Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 117

Disquiet.com Redesign

This is a quick note to mention that Disquiet.com has undergone a major redesign. This effort has been a long time coming, a long time in the works. The site had come to look more claustrophobic as time passed. I wanted the text to be larger, the space in which the text appeared to be larger, the navigation to be simpler, and the backend to be modernized. I also wanted the mobile version to be less burdensome to read.

In the process, a “books” page has been added to the site, and the sidebar has been cleaned up considerably.

The new theme just got turned on this evening, and there is some inevitable tidying up to be taken care of in the days ahead, but it’s 95% of the way there. Major thanks to futureprüf for the support.

And for your enjoyment, here’s a screenshot of what Disquiet.com looked like in 1998, two years after its 1996 launch:

And here’s what this site looked like just before the new theme was implemented:

Disquiet Junto: 11th Anniversary

It’s a new year, and a new project — and also an old one. This week’s music composition prompt, to record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it, is the same project the Disquiet Junto community does the first week of every new year. It’s the same as the very first Junto project, way back during the first week of January 2012. It’s a simple proposal, just a single line of instruction, and you can, as always, interpret as you see fit.

I’m sitting here as I type this, drinking black iced coffee with three ice cubes in it — two and a half ice cubes, actually, as half of one disintegrated when I tried to remove it from the tray. Those ice cubes in the context of that daily morning habit were on my mind when I first started the Junto, as were the clinking sounds in an old Alkaholiks rap song (the great “Hip Hop Drunkies”). Also on my mind at the time, as I sat with a friend in a now defunct cafe on Valencia Street here in San Francisco, was the inclusion of sampled ice cubes by an important Junto precursor, the challenge series Iron Chef of Music, in which samples are equivalent to the shared ingredients on the Iron Chef TV shows.

I truly had no idea that week if anyone would even take up the proposed project, but people did, and we’ve been doing a new Junto project Junto starting each Thursday ever since. It isn’t always a sample-based effort. We’ve explored visual scores, and live recordings, and open source software, and numerous techniques, and many other types of prompts.

If you’re new to the Junto, welcome. I hope it can be part of a productive and fulfilling year of music-making. If you’ve been around for a while, then you new this project was coming.

And that covers it. Thanks, as always, for your generosity with your time and creativity. Oh, and I might as well mention that this week marks a double milestone: not just 11th anniversary of founding of the Disquiet Junto, but the 575th consecutive weekly project.

Best from a windy and rainy San Francisco.

Disquiet Junto Project 0575: On Ice

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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 9, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 5, 2022.

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

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0575: On Ice

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0575” (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 “disquiet0575” (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-0575-on-ice/

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. How long until the ice melts?

Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 9, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 5, 2022.

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 575th weekly Disquiet Junto project — On Ice (The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it) — at: https://disquiet.com/0575/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0575-on-ice/

This Week in Sound: The Daily Hum of Nearby Surroundings

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 3, 2023, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

▰ RATTLE & ROLL: All about a device that helps us experience “The Unheard Symphony of the Planet” — read on nytimes.com via this gift link (and thanks, Paolo Salvagione!).

“The Raspberry Shake — a small device that combines a cheap computer called a Raspberry Pi with a monitor that measures minuscule ground movements — has, since 2016, helped to make seismology more accessible to the public. Raspberry Shakes are less sophisticated than professional seismographs but a fraction of the cost, and around 1,600 of the devices are scattered around the planet, livestreaming their open access data online to form the largest, real-time seismic network in the world. The network of “Shakers,” as the community likes to call itself, is made up of hobbyists, professionals and educators, whose instruments pick up the seismic waves of earthquakes as well as the daily hum of their nearby surroundings.”

▰ THE SPINAL TAP THEOREM: “A team of researchers at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Audiology and Deafness, has found that musicians tend to listen to music at louder volume than non-musicians.” (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!)

To 11 and Beyond! Research by Antonia Olivia Dolan, Emanuele Perugia and Karolina Kluk

▰ JUST DESERTS: Erik Davis brings us up to speed on Kim Haines-Eitzen’s book Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks — and What It Can Teach Us:

“In this relatively brief and beautifully written volume, Haines-Eitzen interleaves a study of what McLuhan would call the “acoustic space” of early desert monasticism — whose promise of silence struggled with winds, canyon echos, beasts, and demonic noise — with the author’s own quest to both understand the yen for silence that seizes many of us today (including myself) and to record the sonic landscapes of the world’s deserts (with QR codes at the end of the chapters linking to her lovely recordings online).”

▰ SPEAK NOT: About that smart speaker your cousin gave your for the holidays — via researcher Matt Kunze:

“Once a hacker manages to connect their account to the Google Home speaker, they get access to the smart devices in the victim’s home. The bad actor could operate switches, play music, turn on and off appliances, and more. A hacker can also initiate a phone call via the smart home speaker, making it possible to record everything happening in the victim’s home. While in a phone call, the smart speaker’s lights turn blue, but if the victim is someone who doesn’t use this feature or isn’t well versed with Google Home’s options, they might just assume the speaker is updating or otherwise busy.”

▰ BACK UP: Warren Ellis ponders always-on “memory prosthetics,” quoting Matt Webb:

“Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?”

