Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 122
November 25, 2022
The Other Doorbell
Not what most people mean when they say “doorbell” but a literal doorbell nonetheless. It’s got to be one of the simplest, most low-tech solutions around, even if at this spot the door was propped open. Maybe you can give it a little tap as you enter.
November 24, 2022
Disquiet Junto Project 0569: Think Thank
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, November 28, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 24, 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 0569: Think Thank
The Assignment: Make music inspired by something or someone you’re thankful for
Step 1: Think of something or someone you’re thankful for.
Step 2: Make a piece of music inspired by what came to mind in Step 1.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0569” (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 “disquiet0569” (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-0569-think-thank/
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, November 28, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 24, 2022.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0569” 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 569th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Think Thank (The Assignment: Make music inspired by something or someone you’re thankful for) — at: https://disquiet.com/0569/
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-0569-think-thank/
The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2, where “open door, party inside, digital art” was the prompt.
November 23, 2022
This Week in Sound: A Sonic Health Exam from 1857
Note: I’m on vacation this week, so there may not be a TWiS email on Friday, November 25th.
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the November 22, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: thisweekinsound.substack.com.
▰ FINANCIAL HEALTH: In “Coin-Sound, or the Bruit d’Arain of Armand Trousseau,” Dr. Jesse Kraft describes a sonic “diagnostic test” involving coins “to determine whether or not an individual suffers from a punctured lung.” Here’s some detail:
“[A] coin is held flat against the side of the patient’s chest that is thought to be punctured, and tapped with a second coin. … With a stethoscope on the direct opposite side of the patient, if there is fluid or air in the pleural cavity, the practitioner will hear a sound resonate, as opposed to quickly mute. … The sound itself is not produced by the pressure of the air or fluid that has entered the pleural cavity, nor is it the sound from the coins themselves. Rather, the sound comes from tension that is created on the bounding walls of the pressurized cavity.”
The Trousseau reference in the title is the individual credited with having first “observed and described coin-sound,” around 1857. Trousseau (1801-1867) called it “bruit d’arain” which translates as “brazen noise.” Kraft, who earned a PhD in Americana Studies at the University of Delaware in 2019, is the Resolute Americana Assistant Curator of American Numismatics at American Numismatic Society. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ WAYNE MANOR-ISMS: When I worked in Japanese publishing, my duties and natural inclination involved manga, but I collaborated regularly with the anime side of the business. One thing that always struck me was — due to the industry’s prominence in its country of origin — just how well-known were the Japanese voice actors, stars in their own right. American anime fans — and more broadly animation fans — have steadily raised the profiles of voice actors here, even if few have achieved the national notoriety of their Japanese counterparts in terms of name recognition (putting aside movie and television stars who are hired by studios like Pixar to lend familiar voices to animated roles). One individual who stood high on the list of major talents was Kevin Conroy, who died earlier this month at age 66. Conroy portrayed Batman for 30 years in TV series, feature-length animated films, and video games, starting in 1992 with Batman: The Animated Series. As James Whitbrook notes, “Conroy even went on to play a live-action version of Bruce Wayne in the CW DC TV show crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths.” (And he was great in it.)
▰ ACT NATURALLY: “BookBaby, one of the leading players in the audiobook segment announced it has entered into a collaboration with Speechki to create audiobooks using artificial intelligence-powered synthetic voice narration. … Speechki said they support 77 languages at the moment along with up to 50 synthetic voice actors.”
▰ BAD ROBOT: The FCC has a plan to deal with “ringless voicemail spam” that goes straight to one’s voice mailbox. Writes Jon Fingas: “The Federal Communications Commission has determined that these silent voicemails are covered by the same Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) rules that forbid robocalls without consent.”
▰ ENTRY LEVEL: Now YouTube has its own start-up cue, or sound logo, developed by the agency Antfood: “The initial idea behind the sound was to have something vibrant, engaging and easily recognizable, so that as soon as you hear it – even if you’re turned away from your TV or device – you know that something’s about to pop up on YouTube.” There’s more detail about the process at the official blog of YouTube in a post by Andrew Lebov.
