Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 139
July 23, 2022
twitter.com/disquiet: Voice Menus, Göransson, Mann
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.
▰ If you say “human” enough the voice menu eventually gets the point.
▰ Soundtrack: buncha kids on some sorta summer camp stroll walking by while singing loudly in perfect misharmony, muffled by wind and walls and traffic.
▰ Ludwig Göransson is scoring Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, Oppenheimer. Very much looking forward to it.
▰ From today’s New York Times mini crossword. An across clue: “8 electronica instrument” (5 spaces).
▰ One of the “Physics Cost-Saving Tips” from today’s XKCD:
▰ “It is not on any map. True places never are.”
I’m enjoying Todd Eliot’s Moby Dick (re)read in particular and book blog in general: thelithole.com.
▰ Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson is the 18th novel I’ve finished reading this year. I strive to get into historical fiction but I’m usually left wanting to read more history. I’m not sure I’m moving on to volume two of the Baroque Cycle for a while. Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon remain my favorite Stephenson novels.
The Sound of Michael Mann
I’ll read anything about Michael Mann, so, clearly, I’ll be reading the upcoming Heat 2 (!) novel (!!), co-written with Meg Gardiner. I love that this lengthy New York Times interview gets into the role of sound in Mann’s productions, for film and TV alike.
Pinned to a wall behind him were several images of vintage Ferraris painted different screaming reds. He’d tasked his crew with making full-body 3-D scans of these vehicles, crafting perfect facsimile shells and fitting these with contemporary drivetrains capable of high-performance racing. Special recordings, Mann said, would capture the engine sound of period-accurate “small-displacement V12s running very high, this shriek, driving down narrow canyons through masonry, then suddenly they’re out in an open field.” He smiled. “It’ll feel like the air is being ripped apart.”
More from the Times article, written by Jonah Weiner. It’s mostly about Mann’s upcoming movie, Ferrari (a biopic I’d otherwise pay close to zero attention to, but, you know, it’s Michael Mann).
[Christopher] Nolan calls “Heat” Mann’s masterpiece, and when we spoke, he singled out a “tiny detail during the bank robbery, where the money is stacked and wrapped in plastic, and they put it into the duffel bags, then use a razor to slash the plastic and bang it, so that it comes loose and takes the shape of the bag.” This moment flies by, but it “grounds the entire robbery in a technical reality that you respect and enjoy,” Nolan said. “You feel you’re watching a film about experts made by experts.” The sequence’s most indelible aspect is its terrifying sound. Mann recorded the gunfire — “full-load” blanks, containing the same powder charge as live ammo — not on a soundstage, as is common practice, but out on the streets, as it reverberated off the sunny steel-and-glass canyons onscreen.
I wrote a short appreciation of Thief in 2019 for hilobrow.com, and followed that up with a close listen to his feature debut, a TV movie called The Jericho Mile.
July 22, 2022
Delay & Aarset
Much of the music Vladislav Delay and Eivind Aarset produced together for Singles has a precisely calculated, threatening quality to it — which is why the track that stands out the least in fact stands out the most.
Track “13” (they’re all numbered), for example, could easily come from the climax of a hopped-up Ridley Scott movie. It’s all resounding clang and anxious atmosphere. The album opens, calmly enough, with “08” (they’re all numbered but they don’t appear in sequence), which then quickly shifts into pile-driver mode. Track “22” (while there are eight total, they appear to have beeen selected from a wider batch, based on the naming) is perhaps the brashest of the collection, the sort of full-body pile-on one experiences at noise shows. Throughout Singles, Delay’s electronics and Aarset’s heavily mediated guitar (the album sounds less expressly guitar-like than usual for him) work in exacting parallel with each other.
And then there is “10,” which is the track to spend time with, to spend time in. It is lulling, or at least seemingly so, like nothing else on the album. No, not like nothing else. Like instances elsewhere, instances that are fleeting, caught between fierce outbursts, inhuman aggressions. On “10,” much if not all of that is put to the side so the dubby ambience can come to the fore. The placidity, of course, is contextual. It’s purely relative. In fact, the air in “10” is clipped and fraught. Toward the end, a mechanical rhythm pierces the fragility, but never so much that the fragility is ever in doubt.
Album originally posted at vladislavdelay.bandcamp.com, and released by Room40. Vladislav Delay (born Sasu Ripatti) is from Finland and Eivind Aarset is from Norway.
July 21, 2022
Disquiet Junto Project 0551: The Bends
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, July 25, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 21, 2022.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0551: The Bends
The Assignment: Get less strict about something you’re strict about.
Step 1: Think about things you’re strict about when you make music. Maybe you only work in a minor key, or you never use drum machines, or you always stick in 4/4, or you never revisit past work, or something else entirely.
Step 2: Choose one thing from the list you made in Step 1 and think of it as a rule.
