Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 128

Moving ‘This Week in Sound’ to Substack

The TWiS newsletter is being moved to Substack, at thisweekinsound.substack.com. If you were already a subscriber via Tinyletter, you shouldn’t need to resubscribe.

This is an experiment. I may end up using another system, but several friends of mine use Substack and it’s served them well — and I have experience with it as a reader, as I subscribe to a bunch of arts/technology/personal newsletters I enjoy. (I started my first email newsletter in 1994 as an editor for Towers Records’ magazine, Pulse!, and I know all too well that every service has its positives and negatives.) The TWiS newsletter remains free, but of course feel free to get a paid subscription as a means to provide support. Thanks.

Also, I had to come up with a logo to set the thing up, so the one up above is an initial pass. I’m fairly certain I’ll get something better together in time.

While I’m mostly interested in Substack for its publishing toolset, it does have other aspects to its infrastructure, a key one being its recommendation engine. In that spirit, here are some sound/music-related Substacks I recommend:

▰ Ethan Hein’s Ethan Teaches You Music is an exceptional tool. He has a unique ability to apply a deep mastery of music theory to highly accessible music.

▰ The World According to Sound is a about the potential of sound in various media

▰ Joshua Minsoo Kim edits Tone Glow, which often features ecellent interviews with musicians toward the experimental end of the spectrum.

▰ Pavle Marinkovic’s Sound Awareness covers audio branding, music psychology, film scores, and more.

▰ Shriek of the Week shares a different birdsong recording in each issue.

▰ Damon Krukowski’s Dada Drummer Almanach provides a musician’s-ear-view of music making and, especially, the business of music.

▰ Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker is a great resource on a range of topics, especially classic jazz.

▰ A Closer Listen is another great music recommendation resource, very much aligned with Disquiet.com aesthetically.

▰ Matt Pinto’s Caesura is a quick shot of music recommendations.

If you have other suggestions for newsletters to follow (on Substack or otherwise), let me know. Thanks.

Street Fighter x the Visually Impaired

Sound in video games isn’t merely about immersive reality. It can be a matter of life and death — for the player characters, that is, especially the ones operated by visually impaired gamers. The current beta version of Street Fighter 6, an update of the venerable franchise that originated as a 1987 arcade favorite, apparently has exceptionally inclusive accessibility options. Shown here is one of several in-game menu pages that allow for customizing the controls. “For visually impaired players,” writes Chris Moyse of destructoid.com, “Street Fighter 6 seemingly offers a custom sound deck, that not only offers up spoken signals for the game’s menu system and select screens but also features fully customizable sound options for the fight itself. Players can adjust the balance and sound applied to all manner of in-game commands — from accurately ascertaining distance, to whether a strike has connected or been blocked, Drive Gauge gain/burn, even when a player performs a jump attack, with alternate sounds if it ‘crossed-up’ the opponent.”

The image above is a screenshot I took from footage posted on Twitter by @_REMless that was a source for Moyse’s article. A reply to the initial tweet reads: “As a totally blind person who loves the Street Fighter series, I think this is a great step forwards. The only thing missing would be voiced spoken menus.” Video gaming for the visually impaired is a real thing, and its ongoing development has ramifications for future interfaces in our increasingly technologically mediated world. (That’s a phrase I use a lot, and that I see variations of frequently in my reading. I sometimes wonder if it’ll ever get shortened to something like OITMW. Perhaps there’s already slang for the underlying phenomena. I learn most of my slang from words I fail to get right in the New York Times Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee.)

In Fast Company on Sound Logos

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Rob Walker for a Fast Company story this week. He wrote about the Wikimedia Foundation’s current open call for “sound logos.” As he describes it, the connection of sound with branding is nothing new: “Jingles have been a staple of broadcast advertising from the beginning, and before that, traveling medicine shows were heavily musical.” I contributed some thoughts about the sizable breadth of Wikimedia’s creative brief — “both in terms of topic (‘the sound of all human knowledge’) and audience (presumably: everyone on the planet?)” — and he mentioned the recent Disquiet Junto music community project (the Junto is another effort of mine) in which participants contributed entries to the Wikimedia contest.

