Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 119

Recursion at the Mall

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Disquiet Junto Project 0573: Float Mode

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, December 26, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 22, 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 0573: Float Mode
The Assignment: Add material atop a pre-existing beat to form a complete track.

Note: This week’s project is the second part of a two-parter, following up last week’s, but you don’t need to have participated last week in order to do this one.

Step 1: You will be adding musical elements atop beats created last week by other members of the Disquiet Junto. Select a beat. There are beats from 30 or so musicians in the SoundCloud playlist:

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0572

If you search for the project tag, you’ll find a few extras, I believe, from folks who did more than one:

https://soundcloud.com/search?q=disquiet0572

And there are two Bandcamp and one YouTube tracks in the discussion thread, along with details on many of the other entries:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0572-rhythm-kit/

Step 2: Add material to the beat you selected in Step 1. You can rework the beat if you like, even combine beats, but assuming you have limited time, the focus of your effort should be what you add, not what you do with the pre-existing material.

Step 3: When posting your track, be sure to credit which track(s) you employed as the foundation for your work.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0573” (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 “disquiet0573” (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-0573-float-mode/

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 don’t need to stick with the length of the original beat.

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 573rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Float Mode (The Assignment: Add material atop a pre-existing beat to form a complete track) — at: https://disquiet.com/0573/

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-0573-float-mode/

Status Report

RIP, Terry Hall (1959-2022)

Kinda speechless following the death, at 63, of Terry Hall. The Specials, the ska band with whom he came to prominence, meant a lot to me in my teens and 20s. It was his subsequent group, Fun Boy Three, who really opened up my sense of what pop music could be — and how artists, how people, could vastly alter our sense of what they were capable of. Where the Specials were taut, Fun Boy Three could be downright minimalist, even as the band expanded its ranks. I heard their version of “Our Lips Are Sealed” after the one by the Go-Go’s was seared into my MTV-reared memory. The sequence only served to reinforce it as an act of extreme subtractive effort.

M8 + TouchOSC = ❤️

On the left is the M8, a remarkable little portable synthesizer (or “synthesizer sampler sequencer,” as the developer describes it: dirtywave.com) that I got recently. On the right is my iPhone running a piece of software called TouchOSC (hexler.net), which provides a customizable control surface. In between is a Micro-USB cable and an Apple dongle. Given how complicated so much technology can be, all the more so when trying to connect two pieces of technology from different manufacturers (don’t get me started on my I2C headaches — and if the term “I2C” is unfamiliar, you might count yourself thankful), I marveled at the immediacy of this connection, the ease with which I could suddenly not just set parameters but maninpulate them in real time.

Belated Disquiet.com Anniversary (26 Years)

I’m still recuperating from getting sick. As a result, this past Tuesday, December 13, came and went. The date matters to me because it marks the anniversary of when I bought and began to populate the Disquiet.com URL, way back in 1996. Each year when December 13 has come around, and I’ve had the time, I’ve recounted from scratch my memory of the site’s origin. This year, I was both so busy and so tired that I spaced on it entirely until after I had sent out the Tuesday issue of This Week in Sound.

A few months before starting Disquiet.com I had turned 30 years old. I’d recently moved to San Francisco, after seven years in the Sacramento area, where I’d moved from Brooklyn in 1989 to work as an editor at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. While at Pulse!, I co-founded, with Bob Levine, the magazine Classical Pulse!, and I founded, in 1994, epulse, Tower’s first online publication, a weekly email newsletter, back when such a thing was quite new. We used the Majordomo software, which debuted in 1992.

In 1996, I left Pulse! to join Citysearch’s San Francisco office. I continued to write freelance for Pulse! up until the magazine was closed down as part of Tower’s eventual bankruptcy. I also edited comics for Pulse! during that time, and epulse, as well.

I already had a web address in 1996, thanks to a bit of server space provided by my ISP, but I wanted a proverbial/virtual room of my own. When I joined Citysearch, I realized at some point, quite early on, that something felt missing, some sense of an identity, online or otherwise. The string of letters denoting a subdirectory of my ISP wasn’t sufficient. I played with a few options. In 1996, URLs with “.com” as a suffix were still abundant. Words I considered included “yellow” and “cilantro.” As an admirer of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and a devoted listener to quiet music, I felt that Disquiet.com made perfect sense. I recall I had to use a fax machine to complete the URL purchase — that’s how new, how tethered to pre-internet media, the web was at that time.

I ported over my ISP site, and then built a style for Disquiet, using a free font that emulated the scrawl from Depeche Mode’s Violator album cover. I modified the pixels in MacPaint. At first, Disquiet.com was simply a repository for articles I wrote for Pulse! and epulse, and then I began writing for it directly.

