Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 140

Disquiet Junto Project 0550: Abrupt Probability

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 18, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 14, 2022.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0550: Abrupt Probability
The Assignment: Make music based on a chance graphic score.

This project is the first of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2022 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 7 through 11. The topic this year is “unvermittelt,” which is a little tricky to translate. Literally it’s “unmediated,” but it can also mean “sudden,” “abrupt,” or “immediate.”

We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the fourth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played and displayed throughout the festival.

Also, if you post your graphic score (see below) for this week’s project, it will be considered for display at the festival, either in public viewing box or in the Cage Room.

Step 1: Consider the nature of everyday randomness.

Step 2: Devise a situation (thrown coins, drained tea leaves, patterns in condensation, etc.) that depicts randomness visually.

Step 3: Take a photo of the chance-inducing scenario you decided upon in Step 2.

Step 4: Edit the photo from Step 3 to create a graphic score.

Step 5: Create an original piece of music that is an interpretation of the score you created in Step 4.

Also: When posting the track, describe a bit of your thinking and process.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0550” (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 “disquiet0550” (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-0550-abrupt-probability/

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 18, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 14, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Maybe leave it to chance?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0550” 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 550th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Abrupt Probability (The Assignment: Make music based on a chance graphic score) — at: https://disquiet.com/0550/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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-0550-abrupt-probability/

About the July 14 Disquiet Junto

The July 14, 2022, Disquiet Junto project will go out a little later in the day than has been the norm. The projects used to be posted fairly late in the day each Thursday. This year I’ve posted right after midnight, Pacific Time, each Thursday. It’s been like clockwork, though the email has gone out at varying times because it can’t be automated in the system I currently use (tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). There are some moving parts for tomorrow’s project I’ve got to sort out, so it’ll go out a bit later in the day. I’m mostly posting this so that people who might come to disquiet.com while wondering what’s up will see the notice.

Silence Amid the Goon Squad

This is from the very end of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and it both gives nothing away and is a great entry point to the sort of reading a newcomer to it should look forward to. This sure is a heck of a book, as so many people have told me over the years. Finally read it. An amazing Akutagawa Borges Gibson Nabokov chimera of time travel minus the time travel — about connections, perceptions, and perspective. My favorite novel out of the 17 I’ve finished reading so far in 2022.

This Week in Sound: Cheep Deception

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the July 11, 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.

▰ “In 1960, a group of dentists published a curious study: when they played music for their patients during operations, the people experienced less pain. Some didn’t even need nitrous oxide or local anesthesia to get through unpleasant procedures. … Now a new paper untangles why this works — at least in mice.” ➔ science.org

▰ A profile of a German company, Naturawall, that builds foliage-covered noise-reduction structures: “Naturawall specializes in installing flowers and plants into noise-protecting walls made of galvanized steel. When the wall is filled with soil, it gains enough mass to block up to 67 bB, which is just about the sound level traffic sits at.” ➔ apartmenttherapy.com

▰ All hail Savannah Salazar, who didn’t just add to the pile of (enjoyable) jokes about all the Stranger Things captions that describe what we’re hearing (“[Tentacles undulating moistly], [wet footsteps squelch], [tense music intensifies]”) but tracked down the crew responsible for writing the stuff. These include Jeff T. (who kept his family name private), QA editor Karli Witkowska, and Netflix’s director of globalization, Kathy Rokni. Says Jeff: “I read a lot of authors like China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and others who are engaged in the new weird movement of the 2000s. I love authors who use evocative words and language to do their world-building, so I will freely admit that whenever I’m reading and see a word that’s great, I steal it to put in my word bank. I do have a word bank that I consult for most of my shows, but I don’t have to break it out a ton because not every show has the intentionality of sound like Stranger Things has.” Karli: “Working with Jeff on this, I had to think about whether every sound and every descriptor provides the necessary required emotions or feelings that the deaf community would require.” ➔ vulture.com

▰ In related news, check out Dinda Nur Puspitasari’s essay from CrossOver: Journal of Adaptation Studies, about the translation of Webtoon sound effects. The study breaks down the various categories (impact, friction, air current, etc.) and strategies (repetition, transmutation, substitution, etc.), and gauges their rate of employment and effectiveness. ➔ uinsaid.ac.id (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ “[N]oise from one mine alone could travel 500km (more than 300 miles) in gentle weather conditions,” according to a report on deep-sea mining by researchers from the US, Japan, and Australia, published in Science. “They found that noise levels in a radius of 4-6km from each mine could exceed thresholds set by the US National Marine Fisheries Service, above which there are risks of behavioural impacts on marine mammals.” ➔ theguardian.com