▰ DEAD RINGER: We’ve pretty much all seen some thriller where a dead person’s eye or fingerprint is used to help the hero (or villain!) access something important. Real life has caught up with fiction, and is generally the case, things aren’t anywhere as easy as they seem. In fact, quote the contrary. Allison Engel writes on the difficulty that loved ones have accessing the accounts of their dead relatives: “Face recognition, voice recognition and fingerprint recognition speed up access when someone’s alive but present tremendous barriers for survivors trying to wind down accounts.” (You can read it for free, thanks to my gift link.)
▰ VOLUME CONTROL: Spotify has continued to broaden its scope by adding audiobooks and podcasts to its app, making the service about more than “just” music. “Now, Spotify is rolling out an update to the dedicated Anchor app on iPhone with a new feature it says can drastically improve the audio of your podcast with just one click,” . It’s called “Podcast Audio Enhancement” and it can “reduce background noise and level your audio – supposedly so much so that podcasts can now be ‘recorded in a loud coffee shop, on the subway, or with babies crying in the background.’”
▰ BAD VIBES: Our phones can sense a bridge span’s “unique vibrations” and help reveal “hidden structural problems,” writes Matt Simon. (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!)
Every bridge has its own “modal frequency,” or the way that vibrations propagate through it—then subsequently into your car and phone. (Tall buildings, which sway in the wind or during an earthquake, have modal frequencies too.) “Stiffness, mass, length—all these pieces of information are going to influence the modal frequency,” says Thomas Matarazzo, a structural and civil engineer at MIT and the United States Military Academy. “If we see a significant change in the physical properties of the bridge, then the modal frequencies will change.” Think of it like taking a bridge’s temperature—a change could be a symptom of some underlying disease.
▰ ALL HANDS: “Microsoft has made it easier for users of its video conferencing platform Microsoft Teams to use sign language through a new meeting experience called ‘Sign Language View.’”
November 22, 2022
Sound Ledger¹ (Alexa in Decline)
$10,000,000,000: The amount Alexa is likely to cost Amazon this year alone
10,000: The number of jobs Amazon is reported to soon eliminate, including from the Alexa unit
8: The number years of years since the introduction of Amazon Alexa
________
¹Footnotes
November 21, 2022
“‘Seeing’ Music from Manga”
Many years ago, I spent a solid half decade publishing manga, eventually becoming the editor-in-chief of the U.S. edition of the magazine Shonen Jump. It was an amazing experience, one I treasure to this day. However, my work on manga rarely overlapped with my interest in sound.
Traveling to Japan for work over the years did give me the opportunity to attend concerts at Tokyo venues I’d otherwise never have even heard about. Also, there were times while preparing an issue of the magazine when we got to debate how to translate sound effects, or how to effectively help a young reader (this was back from 2004 to 2009, before manga was as mainstream as it became outside Japan) understand things like the vertical ellipses that signify an extended silent pause. Most of the shonen comics I worked on were about fighting (e.g., Naruto, One Piece), the main exception being, as one reader put it, “the one about moving stones around a board.” (The latter was a joke at the expense of Hikaru no Go, which was one of my favorite things we published.)
And so it was with great interest that I read a new academic study from two authors based at National Taiwan University, Taipei: “‘Seeing’ music from manga: visualizing music with embodied mechanisms of musical experience.” The article looks specifically at how music is represented in manga (for the uninitiated, the word is both singular and plural, as is the norm in the Japanese language) that take music as their subject. Iju Hsu and Wen-Yu Chiang, the article’s authors, study such highly recommended series as Nodame Cantabile (about a classical music student ) and Detroit Metal City (the title is self-explanatory), among others.
Are You Experienced?: This diagram from the article maps “how music is transformed into visualized music”
The article, which came out in the recent volume 21 of the journal Visual Communication, explores visual metaphors for sound in various manners, notably the Visual Metaphor Identification Procedure, or VISMIP. Another approach explores “six embodied mechanisms that induce emotion.” In the words of the authors: “this study sheds light on our overall understanding of audio-visual cross-modality, musical experience, metaphor and embodied experience.” It’s dense stuff, and I’m still making my way through it for a second time — and beginning to explore the trove of articles and books cited as references. (Thanks, Gene Kannenberg Jr. and Bart Beaty!)