The word “blog” didn’t exist yet. A friend of mine, Jorge Colombo (best known, later, for his iPhone covers for The New Yorker — and, like Pessoa, a native of Portugal) suggested I add dates to the pieces I posted on Disquiet.com. Since Jorge is wise, I did this. Eventually I added an RSS feed, which, like the rest of the site, I edited by hand until 2006 or 2007 (I’d have to look back), when I paid someone to patiently port the website over to WordPress, which is how it has been published ever since. I’ve spoken more recently with some friends and supportive readers about maybe switching to a static site at some point, but there are only so many hours in a day.

Disquiet.com has remained largely the same since 1996. The world, however, has changed. And as the world has changed, my sense of Disquiet.com has changed, both what it means to me now, and what it has meant to me. The past comes into focus. The throughline gains heft.

Assuming I manage to post something daily for the remainder of December, then 2022 will have been, I believe, the third year in a row I’ve managed to do so. Disquiet.com will, in a few years, have been part of my life for more than half of my life. That online-life balance is fairly common for folks who came of age, let alone were born, after the arrival of the web browser (or what is sometimes described colloquially as the start of the internet), but less so for those of us who consumed and produced culture well in advance of that media milestone. Disquiet.com felt, when I founded it, like a digital equivalent of a self-published zine or mini-comic. It was an online journal, and remains so to this day. It had a social component, long before the term “social media” came to mean a fairly specific sort of thing — connecting me to musicians and readers in a way that felt different from earlier forms of correspondence: more sinuous, more of a piece. As music moved online, that sense of continuity — the golden braid of writing online about online culture, writing digitally about digitally mediated culture — felt richer, and all the more so as life in general moved online. At some point “online” became the norm, and I was writing about culture where it, to a great degree, simply happened.

Scratch Pad: Games, Glitch, Viola

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media during the preceding week. I tend to think of social media — Twitter especially, though I’m taking a break, and Facebook to a degree, and increasingly Mastodon — as my public scratch pad. It’s informative to revisit a week of thinking out loud in public. Also, knowing you’ll revisit what you say pulls in the reins a bit, in a good way.

▰ The car’s heater sounds like speed metal is being played on the other side of a concrete wall.

▰ Any favorite recent video games with particularly good environmental sound (that is: ambient world sound, not score or narrative-based effects)?

▰ Such a busy, strange day that only after sending out my This Week in Sound email did I recall that it’s the 26th anniversary of when I founded Disquiet.com. Double 13s on the 13th.

▰ Me in 1993: the “glitch” aesthetic provides a trenchant analysis of digital fragility

Me in 2022: wow, the Spider-Verse sequel trailer is so cool I watched it three times in a row

▰ Didn’t have “the goofy guy from Supergirl plays the founder of Casablanca Records” on my 2023 bingo card

▰ Just noticed that the Los Angeles Philharmonic has revived The Tristan Project, a collaboration between Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Sellars, and Bill Viola. I saw it in 2007 (or maybe 2004?) because I’m a Viola nut (in contrast, I suppose, with a viola nut). I’m now reminded that some people walked out during the performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall because — OMG! — some of Viola’s projected video images displayed nude human bodies. (This struck me as especially ridiculous at the time because the tickets were so expensive.)

Audiophile

Every time I stumble on this thing it looks to me like if David Cronenberg started a line of audiophile accessories

Disquiet Junto Project 0572: Rhythm Kit

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, December 19, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 15, 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 0572: Rhythm Kit
The Assignment: Make a beat that someone else will add to.

Note: This project is the first of a two-parter. You don’t need to participate in both, and you can easily participate in the second one (next week) even if you don’t participate in the first one.

Instruction: Record a beat with the intension that someone other than yourself will add something to it at a later date. It’s preferable that you record something that lasts between one and three minutes, but it’s also fine to record something shorter with the intention that someone will loop it — or something longer, for that matter.

Also: Be sure to make your track downloadable.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0572” (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 “disquiet0572” (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-0572-rhythm-kit/

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:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, December 19, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 15, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Between one and three minutes is optimal.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0572” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

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 572nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Rhythm Kit (The Assignment: Make a beat that someone else will add to) — at: https://disquiet.com/0572/

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-0572-rhythm-kit/

This Week in Sound: Are Electric Cars Killing AM Radio?

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the December 13, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: thisweekinsound.substack.com.

▰ BUG OUT: Scientists are recreating the sounds of ancient insects. It’s like Jurassic Park, but smaller, and less of a DEFCON threat. It’s also considerably older.