I think Wikimedia has a unique challenge ahead. While the name Wikipedia is widely recognized, Wikimedia isn’t, nor are the majority of its other activities, of which there are a dozen. (Have you used Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, or Wikidata recently?) I’m not even convinced that Wikipedia’s own visual logo is all that well known — that is, I’m not sure how many people would recognize it out of context. (Interestingly, as the Fast Company story notes, the Wikipedia visual logo — the jigsaw puzzle globe — was also the result of a contest, apparently won in 2003 by a 17-year-old, Paul Stansifer, who is now a software engineer at Google. The globe was then refined by someone else.)

The people entering the sound logo contest don’t have much to go on. Creative constraints are not just valuable but necessary. One of those is the audience for whom the logo is intended. Part of me wonders who truly has allegiance to Wikipedia. I wonder if it’s more the people who contribute to the ever-growing database of information than the people who use it. I’ve done some work for open-source projects, and the audience of participants in those efforts is often more “knowable” and central than are the actual end-users, which is a broader and more diffuse collection of loose cohorts. I’d recommend prioritizing practitioners — the people whose work fuels Wikipedia — because if the logo doesn’t register with them (or, worse, if it turns them off), then you have a serious problem to manage. (I loved the stage of the Marvel credit sequence logo when you heard the pages of comics flipping by during a montage of the company’s broad creative heritage. That spoke to a certain community, a certain subset of their audience. Perhaps tellingly, as the movies and TV shows continued to outpace the comics, the sound of the pages was removed.)

Read the full piece at fastcompany.com.

twitter.com/disquiet: Blue Angels, Grammarbots, Mastodon

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.

▰ I no longer set timers for work projects. I just work until a “spam likely” call appears on my phone, decline it, switch to another project, and await the next spam call. When I feel I’ve earned a break, I read the entertaining automated transcriptions of the spam calls.

▰ Tired: You study sound, so you must love fireworks [that cause stress-inducing disturbances and annoy domestic animals].

Wired: You study sound, so you must have a smart assistant in your home [that listens to everything everyone says and does].

▰ Disembodied voice: “If you would like to hold without music, please press 1.”

Me: 1

▰ I can pretty much tell how much I’ll like a random contemporary British TV crime drama from its theme music

▰ Ooh, Matthew Herbert did the music for The Wonder, the new Florence Pugh film

▰ Got to Queen Bee in the New York Times Spelling Bee on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, and woke up Monday wondering if that had just been a dream (apparently it hadn’t).

▰ Can’t believe I missed the word “cooing” in yesterday’s New York Times Spelling Bee

▰ There’s a graphic novel called Forest Hills Bootleg Society. When I first saw the title, I thought it was a real thing, and that I could return to the time in 1983 I saw Talking Heads in Forest Hills, Queens.

▰ “My AI could do that”

▰ I haven’t loved a Don DeLillo book in quite some time, but I’d be stoked for him to win the Nobel, because then we’d get a speech. I can only imagine what such a speech would contain.

▰ I know that by some measures I write a lot, but I think somehow managing to crash TextEdit was an unforeseen badge of honor.

▰ If you write and don’t think of yourself as “a writer,” I beg of you: pay a little attention to text underlined by automated grammarbots in red and please do feel comfortable ignoring much of what gets underlined in blue. In fact, as I was writing this, the grammarbot wanted me to remove the “of” in “beg of you.” Apparently the grammarbot doesn’t care for Elvis Presley.

▰ It’s almost like these grammarbots are trying to undo what little grammar people may have learned.

▰ I was gonna tweet something about the lovely foghorns but then the Blue Angels made my nervous system do things that are by no means healthy.

▰ Before the Blue Angels assaulted our peaceful neighborhood, I was gonna mention that while I’m not fluent in foghorn, I did comprehend what they were saying amid today’s marine layer: “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” (Not sure if they noted the quote is apocryphal.)

▰ Tired: Buying fancy new speakers.

Wired: Having a cold for a couple days and then your earache subsides.

▰ Tonight’s reading: a return to that period during the 1990s when I subsisted primarily on burritos and mini-comics.

▰ One of my favorite walls in the neighborhood

▰ I get a lot of linktree-style choose-your-platform things like this via email from music PR, and I’m fascinated by how often YouTube and YouTube Music aren’t listed, even if the music in question is on those platforms. (I trimmed the artist’s name off the top of this image.)

▰ There is an FAQ about the Disquiet Junto. If there are other questions, lemme know.

▰ Are you on Mastodon? I’m on Mastodon. I dig the underlying concept, though I can’t say I’ve connected with it much in practice. I’m at post.lurk.org/web/@disquiet — or something like that. Sharing links to Mastodon is a little peculiar, even self-defeating, but there you go.