▰ QUICK NOTES: BOW FLEX: The Musée Mécanique, here in San Francisco, where I live, has a thing called the Mills Bow-Front Violano Virtuoso, “a century-old self-playing device which performs duets on piano and violin.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ WHAT’S SHAKIN’?: All about EarSpy, an experiment in using motion sensors to tap into mobile phone conversations. ▰ WAX ON: A device called the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine has allowed fragile wax cylinders, over 100 years in age, to be digitized. (Thanks, Brian Biggs!) ▰ BOSS LEVEL: What is the greatest ever sound effect from a video game? ▰ DEVOTION COMMOTION: Reportedly there is faith-based sonic warfare happening in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh through loud prayer. ▰ LATEST BUZZ: Perhaps the first instance of a mysterious hum in 2023 has been reported in the town of Hinckley in Leicestershire, England.

Storm

The waiting iS The hardest part, sO the song goes. The weatheR has its own plans, its own Music.

Sound Ledger¹: Mumbai Edition

100: Distance from “schools, hospitals, courts and places of worship” within which loudspeakers are banned in Mumbai

16: Number of decibels reduced by the installation of a two-mile long fence along a highway

$12: Fee for drivers making too much noise on “No-Honking” day (1,000 rupees)

________
¹Footnotes

bloomberg.com

Novels Read, 2022

I managed to finish reading 26 novels in 2022. Here they are in the order I read them. The ones with a + are particularly recommended.

1: +Fonda Lee: Jade Legacy
2: Olen Steinhauer: The Last Tourist
3: Geling Yan: The Secret Talker
4: Caleb Azumah Nelson: Open Water
5: +Sayaka Murata: Convenience Store Woman
6: Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
7: +Maggie O’Farrell: Hamnet
8: Becky Chambers: A Closed and Common Orbit
9: Julian Barnes: Flaubert’s Parrot
10: Sayaka Murata: Earthlings
11: Shion Miura: The Great Passage
12: John Scalzi: The Kaiju Preservation Society
13: Victor LaValle: The Ballad of Black Tom
14: Hervé Le Tellier: The Anomaly
15: Elvia Wilk: Oval
16: James S.A. Corey: Leviathan Falls
17: +Jennifer Egan: A Visit from the Goon Squad
18: Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver
19: +Peter Watts: Blindsight
20: Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending
21: +Hannu Rajaniemi: Summerland
22: Annalee Newitz: The Future of Another Timeline
23: Ed James: The Hope That Kills
24: Ed James: Worth Killing For
25: +Francis Spufford: Red Plenty
26: +Hernan Diaz: Trust

Looking ahead to 2023, currently I’m in the midst of:

1: Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow
2: Carole Stivers: The Mother Code
3: Lauren Belfer: And After the Fire

On Repeat: Guðnadóttir, Frisell, Rathrobin, Rplktr, Colombo

It’s the start of a new year, and I want to try to get back in the habit of posting quick mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ Hildur Guðnadóttir already had committed some of the most remarkable film music of the year for Tár, Todd Field’s feature staring Cate Blanchett, and she’s followed it up with Women Talking (Deutsche Grammophon) Both scores veer dramatically from her often drone-based prior work (Chernobyl, Joker, Sicario: Day of the Soldado). Women Talking, in contrast, features a lot of staccato string work.

▰ If I had done a top favorites of 2022, guitarist Bill Frisell’s Four, his third album for the jazz label Blue Note, would have been on the list for sure. It teams him with Johnathan Blake on drums, Gerald Clayton on piano, and Greg Tardy on horns (saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet). The key word is “team,” as this is a jazz album with essentially no solos; it’s all about constant interplay.

▰ Beth Chesser and Pier Giorgio Storti collaborate as Rathrobin. Their album Ear to the Ground combines strings, voice, and unidentifiable textures, including field recordings, into a sometimes aggressive but often ruminative sonic spaces. It came out almost a year ago, at the end of January 2022, but I’ve only recently started listening to it.

Ear to the Ground by Rathrobin

▰ Rplktr (aka Łukasz Langa) recorded half an hour using the Awake script, which comes as part of the Monome Norns musical instrument. It’s sparkling and lightly percussive. Just listen as the patterning unfolds.

▰ Embedding here won’t do it justice, so if you do use Instagram, check out Jorge Colombo’s (instagram.com/jorgecolombo) — specifically the short films he posts. The “NYC2” batch, for example, are black and white snippets, shot in cinematic horizontal mode — field recordings that evidence the keen eye and ear I’ve admired for decades.

Scratch Pad: Brazil, ASMR, Guðnadóttir

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org.

▰ I watched Terry Gilliam’s Brazil for the first time in forever and it is more than ever one of my favorite movies. Bonus points for using the same song over and over in different arrangements.

▰ Morning sounds: house creaking gently now that the heat is turned on, distant vehicles droning by blocks away, cars right outside rushing atop streets newly slick with rain, the pneumatic releases of a city bus as it comes to a stop and then starts off again

▰ I’d like an ASMR recording of the fake typing sound that is employed by phone menu voice user interfaces when the institutional narrative needs to signal that data is being processed and it may take a moment

▰ I have a feeling I’ll be listening to the new Hildur Guðnadóttir score, Women Talking, for the rest of the year — which, yeah, is only a day and a half, but still.

Screwy

My doorbell photograph backlog runneth over. Here’s one. What struck me about this specimen was the notation that reads “door chime” in small yet capitalized letters. I can’t tell if it’s merely a product component, or also intended as an instruction. The rusty old screw is so large that it ends up closer to the words than is the button they seem to be intended to align with. They’re also smaller than the name in the logo of the manufacturer, NuTone Scovill (the two companies became one when, in 1967, the latter, which was founded in the early 1800s, bought the former, which was founded in 1936). One other comment: the damage and discoloration around the busted button makes sense due to use over time. Less so does the ring around the screw — is that just rust, or was it actually mistaken by countless visitors for a button itself?