Scientists had already suspected that katydids might have changed their tunes before mammals evolved better hearing about 160 million years ago. But they had no evidence for that hypothesis until [Michael Engel [at the University of Kansas] and his colleague Bo Wang at Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China discovered a collection of 63 very well-preserved male and female katydid fossils, representing 18 species from the Middle Jurassic Epoch, 160 million years ago, in north-eastern China.

The team photographed the three-dimensional fossils to investigate the males’ stridulatory organs – a set of five structures on the forewings that produce and radiate sound – and both sexes’ hearing organs, which resemble a somewhat simplified form of the human middle and inner ear structures and are located on the two front legs. In both modern and ancient species, all katydids have ears, but only males have stridulatory organs.

▰ SONIC REDLINING: Students of Erica Walker, assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University, have looked at how different neighborhoods around Providence, Rhode Island, were affected differently by noise pollution: “In the areas around highways and in neighborhoods with more non-white and low-income residents, students in Walker’s class found noise pollution levels were higher — sometimes above the maximum decibel levels set by city ordinances.” As part of the research, they produced heat maps displaying the relative impact.

Island Noise: Relative volume levels of Providence neighborhoods

▰ RED EAR: The Mars rover was hit by a nearly 400-foot-tall dust storm and lived to share what its onboard microphones recorded: “The sound of the dust devil, published Tuesday to accompany a paper in the journal Nature Communications, is subtle. It’s crackly and percussive, like radio static, though one might more generously imagine a breeze ruffling some distant palm fronds.”

“[ISAE-SUPAERO planetary scientist Naomi] Murdoch said the team’s success in capturing a dust devil’s sound reflects both luck and preparation. The rover’s microphone takes recordings lasting a little under three minutes, and it does that only eight times a month. But the recordings are timed for when dust devils are most likely to occur, and the rover cameras are pointed in the direction where they are most likely to be seen.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode, for the Washington Post gift link!)

▰ RADIO INTERFERENCE: One victim of electric vehicles appears to be AM radio, which (see nytimes.com gift link) is being dropped by numerous manufacturers, including Audi, Ford, Porsche, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo:

An increasing number of electric models have dropped AM radio in what broadcasters call a worrisome shift that could spell trouble for the stations and deprive drivers of a crucial source of news in emergencies.

Carmakers say that electric vehicles generate more electromagnetic interference than gas-powered cars, which can disrupt the reception of AM signals and cause static, noise and a high-frequency hum. (FM signals are more resistant to such interference.)

Despite this industry-wide shift, the eradication of AM isn’t necessarily inevitable: “Some experts say the reception problems are not insurmountable.”

▰ TAPE HEADS: A perspective on physical recording media, via New Scientist: “[A]udio on cassette doesn’t sound as good as hi-res streaming, so what is the appeal? Well, it is the same reason vinyl has made a comeback – the enduring lure of retro technology. Earlier this year, a series of experiments carried out by a team including psychologist Matthew Fisher at Yale University showed that people tend to prefer technology they think was invented before they were born, an effect that holds even when the technology isn’t as old as people think.”

▰ QUICK NOTES: WHALE OF A MYSTERY: Whales are making their songs deeper. Scientists have found “the tonal frequencies of the songs had been sinking to even greater depths for three straight years.” And no one knows why. (Thanks, Erik Davis!) ▰ SKULL CANDY: WBUR covered how Berklee College of Music professor “Richard Boulanger turns … brainwaves into music in a high-pitch, high-tech demonstration.” ▰ BAD LANGUAGE: “[Research] suggest[s] that some sounds — plosives and affricates in particular — are more suitable for profanity than others. This may be because they sound more abrasive or aggressive than other sounds, and so make language harsher when used.” (Thanks, Christian Carrière!) ▰ PIER PRESSURE: Noise pollution of Hong Kong is keeping dolphins from being able to communicate with each other. ▰ BAND AID: Apple’s watchOS 9.2 has expanded its environmental noise detection offering. ▰ F(L)IGHT CLUB: It’s not just people who get road rage: “A recently published study has found that human-made traffic noises are linked to increased physical aggression in rural European robins.” ▰ NORTH STAR: Anchorage, Alaska, has tripled the fee for noisy vehicles, to $300 from $100. ▰ DIAMOND AGE: “The earliest transistor gadget to hit the market was a hearing aid released in 1953. Soon after came the transistor radio, which became emblematic of the 1960s.” And now the transistor has turned 75. ▰ CAM NOT: The organizer of the Citizens Noise Advisory Group in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is not convinced that so-called “sonic cameras” are the answer to the problem of vehicular noise pollution, noting vandalism, theft, and location avoidance as issues to be considered. ▰ RUMP ROAST: John Hodgman weighed in on whether the word “fart” counts as onomatopoeia — and whoever wrote the headline deserves a Pulitzer.