▰ They’re called the Blue Angels because they appear out of the blue and force you to contemplate the afterlife

Polaroids from the Singularity: Flaming Tubas

Werewolf by Night, the new seasonal horror special from Marvel Studios, was directed by Michael Giacchino, the prolific film composer who has done a bunch of Marvel movies (among them Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thor: Love and Thunder), and one of my favorite TV series of all times (Fringe), not to mention Lost, and Alias, and Star Wars: Rogue One, and The Batman (“the one with Robert Pattinson”) and a lot of Pixar. Needless to say, I was especially interested in how music would be situated in the one-hour, standalone show.

As it turned out, beyond the notable presence of a soprano voice (two are credited: Grace Davidson and Sumudu Jayatilaka) amid the orchestral score, the main things to make a sonic impression were diegetic — which is to say, they were sonic occurrences that appeared on-screen.

One was the presence of a Wizard of Oz tune, which felt almost inevitable, given the (largely) black and white nature of the film. (Fun fact: Giacchino did the theme music for The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz back in 2005.)

The other was a flaming tuba seen during a ritual procession. The next morning after watching it, I asked DALL·E 2 (the text-to-image tool founded on artificial intelligence: labs.openai.com) to produce some flaming tubas in a variety of styles. Shown here, clockwise from the upper left, is the prompt (“a tuba on fire”) in four styles: photograph, pixel art, Johannes Vermeer, 3D render.

One additional sonic fun-fact: all the vocalizations by Man-Thing in the episode were made by the film editor Jeffrey Ford, who has worked on a lot of Marvel movies (and Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, among other films).

If You Make Music Please Consider

If you make music please consider:

Starting a blog that serves as a central archive of your activities

Starting a newsletter that once every season or so tells your listeners what you’re up to

Sticking with Bandcamp (etc.) for releases but using other tools for your blog and newsletter activity

I may expand on these in the future, but that’s the three-part suggestion in a nutshell.

Polaroids from the Singularity: The Concept of “Hidden”

I’m fascinated when DALL·E 2 (labs.openai.com) falls short — why, for example, the concept of “hidden” seems unfamiliar to it.

The prompt: “photograph of a tape cassette with a microphone hidden inside”

Ryoji Ikeda’s Blissfully Frantic New Track

There’s a new song out from Ryoji Ikeda, the Japanese musician and installation artist who likes to flood massive spaces with immersive minimalist visuals that resemble test patterns for imaginary technologies. When it comes to more intimate zones, such as the space between our ears, he can really edge into the blissfully frantic. This new track, “ultratronics 01,” is everything I love about Ikeda’s music compacted into a strident, glitchy five minutes that sounds as if a dying alien civilization of anxious androids only knew about the idea of music from stray Earth signals carrying Dizzee Rascal and Cliff Martinez albums to their distant, fading star. The constant fritter of vocal cut-ups finds common ground between telecom packet switching and a spin of the FM radio dial, while the underlying rhythms suggest that someone with a PhD in 20th-century percussion music decided to make an EDM record. If data poisoning is your drug of choice, this is for you. The full album, Ultratronics, comes out on the Noton record label, run by Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai), on December 2.

Track originally posted at YouTube.

Disquiet Junto Project 0562: Sheep Music

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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, October 10, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 6, 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 0562: Sheep Music
The Assignment: Record something to help someone fall asleep.

There is just one step: Record something to help someone fall asleep.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0562” (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 “disquiet0562” (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-0562-sheep-music/

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, October 10, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 6, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. How long does it take to fall asleep?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0562” 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 562nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Sheep Music (The Assignment: Record something to help someone fall asleep) — at: https://disquiet.com/0562/

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-0562-sheep-music/

The project’s image was produced using DALL·E 2. “Three sheep floating over a suburban house at night, realistic photograph” was the prompt.

This Week in Sound: A Camera That Runs on Sound Waves

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the October 4, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: tinyletter.com/disquiet.

