Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 120

Scratch Pad: Drive-bys, Lennon, Reznor

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.

▰ My year-end streaming summary tells me I’m in the top 20% of Led Zeppelin listeners. I’m like, whatever, streaming is just a subset of my listening. And then I look over at the turntable, and there’s a Led Zeppelin album on it.

▰ The new Metallica single sounds like someone asked an AI to make a new Metallica single

▰ A car just went by blasting “Blue Rondo à la Turk” — couldn’t they drive around the block a few times, or maybe even idle?

▰ “You will hear music until your call is answered.”

This feels like a prophecy more than it does a voice menu narration.

▰ I would totally join a cult that worshipped a trinity of tuning forks.

▰ Just the occasional note of astonishment as to how good the speakers on my 14″ MacBook Pro are — the stereo separation, the range. It’s kind of incredible. (Right now listening to the new Bill Frisell album on Blue Note, Four, featuring Johnathan Blake, Gerald Clayton, and Greg Tardy.)

▰ Been listening to a lot of Brad Mehldau, the pianist, lately. This one, his cover of “Dear Prudence,” hits hard on the 42nd anniversary of John Lennon’s death. This is from Mehldau’s Largo album. It is, I believe, just him, Jim Keltner (drums), and Darek Oleszkiewicz (bass). The record is over 20 years old. He has a new solo piano collection of Beatles covers due out in 2023. Keep music alive by interpreting it anew.

▰ The primary purpose of voice menus is to reassure us that voice AI is not nearly ready to take over the world.

▰ Ooh, time to take a break from the CD player, ’cause a new Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross score has arrived: Empire of Light, the new Sam Mendes film (or, perhaps more importantly, the new Olivia Coleman and Michael Ward film). And on that note, have a good weekend. See you Monday.

The New Old

The household CD player, over 30 years old, died. After a bit of a hunt, I finally located a useful used replacement. The test run CD was an easy choice.

Disquiet Junto Project 0571: Child’s Play

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 12, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 8, 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 0571: Child’s Play
The Assignment: Make music inspired by a nursery rhyme.

This week’s project was proposed by Junto participant El90.

Step 1: Listen to some nursery rhymes — and do sing along if you like.

Step 2: Think about the idea of nursery rhymes, the nature of their melodies, lyrical content, rhyme scheme, form, and any other aspects you find striking.

Step 3: Make a piece of music based on, or inspired by, a nursery rhyme.

Step 4: Upload your piece, making sure to explain in your description the name of the nursery rhyme (or rhymes) that it is based on and how the source material has informed your work. Please also provide a link to a recording of the nursery rhyme if one is readily available.

Step 5: Listen to and comment on your fellow contributors’ pieces.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0571” (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 “disquiet0571” (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-0571-childs-play/

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 12, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 8, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0571” 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 571st weekly Disquiet Junto project — Child’s Play (The Assignment: Make music inspired by a nursery rhyme) — at: https://disquiet.com/0571/

This week’s project was proposed by Junto participant El90.

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-0571-childs-play/

This Week in Sound: A Lone High-Pitched Honk

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the December 2, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: thisweekinsound.substack.com.

▰ SILENT VS. DEADLY: “The nearly silent motor of the ebike — a factor that can make them an accident risk in the busy city — has become the surprise secret weapon for saving the world’s most endangered species.” Yeah, park rangers are using ebikes in Mozambique, on the southeast coast of Africa, to catch poachers.

▰ BATS, MAN: One thing that Substack subscribers helped me do was rationalize a subscription to New Scientist: “Bats are known for their high-frequency calls, which they use to echolocate and catch prey, but they also let out much lower frequency calls for bat-to-bat communication. The structure in a bat’s larynx that lets them produce these sounds is the same one used by death metal singers to growl out low notes. … Lower frequency squeaks came from the bats’ false vocal folds, which get their name from the fact that ‘in humans they are rarely used, never for speech’.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus)

▰ BATHROOM TONE: “Scientists have created a machine that will listen to your farts, pee, and poop. Yes, that’s right. The machine will recognize and analyze the sound of each bathroom-related activity.” It is not April Fools Day, though the scientists sure have a sense of humor. The machine is called Synthetic Human Acoustic Reproduction Testing machine — or S.H.A.R.T. for short. “Scientists are training AI to detect and scrutinize scatological sounds so that it can one day help in diagnosing deadly diseases like cholera and nip a potential outbreak in the bud.”