Step 3: Think about how you could be less strict in regard to the rule you focused on in Step 2.
Step 4: Record a piece of music in which you bend the rule, as you determined in Step 3.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0551” (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 “disquiet0551” (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-0551-the-bends/
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, July 25, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 21, 2022.
Length: The length is up to you. If you usually make short pieces, maybe try something long?
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0551” 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 551st weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Bends (The Assignment: Get less strict about something you’re strict about) — at: https://disquiet.com/0551/
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-0551-the-bends/
July 20, 2022
July 19, 2022
This Week in Sound: Quiet Action Sequences
These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the July 18, 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.
▰ Not sure what to make of it, but Vox Protect appears to be software designed specifically to hide identities of witnesses in judicial proceedings: ➔ voxprotect.com, prnewswire.com
▰ Scientists “have collected a database with the aim of diagnosing Covid-19 through the use of coughing audio samples.” ➔ researchgate.net
▰ “The tiny-but-mighty pistol shrimp can snap its claws with sufficient force to produce a shock wave to stun its prey. So how come the shrimp appears immune to its sonic weapon? Scientists have concluded that the shrimp is protected by a tiny clear helmet that prevents any significant neural damage by damping the shock waves.” ➔ arstechnica.com
▰ “In fact, while AI researchers have attempted to instill human emotion into otherwise cold and calculating robotic machines for decades, sales and customer service software companies including Uniphore and Sybill are building products that use AI in an attempt to help humans understand and respond to human emotion. Virtual meeting powerhouse Zoom also plans to provide similar features in the future.” ➔ protocol.com
▰ Just a side note that the final episode of Ms. Marvel appeared to involve a sonic weapon, though its exact functionality wasn’t, I believe, identified. I could be wrong. Everything went quickly.
▰ “Ring is rejecting the request of a U.S. senator to introduce privacy-enhancing changes to its flagship doorbell video camera after product testing showed the device capable of recording conversations well beyond the doorsteps of its many millions of customers.” ➔ gizmodo.com
▰ NPR correspondent Linda Holmes makes a great case for “quiet” action sequences: “That means you are left with the sounds of the chase itself: feet over bricks that are slipping, police clambering down noisy stairs, the sound of running along an isolated street, the way echoes change depending on where you are. And then, of course, the roaring of the sewers, the splashing that’s deep or shallow, and the rich acoustics of underwater tunnels not meant for travel. Where loud scoring might hand you a mood or a monitor to attach to the tension level, using the sounds of the pursuit stresses the chaotic shifts from place to place and the abrupt arrivals in different settings that mark a truly desperate bid to get away.” ➔ npr.org (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ Kaya Yurieff makes the case that Clubhouse, which normalized realtime audio chat (aka digital party lines), “isn’t dead yet.” ➔ theinformation.com
July 18, 2022
Sound Ledger¹ (Fast Radio Burst Times)
3: Number of seconds of the persistent fast radio burst (FRB) recently detected from a “far-off galaxy”
1,000: Number of times longer that is than the average FRB
2007: Year of the first FRB detected
________
¹Footnotes
FRB: mit.edu.
Originally published in the July 18, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.
July 17, 2022
No Fuses Inside
There was an article in the Village Voice — or maybe it was Interview — many years ago by someone who had their car broken into repeatedly. At some point the car stereo was stolen, and the author put a sign in the dashboard window that read: “No radio.” When the car was broken into subsequently, tape cassettes were taken from the glove compartment. The author replaced the sign to, if memory serves, read: “No Kerouac, no Coltrane.”
There are electronics in plain sight all around the city, little bits of elemental public-utility infrastructure that accrue value, or at least perceived value. At some point, something becomes valuable enough that aspiring thieves apparently need to be informed what isn’t inside these municipal lock boxes.
July 16, 2022
twitter.com/disquiet: phone alerts & a singing bridge
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.
▰ Pretty sure that in my dream I heard the iOS “you have a text message” ping and then woke up, ’cause there was nothing on my phone when this happened. (I didn’t check at the time but I did in the morning.)
▰ Pretty sure the Golden Gate Bridge can, again, be heard from the backyard. Hard to tell. Definitely not as pronounced as it’s been, and the wind making noise of the trees and bushes masks it a bit. But I think it’s there. I’d register this as an improvement.
▰ I’d like a Condor / Old Man crossover just for Bob Balaban and Joel Grey to have a tête-à-tête.
(This would be complicated by Leem Lubany having to play two very different people separated by decades, nationalities, and continents — but she could pull it off.)
▰ Every time I see a Webb Telescope image my first thought is, Yeah but when’s the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?
July 15, 2022
Nature’s Emphasis
Nice typography, all the more so underlined by the setting sun. Have a good weekend, or best you can manage.