November 20, 2022
More on the Deadly Silence of Andor
Head Banger: Andor’s Bix feels the noize
When I wrote about the sonic torture in the “Nobody’s Listening!” episode of the Star Wars TV series Andor back at the start of the month, I postulated that before opting for the audience hearing nothing at all while rebel-adjacent character Bix succumbs to imperial punishment, the creative team on the show perhaps might have tried “to recreate — to imitate — what Bix hears.” And of course, leaving it to our imaginations, which is where the episode landed, was the best of all possible decisions.
And it turns out that, indeed, the Andor crew did try to fill the void first. This is per an interview at slashfilm.com, which spoke with David Acord, the supervising sound editor on Andor. Acord explained:
“When that scene came up, it was like, ‘Oh, okay, well…’ It’s daunting, for sure, that we had to come up with a sound that is, ‘What’s the sound that would literally be used to torture somebody with?’ So we came up with a lot of ideas of, “What do these creatures sound like that they’re emulating?” Or maybe it’s, we come up with a more surrealistic thing of, ‘What does the sound make the characters feel like? What is that sound?’ And ultimately, it was Tony who said, ‘No, we don’t want to hear it. The audience doesn’t hear it, and let Adria Arjona carry that scene.’”
In Acord’s anecdote, Tony is the series’ creator, Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Rogue One). Arjona (Good Omens, Irma Vep) plays Bix. And carry it — abetted by the silence — she certainly does.
November 19, 2022
Scratch Pad: Pirie, Mastodon, AI
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.
▰ Just an occasional reminder that my inbox is certainly open to new music releases for potential review, but I simply can’t respond personally to them all due to the sheer amount of inbound communication. Follow-up emails don’t help, I assure you.
▰ Mastodon has retired the term “toot,” per Dell Cameron at Gizmodo. I think it’s a good move. Per my earlier comments (which preceded the announcement, about which — to be clear — I knew nothing in advance), this helps reinforce that Mastodon isn’t just a Twitter replacement. It’s something else. (I mentioned this back in early May, when I wrote that people would maybe less often confuse Mastodon’s posts with Twitter’s tweets if Mastodon didn’t refer to its posts as “toots.”)
▰ Person 1: The problem with AI is it’s too easy. Those images you post look great, but they’re too easy. It’s gonna take over because it requires no effort.
Person 2: I had to do several rounds of coaxing the prompts each time, and I learn a bit more each time I do it. There’s a lot of trial and error, and paying attention.
Person 1: That’s the problem with AI: it takes too much work. It won’t take off until it gets easier.
▰ If you’ve done any Disquiet Junto projects and wanna be on a Mastodon list (I’ve not yet experimented with Mastodon lists), lemme know and I’ll put one together.
▰ A local cemetery is advertising on television. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a television ad for a cemetery before.
▰ “A low down disturbing pest / But, as of now, I’m gonna pluck this pest off my chest” —The Fat Boys’ “Trouble!” (which samples Sam and Dave’s “Hold On! I’m a Comin'”)
▰ The subtitles in this TV show, Karen Pirie, keep saying how the car’s handbrake “croaks.” Is that a Britishism, or a car thing, or a British car thing? (I’m illiterate in all three.)
November 18, 2022
Reznor and Ross, Bones and All
There is a new movie score out from the team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: Bones and All, the “coming-of-age romantic horror road film” by director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria) and screenwriter David Kajganich (The Terror, Suspiria).
Early on in Reznor’s film-score career, 20-plus years after the debut of his band, Nine Inch Nails, he made a comment about how he didn’t intend to do many scores. I need to find the reference, but he was quoted as saying something along the lines of not necessarily having enough “ideas” (I believe that was his word) to do more than maybe one a year, if that. Fortunately, his ideas have flourished, and we’ve had another 14 scores — all with Ross, who has numerous of his own, as well — since the breakthrough that was 2010’s Social Network.
Bones and All (Original Score) by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
Bones and All is an hour and nearly a quarter of characteristically exquisite attention to detail. The melodies are simple. The textures are rarely muddied. The motifs are persistent. And it’s all committed as if the microphones are inside the instruments. Just when you think a particular string part is getting routinized, you realize the sheer variety of nuance with which Reznor and Ross are working.