▰ GADGETS WITH BIG IDEAS: Popular Science’s list of the year’s 100 best inventions includes at least one mentioned here previously (Sony earbuds with an “open ring” to make sure you hear the outside world while you’re outside in it, for safety’s sake). ▰ There’s also GameDAC (digital audio converter), which “connects to multiple systems and pumps out high-res certified sound with 360-degree spatial audio from whatever source you choose.” ▰ And a soundbar, the Diome, that may be worth the price. ▰ And most interestingly (to me), a drone (named the Zipline) that use sound to avoid obstacles: “Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives.”

Air Lines: Graphic from the flyzipline.com website illustrates how drones “autonomously and continuously monitor for airspace traffic”

▰ GOOSE CHASE: One of my favorite newsletters (Substack or otherwise) is This Week in Birding by Bob Dolgan, whose writing about his dedicated pursuit can be quite beautiful. Here he is on the trail of the Cackling Goose, which sounds like something Edward Gorey might have come up with:

“I stood on a snowy baseball field and looked up a cackler video on my phone and compared it to the birds around me. The nearby geese were considerably larger with a slightly different posture than the bird in the video. As I was doing this, a lone high-pitched honk pierced some momentary quiet and seemingly hung in the wintry air for a moment.”

▰ BOXED IN: A “boxy” heating solution called the heat pump is gaining popularity in Germany, but first someone has to sort out the noise concerns. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

Aware of the problem, German manufacturers have been fine-tuning their machines to make them quieter. Vaillant has altered the angle of the blades and cut zigzagged notches into their edges, testing the results in an acoustics room on the premises of their factory.

▰ QUICK NOTES: STILL LIFE: John McNamee looks at the role of silence in the comics of the Norwegian cartoonist who simply goes by the name Jason (via Mike Rhode). ▰ DEAF TONE: There’s lots of talk about recent legal changes opening the market for cheap(er) hearing aids — now there’s news about low-cost tests for hearing loss, too. ▰ FOOD FIGHT: I couldn’t help but notice that the Kenyan “upmarket” suburb where a local restaurant has gotten noise complaints is named Karen. ▰ PING PONG: I love when a UX fetishist details such a minor thing as the change in sounds made by Google’s Messages app. ▰ WILD THINGS: At least 53 creatures “thought to be soundless are actually communicating with vocalizations” (and more at nature.com — thanks again, Rich Pettus!).

Sound Ledger¹ (Kenya, China, Cursing)

23,000: Number of nightclub employees estimated to be laid off due to noise ordinances coming into effect in Nairobi

100,000,000: Number of streams a single human-mimicking AI vocal track had gotten on Tencent Music in China as of mid-November 2022

4: Number of syllables (L, R, W, Y) generally missing from curse words in several otherwise seemingly unrelated languages

________
¹Footnotes

Key: Nairobi: nation.africa. AI: musicbusinessworldwide.com. Curses: nytimes.com.

Disquiet Junto Slack: Rules, Encouragements, and Etiquette

The Disquiet Junto Slack is a Slack for people who participate in the Disquiet Junto music community projects (see: disquiet.com/junto), which are based around the idea of using creative constraints as a springboard for productivity.

If you’re new here, you may have noticed there’s a lot of channels. It’s recommended to start out in #gear #fave-current-listen #general #my-latest-track #technique and #random — and, of course, #junto-projects-thread. We don’t pay for this Slack, so comments disappear into the ether at some point. Consider that a feature, not a bug.

By their very nature, “rules” tend to define what not to do rather than what to do. With that in mind, before getting to such rules, here are some encouragements:

share your musiclisten to and respond to other people’s musicmeet people locally and play togetherfeel free not to subscribe to every channel heretry to think in terms of technique rather than geartry to think in terms of gear you have rather than gear you (sense you) want

The standard BBS rules apply about playing nice, about not being mean to (or about) people who are different from you, and about how disruptive behavior isn’t rewarded. If you found yourself instinctively interpreting that statement as a coded sign of some restraint on your civil liberties, then this may not be the Slack for you.

A few other points:

Privacy: What happens here stays here. Don’t go repeating it elsewhere without folks’ permission.

