to create a synth-pop track,” but just let go of all self-imposed limits. Time begins to fly and creativity works its wonders.

Sometimes the result is a completely different piece of art with hardly any resemblance to the vague idea at the start, and afterwards I can’t really explain how the track came into being.

Such experiences are deeply satisfying to me and make me happy. For me this is the essence of making music.

What Are Your Online Locations? My online activities are very reduced. I upload my music on Soundcloud, and use its “SoundCloud for Artists” service to publish some of the tracks on other streaming platforms. I enjoy the Disquiet Junto discussions on llllllll.co about the individual contributions, learning a lot from them, and hoping to give inspiration to others with my explanations. Apart from that I “advertise” new tracks on Twitter and Mastodon. On the whole I try not to spend too much time browsing all the music-relevant information there — although it is often very rewarding, like the discovery of the Asynchronous Drone Orchestra.

What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project? For this interview I was listening through some of my contributions of the last two years and found many which have a certain importance for me. Of course I have to mention my contribution to the Disquiet Junto Project 0476. It was my first participation, from two years ago. This was rather difficult for me since I had started to publish tracks on SoundCloud only two months earlier, and only my wife and some close friends were listening — and now I was about to present a track to a group of music enthusiasts much more experienced than me… But it was rewarding, and I enjoy this community ever since.

One of the projects of which I have special memories is my track for the Disquiet Junto Project 0506 from September 2021. The assignment was to erase half of an existing track. I chose a rather hectic and fast composition and reduced the arrangement to play only three of the original five synths at a time. Additionally I slowed it down with the same ratio. I was totally surprised what can be achieved by just following such simple rules on an already existing track (with small adaptations). The result is very dear to me, because it strongly resonated with my state of mind at that time. My mother just died the year before, so it has a special meaning to me ever since, and what I wrote back then is still true for me: It feels melancholic, it embodies loss, yet it is full of beauty and consolation.

Does your background in math particularly inform your music-making? This is a difficult question. Would I compose other music if I had studied English literature, would my improvisations lead to other results? I think my mathematical vein comes into play when I “construct” tracks like in this week’s Disquiet Junto project 0581 contribution. First I design a process incorporating certain techniques. Then I consequently apply this approach to build musical elements.

Another outcome of my studies may be my interest in algorithmic approaches to creating music — by using generative MIDI sequencers or programming Sonic Pi code for the algorithmical creation of MIDI notes. I would love to spend much more time on this and dig deeper into this topic!

My friend Guido Kramann has realised many fascinating projects in the field of algorithmic composition. His results tempt me very much to venture more into that direction, but with limited time I simply get more satisfaction creating a track for a Disquiet Junto project instead of — for example — learning more about the programming language of Sonic Pi …

On Repeat: NIN Cover, De Vis & Co.

Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ This is my favorite of some of the recent pieces that guitarist Simon Farintosh has posted, maybe because it feels especially close to the original in tone, like the pace of the source material and the size of the room in which it was captured. Farintosh is best known for his transcriptions for classical guitar of Aphex Twin’s music (about which I’ve interviewed him). Here he does “The Frail” from Nine Inch Nails.

▰ Gorgeous trio, featuring frequent Disquiet Junto participant De Vis with bassist Roy Mastega and a horn player I’ve yet to identify. It’s somewhere between a slowed down “Love Supreme” and an especially stripped down Jon Hassell.

▰ And I’ve been spending a lot of time with some other albums I’ve mentioned recently, notably Years of Ambiguity from keyboardist Kjetil Husebø, supported by Eivind Aarset and Arve Henriksen, and Travel from the Necks.

Scratch Pad: Rain, Library, Siren

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @disquiet@post.lurk.org (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ The siren of the emergency vehicle passing by sounds like a goose with its feathers on fire

▰ The 2024 Oscar race has already begun outside my window, where insane wind is loudly pursuing a Best Sound award

▰ The zombie episode of The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House is so great — watching characters come alive by being undead. Such a wonderful series.

▰ One thing I love about the process of returning a library book (besides, you know, the free* part) is imagining who will get it next. I just returned Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, which I held onto after I finished reading it because I kept sneaking peeks back at passages I’d noted. I kinda wish there were a way, with local libraries, to opt into a “book chain,” where you can meet people who read the same book around the same time.

*yeah yeah taxes — shaddup

▰ Me this morning: I probably don’t need this second large screen in the office.

Me this evening: I could use a third large screen.

Tape Loop

I know a few people who have actually left social media behind, but a lot of the time people who argue for exiting social media mean one thing by it, while participating — sometimes quite heavily — on another: no Facebook, but plenty of Mastodon; no Twitter, but loads of Instagram; no TikTok, but knee deep in Reddit. It’s a bit like people who mention with some frequency how there’s no TV in their home, but thanks to the “it doesn’t count” screen called a laptop or a tablet, they’re more than fluent when it comes to the latest prestige series.

Like many things, social media in moderation — both in frequency and subject matter — can be fine. This was all on my mind as conversation unfolded on a post I made the other day about a hand-me-down Sony cassette player-recorder — not here, but on Instagram, where the benefits of #hashtags brought people I didn’t even know to the post. And they, along with others I do know, shared their experience with cassettes, including (see the screenshot above) tips about the object in hand.

Three Junto Updates

Email Announcements: This Tinyletter webapp is become less usable as we get gain members. We’re nearing 2,000 subscribers. I will likely switch to Substack or to another (free) service at some point this year. Suggestions appreciated. No matter what service I end up using, subscription to this announcement list will, absolutely, always be free. (The main issue with Tinyletter is I now can’t send more than five emails a month without going over the limit of recipients, and that means I can’t send out occasional other important news, which I’d like to do sometimes.)

Profile Series: Earlier this week I posted the sixth in the currently weekly series of Junto Profiles, this one with longtime Junto member Jason Richardson. I have a bunch all set to go, and more in the works. If you’re interested in being interviewed for the series, just let me know. I ask that you wait until you’ve been a regular participant for nine months. Much appreciated.

Collaboration Projects: One of the most popular Junto projects each year has been, in fact, three or four projects — the sequence where we create trios asynchronously one week at a time. We haven’t done this yet in 2023, but we will in the near future. Also this year, I’m thinking about either doing it as a quartet, or doing both a trio sequence and a quartet sequence at different times during the year. In either case, one such sequence is coming up soon. Or soon-ish.