And then there is “Unfinished Business,” the 22nd of the Bones and All soundtrack album’s 24 tracks. It is hypnotic, even darkly psychedelic, with its industrial noises, plucked strings, warped vocals, and shimmering faulty-circuit feedback. And then those voices come fully into sonic view, and they are, by all appearances, lifted straight from the movie itself. Diegetic and non-diegetic — on-screen and off — converge emphatically. These are horrific sounds (it is a horror film; it is about cannibalism), all gnashing and moaning. The voices peek out of the thick noise bed like arms violently grasping for prey.
And then they disappear. At one point in “Unfinished Business” there’s a gap, a pause, a near silence, just the quiet of what I presume to be the dark of night, and then the score comes back strong. It’s a startling moment in a score that otherwise hints at rather than underlines the goings-on. I’m not a big horror-movie viewer, even though I do count George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as one of my favorite movies of all time, but I’ll be watching Bones and All at some point soon for sure.
November 17, 2022
Disquiet Junto Project 0568: Slumber Mill
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, November 21, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 17, 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 0568: Slumber Mill
The Assignment: Make music inspired by a key chord from sleep research.
Thanks to Glitcher for proposing this project.
Step 1: We’re going to make music inspired by recent research on sleep habits. Read the article here:
Step 2: Think about the hallmarks of a nightmare.
Step 3: Spend some time with the C6/9 chord. The notes are C E G A D. (In other words: the root, major third, perfect fifth, major sixth, and major ninth.)
Step 4: Create a piece of music that begins with the hallmarks of a nightmare and then gradually transforms into a more positive piece through the use of piano chord C6/9.
Note: Feel free to use other chords or whatever but keep C6/9 primary in the transformation.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0568” (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 “disquiet0568” (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-0568-slumber-mill/
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, November 21, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 17, 2022.
Length: The length is up to you. Keep sleep in mind.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0568” 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 568th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Slumber Mill (The Assignment: Make music inspired by a key chord from sleep research) — at: https://disquiet.com/0568/
Thanks to Glitcher for proposing this project.
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-0568-slumber-mill/
The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2, where “piano chord, sleep, vaporwave, green, pink” was the prompt.
November 16, 2022
This Week in Sound: “Extending the Musical Worlds of the Films”
A friend asked how I can tell when the newsletter is going well. I mentioned how cool it’d be if I had an issue where every recommended This Week in Sound item came from a reader. That, as it turns out, is this issue (which apparently came close to maxing out Substack’s allowed length). Thanks, folks!
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the November 15, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: thisweekinsound.substack.com.
▰ CLIMATE MEDIATION: More from Karen Bakker (mentioned here in recent weeks), supporting her recent book, The Sounds of Life: “Digital technology is so often associated with our alienation from nature, but I wanted to explore how digital technology could potentially reconnect us, instead, and offer measured hope in a time of environmental crisis.” (Thanks, Jason Richardson!)
▰ MUFFLIATO!: I’m not a Potterite by any means, but I am certainly fascinated by the hold those stories have on people. An article (“‘A Magic Beyond All We Do Here’: Musical and Sonic Worldbuilding at Harry Potter Tourist Attractions”), by Daniel White, looks at four in-person spinoffs of the books (a concert series, a studio tour, the Universal Orlando tourist destination, and the Cursed Child theatrical play) for how they use “music and sound in distinct ways, drawing on or extending the musical worlds of the films, or creating worlds of their own.” It includes this interesting chart about different types of experiences — as I understand it, originally from The Experience Economy, by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ CLOUD ATLAS: This project looks unlikely, at the moment, to get funded, but it’s an admirable attempt to translate the beauty, the presence, of clouds for those lacking sight. The creator hopes for funds to “build a working prototype of a handheld device called a cloud scanner which reads clouds and converts the signal into sound which is then converted to a haptic signals which can be felt.” (Thanks, Daniel Weir!)
▰ CAPTION CRUNCH: “Television today is better read than watched,” writes Matt Schimkowitz: “Huge scores and explosive sound effects overpower dialogue, with mixers having their hands tied by streamer specs and artist demands. There is very little viewers can do to solve the problem except turn on the subtitles.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