Topics: If you wanna talk about politics for its own sake (that is, not in the context of the other threads, where politics might relate in some manner to art or music or coding, etc.), there’s a channel for that, #wonks-regulars, and it’s opt-in (i.e., you’re not immediately subscribed upon joining). Please note that you aren’t to join — which means neither read nor contribute to — that channel until a full six months after joining this Slack. There are plenty of places to discuss politics on the internet. It’s nice to have a place where you know you won’t be bombarded by it.

Bootlegs: This isn’t a place to freely share commercial material — such as music, movies, software, etc. — in a manner that might be described as illegal. There are plenty of bootleg havens on the internet. This isn’t one of them.

And that about covers it. Thanks for participating.

My Review of Wetland Project

My review of the new book Wetland Project — which features writing by William Gibson, Hildegard Westerkamp, Elizabeth May, Philip Kevin Paul, and Susan McMaster, among others — is in the new (January 2023) issue of The Wire. Snippet here. Paywalled. (And major thanks to Bruce Levenstein, who told me about the book in the first place.) More at wetlandproject.com and figure1publishing.com.

Carl Ritger’s Environment Sounds

Glance White into the Dark by Carl Ritger

Carl Ritger closes the year with four large, encompassing, engrossing sound environments that get ever more brutalist as the album containing them draws the listener in. Their procession on Glance White into the Dark is, like the music itself, expertly glacial, profoundly still. This is slow-motion music for slow-motion listening. By the time Ritger gets to “Coiling the Golden Loop,” all boiling cauldron, melty warbling melody, and woolen feedback, the listener has already made way through simpler, more placid surroundings — the droning, whistling realm of “Aspen Phase,” the static-laden, watery, echoing facets of the suite-like “Linger at the Well,” and the transformed bells that resound throughout much of “Hail, Isais!” Ranging in length between nearly 23 minutes and just shy of half an hour, each of the four pieces is less a composition than a texture map, less a musical recording than an assemblage of layered elements left to find their own uneasy peace.

A Summoner

Yes, I am enjoying Amor Towles’ novel A Gentleman in Moscow.

Scratch Pad: Star Field, Starless

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.

▰ Morning sounds: garbage trucks’ grinding and rumbling, air filter whir, passing traffic rumble, low level electric hum, yipping and barking of dog being walked by

▰ Voice Menu: “If you would like to hold without music, please press star”

Me:

▰ The thing about these year-end music-listening recaps is mine end up weighted artificially by the numerous songs I’ve struggled to learn for guitar class, and just had on loop repeatedly so I could (try to) play along. And much of my listening is just MP3s (and equivalent) on my laptop/phone. But whatever.

▰ I got my first Mac in late 1984 or early 1985, after having put my TRS-80 through many years of hard labor. The first thing I did with MacPaint was try to recreate a semblance of the artist Tom Phillips’ typography from the inner gatefold, shown here, of the 1974 King Crimson album Starless and Bible Black. I think I missed dinner that night. (RIP, Tom Phillips, 1937-2022)

▰ Kinda funny I was remotely concerned this synthesizer module I ordered from Australia would arrive too soon in San Francisco and it’d get left on the stoop while I was away from home, which I no longer am, and haven’t been for a week — as it has only just now cleared customs.

▰ If you like time travel (I do — if you don’t, fun fact: this ain’t for you), you may like The 7 Lives of Léa, a short (seven episodes) French TV series on le Netflix. I dug it a lot. Jumps between today and the early 1990s, back and forth and back and forth. There was a ton of early-1990s French pop music and hip-hop I’d never heard, which was icing on the cake. I had Shazam running the whole time. It’s got a bit of Russian Doll in it, though it’s nowhere near as dark. Pretty much the oddest thing about it was these kids live in this gorgeous French town and it was, at times, hard to think of it as a tough place to have to live in, but many of us rightfully wanna get outta wherever we grow up. (Thanks, Darko Macan, for the recommendation!)

▰ Absolutely essential hip-hop instrumental I haven’t listened to in way too long. Apparently there’s a Milt Jackson sample in there.

After I posted it, someone on Mastodon pointed out that it is quite similar to De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High.”

▰ First passing-car Christmas carol of the year. Doppler Santa.