Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 135

twitter.com/disquiet: Enveloped by Summer HVAC

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.

▰ Monday morning drone sextet: two lawn mowers, apartment building HVAC, dishwasher, washing machine, traffic

▰ Been on Long Island for 12 days straight and am finally getting a taste of that thunder we don’t get in San Francisco — or the rain, for that matter.

▰ The robot voice of the landline’s voicemail service announced the name of the incoming call. I didn’t pick up. The call was from a robot, which left a message. Someday these robots will be able to speak with each other. Someday later they will no longer be robots.

▰ How many OMGs can I fit in a tweet? Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew are doing a live performance of Remain in Light at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this year. Please please please tell me the “all-star band” includes Tony Levin.

▰ I figured out the new Instagram algorithm:

33% synchronized dancing
33% Jackass wannabes
20% sports highlights
13% ads
1% people I elected to follow

▰ “I reign as the articulator with the greater data / Revolvin’ on the TASCAM much doper than my last jam.” Gang Starr Forever

▰ The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Exceptionally written at a sentence and paragraph level. Beyond that a mediocre psychological thriller. The first half reads like a meaningful parody of literary fiction. The second sets to unravel the tidiness, gets mired in ellipses. (The 20th novel I’ve finished reading this year.)

▰ My suburban hometown train station on Long Island is straight out of any number of anime I’ve watched.

▰ Word for “I need to call an ambulance because the ambulance that just passed by blew out my eardrum”?

▰ Final morning on Long Island for a while, after 15 days straight. Very quiet aside from the composite drone of automobiles — dampened by trees, buildings, and distance.

▰ The hotel HVAC in this tiny room is so loud and so substantial that it is echoing off of my fan-less laptop, and I keep thinking the laptop has a fan and it’s about to spin out of control. And on that note, have a good weekend.

Complex Cumulus

Suss Müsik is always up to something interesting, often involving homebrew DIY equipment of his own making, combined with commercial items that have unique voices of their own. Such is the case with this combination of a contact mic with a stereo resonator, a pitch shifter, and complex reverb. The result is a slowly shifting array of chords, all shimmery and euphoric cumulus.

This is the latest video I’ve added year to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live ambient performances. Video originally posted at youtube.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0556: Gabber Ambient

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, August 28, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 25, 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 0556: Gabber Ambient
The Assignment: Field-test a hybrid genre.

Thanks to Sevenism for having proposed this project.

Gabber and ambient music seem like polar opposites. Gabber is typified by a constant distorted kick drum pummelling you at upwards of 200bpm. Ambient, on the other hand, can be deeply immersive or barely noticeable. This project asks the question: is “gabber ambient” possible?

Step 1: Consider what makes gabber gabber and what makes ambient ambient. Where is there crossover?

Step 2: Make a track that could be construed as “gabba ambient.”

Step 3: You’re probably going to want to delete it. Try not to. Save and upload.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0556” (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 “disquiet0556” (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:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0556-gabber-ambient/

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, August 28, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 25, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Does fast mean long or short?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0556” 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 556th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Gabber Ambient (The Assignment: Field-test a hybrid genre) — at: https://disquiet.com/0556/

Thanks to Sevenism for having proposed 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-0556-gabber-ambient/

Image by BranMoviC, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BranMoviC_Hakken.gif#mw-jump-to-license

Junto x Bern

For the past few months, the Disquiet Junto music community has again collaborated with Musikfestival Bern thanks to the invitation by Tobias Reber. Several graphic scores developed by Junto participants for one of the projects are now on display at the festival, which will run from September 7 through 11 in Bern, Switzerland.

On the Hour

Found thanks to twitter.com/cour13r5, in response to my weekly automated tweet about the Tuesday noon siren here in San Francisco — a siren that hasn’t sounded since 2019.

Cage Chord Megamix Under Construction 🚧

This is a post for Disquiet Junto community members. I wanted to check in about the recent “Cage Chord.” That was the project from two weeks ago (details: disquiet.com/0554). It was one of the three we’ve done this year in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern in Bern, Switzerland (September 7 through 11; musikfestivalbern.ch), thanks to the invitation (for the fourth year in a row) by longtime Junto participant Tobias Reber, who works for Musikfestival Bern.

Tobias is now creating a “megamix” of the drone tracks produced for the Cage Chord project. He’s been able to download all but 14 of the 60 or so that were produced. If your track isn’t set as downloadable, and you’d like it included in the megamix, please make it available for download and contact Tobias via llllllll.co, or let me know about it and I’ll share it with him.