▰ What the Peck: From New Scientist: “To a woodpecker’s brain, drumming against a tree is a lot like birdsong. The findings reveal substantial similarities in the brain circuitry behind hearing and executing these two major acoustic activities in birds, meaning that they may be modifications of a shared evolutionary template.” It takes a moment for this revelation to sink in: it isn’t just that the woodpecker’s pecking registers as singing; it’s that the bird is using an external object, the tree, to accomplish that singing. “Woodpeckers don’t just use their beaks to drill for grubs inside tree trunks. They hammer against trees to make specific sound patterns that communicate territorial information with other woodpeckers.” Ironically, the classic “Woody Woodpecker Song” made the point of saying the cartoon character’s laugh was its song (“Oh, that’s the Woody Woodpecker’s tune … Makes the other woodpeckers swoon”). Turns out, the pecking was itself the song all along. ➔ newscientist.com

▰ Jet Set: “As Emerson Collins, a film producer and nonprofit director, boarded his American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Dallas on Sept. 6, a bizarre noise from the plane’s intercom system flooded the cabin: a loud groan — or was it a moan? — laced with pain — or was it pleasure?” Read about what is definitely not the source of the Havana Syndrome, but is still quite a story about sounds of unclear origins. (Weirder still, someone says the same thing happened to them back in July, also on an American Airlines flight.) ➔ latimes.com (Thanks, Philip Sherburne!)

▰ Cop Out: “The days of eavesdropping on the New York Police Department may be coming to an end,” according to reporting by Gizmodo: “The NYPD says it wants to reimagine its current police communication system and transition to encrypted messages by 2024. … New York joins a growing list of cities considering encrypting radio communications. Denver, Baltimore, Virginia Beach, Sioux City, Iowa, and Racine, Wisconsin have all moved to implement the technology in recent years.” ➔ gizmodo.com

▰ Lost in Translation: The local newspaper from Hamilton (Ontario, Canada) reports on how “closed-captioning goofs make for bizarre reading at city council meetings.” A city spokesperson confirmed for the reporter that the broadcasts “use a voice recognition program for automated closed captioning.” ➔ thespec.com

▰ Life of Brian: Brian Eno spoke at the Woodbridge Ambient Music Festival, held in his birthplace of Suffolk. He talked a bit about how life in this town, which apparently had about 4,000 inhabitants in his youth, influenced the development of ambient music: “I remember I used to take walks towards Kyson Point [overlooking the River Deben estuary] and I used to imagine what would it be like if you could make music like a painting,” he told the BBC. ➔ bbc.com, woodbridgeambientmusicfestival.com

▰ In Sea: “What if you could photograph the deepest depths of the sea using a camera powered only by the ocean’s soundscape?” MIT scientists have devised a camera that “runs on sound waves,” apparently. “They say it can take colour photos in dark environments, and is 100,000 times more energy-efficient than other undersea cameras. … The prototype underwater camera is made up of two domes and a cylinder. One dome houses the image sensor, and the other houses the flash. … The cylinder is covered in a specialized material that allows the camera to harness sound waves and convert them into electrical energy, which it uses to power up.” Bonus out-of-this-world quote: “We’ve also been in discussions with NASA for future space missions where they want to use them to search for life in extraterrestrial oceans.” ➔ cbc.ca (Thanks, Michael Fitzgerald!)

▰ Beyond Blipverts: I hope to revisit this topic, but for the moment I’m just sharing a tweet: “A company is asking the @FEC for permission to program your phone to listen for sounds embedded in political ads that are ‘imperceptible to humans,’ and when your phone hears the sound, it’ll prompt you to make a campaign donation.” (Found via Adav Noti of the Campaign Legal Center, via the Sounding Out! blog) ➔ twitter.com, fec.gov

▰ Super Freak: Stephen Dubner uploaded an episode of the Freakonomics podcast dedicated to matters of noise, covering such topics as how recorded complaints of noise pollution date at least as far back as Roman philosopher Seneca (who “moved out of Rome to the Roman suburbs because he couldn’t stand the noise anymore”), how 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer complained about the noise of cracking whips (“paralyzes the brain … and murders thought”), about early research on the impact of environmental sound on education, and the sometimes limited reinforcement of noise-abatement laws (“There are even prohibitions against ice-cream trucks playing their jingle once they’re parked at the curb. But, of course, there’s a big difference between having a noise code and enforcing it”). (Full disclosure: I read the transcript. I have no idea how people have enough time in their lives to listen to podcasts. More power to them.) ➔ freakonomics.com (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

▰ Phoney Baloney: The war on robocalls proceeds. Press 1 for more information. Press 2 to donate to the cause. “State and federal officials are teaming up to collaborate on investigations to stop robocall scams. The Wisconsin Department of Justice revealed a partnership Tuesday that it’s taking part in with the Federal Communications Center, which establishes a formal sharing and cooperation structure to investigate spoofing and scam calls. ➔ weau.com