Please do so by the end of Wednesday, August 24th (in Switzerland’s understanding of the end of the day), and let me know if I can be of assistance.

Thanks, as always, for your generosity with your time and creativity.

Image via twitter.com/tobiasreber.

This Week in Sound: An Exhaust Pipe for Noise

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the August 22, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: tinyletter.com/disquiet.

As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.

▰ Check out this sonification of privacy invasions. Writes Bert Hubert, “I made a very very simple tool that makes some noise every time your computer sends data to Google.” Check out Hubert’s demo on the official Dutch government jobs site. ➔ twitter.com/bert_hu_bert (via Acoustic Mirror)

▰ “The company actually put an exhaust on the vehicle, even though it doesn’t need one and the only thing it emits is sound,” writes Mariella Moon. The company is Dodge and the vehicle is a two-door electric update of the Charger — the legacy name now unintentionally ironic. The propulsion system is appropriately called the Banshee. ➔ engadget.com (Thanks, George Kelly!)

▰ “Figuring out what peace and quiet actually does for our mental and physical health is the ambition of a group of neuroscientists and health professionals who are beginning to unravel the benefits,” writes Kayt Sukel. “By getting to grips with their research, I discover that a little silence may be vital to offset the detrimental effects of our noisy world. But just how much quiet do I need, and where should I get it?” ➔ newscientist.com

▰ The New Yorker Radio Hour follows up John Seabrook’s recent article on the sound of cars by taking the Mustang Mach E for a “test listen” and interviewing Connor Moore, a musician who worked on the Mach E, among other cars. ➔ wnycstudios.org (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

▰ Andrew King, director of the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, explains to writer Alison Nastasi how the “Shepherd tone” functions: “’The lowest and highest frequencies are barely audible and the middle ones are louder.’ he says. As the quieter, similar sounds at the beginnings and ends of the scale fade into each other, all we really perceive is the smooth sequence of sounds in between, which ‘produces the illusion of an endlessly rising [or falling] pitch.’” ➔ popsci.com

▰ A battle over voice AI technology has Google federal lawsuits against Sonos. ➔ reuters.com

▰ Kathryn VanArendonk praises the vocal soundscape of the TV series Industry: “There are voices everywhere, picking up phones and whispering into them with the desperate urgency of someone who can feel the entire world on the brink of a collapse. There’s a roller-coaster-like feeling of everyone’s fortunes rising and falling, not in concert but in close proximity; the noise never stops, and the fluidity with which characters move in and out of various languages further underlines the global, borderless, unceasing feeling of chaos Industry creates for its characters. Even when their vocabulary sounds like money-flavored white noise, the stakes are always apparent in the vocal performances, when the pitch starts to get shaky and the words start to come faster and faster.” ➔ vulture.com

▰ Three titles are out this year from The University of Chicago’s new Studies in Game Sound series: Nostalgia and Videogame Music: A Primer of Case Studies, Theories and Analyses for the Player-Academic by Can Askoy; The Music of Nobuo Uematsu in the “Final Fantasy” Series by Richard Antone; and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time by Tim Summers. ➔ uchicago.edu

Sound Ledger¹ (Cars, Simians)

103: Number of failed attempts a driver in Wales tried to use voice verification to pay a toll

43: Number of species of monkeys and apes lacking the vocal membrane, aka voice box, likely required for speech

13: Speed in MPH below which, after 2019 legislation by the UK’s Department for Transport, electric cars must emit warning sounds

________
¹Footnotes

Wales: walesonline.co.uk. Box: newscientist.com. MPH: autoexpress.co.uk.

Originally published in the August 22, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.

Library Signage

twitter.com/disquiet: Visual Artist ID

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.

▰ That was a new-to-me flavor of awesome. While speaking with a service representative at what is clearly a massive call center, suddenly the entire room broke into riotous laughter. It felt cinematic, somehow, even though it was just a scratchy phone call.

▰ Hey, anyone recognize this artist’s name? I can’t decipher the signature, which is almost as abstract as the 1962 print on which it is inscribed.

▰ Today’s technique check: mentally practicing guitar scales by saying/singing them out loud while visualizing the fretboard (without a guitar in hand because you’re traveling) doubles as a sleep aid.

▰ And I discovered a new tuning: instagram.com/dsqt.