▰ “Is Alexa Guard just Amazon’s ploy to sell us on ever-present microphones in our living room, or is there more to it?” The Android news site breaks down the add-on subscription service: “Alexa Guard keeps your property safe by listening to the surroundings and providing you with updates when you’re away. Alexa Guard Plus takes this to the next level by adding more functions in exchange for your hard-earned dollars. … Alexa Guard listens for things like alarms and the sound of glass breaking. Alexa Guard Plus expands on this and listens for any activity sounds, such as footsteps, talking, doors closing, and other signs of movement. If your Ring or Echo devices hear any of the sounds you choose, Alexa Guard Plus will notify you—via Smart Alerts to your phone—that there is a potential intruder in your house.” ➔ androidpolice.com

▰ Benny Hill may upstage Kate Bush and Metallica: “At the behest of Hugh Grant, the zanny tunes of ‘The Benny Hill Show’ theme are now providing the soundtrack to Britain’s three-ring-circus political crisis. … [T]he protesters inadvertently provided the background music for Tories’ interviews with the press. ‘Firstly, we need to make sure we get the basic functions of government going,’ one Conservative party member began in his interview with Sky News while being clearly drowned out by the hilarious buffoonery of ‘Yakety Sax.'” ➔ thewrap.com

▰ Beryl Mortimer, aka Beryl the Boot, was a Foley artist in the Great Britain. This is a half-hour BBC special about Mortimer and Foley. I wondered why there is no Wikipedia page for someone who did Foley for Lawrence of Arabia, Caligula, and Caravaggio, among other films. Noted by the BBC: “precisely how many films Beryl worked on is not known, as Foley artists were not routinely credited until the last decade of her career.” ➔ bbc.co.uk (Thanks, Daniel Weir!)

▰ Remember the lawsuit by employees against PetSmart for the use of “voiceprint” monitoring? PetSmart won a motion against it — at least “until another biometric suit is resolved in the state supreme court.” ➔ bloomberglaw.com

▰ Damon Krukowski hear robins singing after hours and discovered this isn’t an isolated occurrence: “I googled and it seems this is a widespread phenomenon in cities and towns. One set of researchers in Sheffield determined that the cause is noise pollution during the day, which prevents robins from carrying on crucial communication until nightfall. Another researcher based in Glasgow argues that the cause is light pollution at night, exacerbated by blue light from LEDs that robins can perceive as daylight.” In the process, he excerpts one of my favorite things ever, a specific instance from the recorded conversations between John Cage and Morton Feldman — who I always think of as the Frog and Toad, respectively, of 20th century American music. ➔ dadadrummer.substack.com

▰ Comics artist Richard McGuire, best known for the book Here, has a new one due out from Pantheon: “a visual exploration of how sound reaches us across time and space, capturing all the sound that happens in the universe within the span of a single minute.” The friend who told me about it noted that it may be related to a recent publication by McGuire with the same title, Listen: “Listen is a sound book, a graphic score transcribing everyday sounds on 32 pages: a dog barking, the radio, a car door slamming… a few sounds among those that punctuate our daily life.” ➔ twitter.com/likaluca, shop-fotokino.com (Thanks, Rodrigo Baeza!)

Cheep Deception

Last week I ran a story in This Week in Sound (“A Sharp, Short ‘Cheep'”) about an AI trained to identify distressed chickens by their cheeps. A reader (Cam Larios, who does the excellent twitter.com/InstrumentBot account, though we actually corresponded on Mastodon) sent me this anecdote:

A note about chickens and alarm calls: chickens are scoundrels. They’re smart enough to lie to each other.

I never saw her do this as an adult, but when a chicken we named Trouble was a young pullet, she learned that if she gave an alarm call, she could beat the bigger, faster pullets to any treats that were being offered. Trouble was an unusual critter, for sure, but deception has been well established in chickens in lab studies.

I admit to hoping that the chickens somehow find it worthwhile to outwit the emotion monitoring machines.

Sound Ledger¹

42: maximum number of characters allowed in a Netflix caption

50: low-volume decibel level at which mice experienced numbness to pain

58: number of octaves that researcher pitched up black hole oscillations in order to sonify them

________
¹Footnotes

Netflix: netflixstudios.com. Mice: science.org. Sonify: abc.net.au

Originally published in the July 11, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.

Two Threes, Two Fours

This is some high-grade confusion. There are two labels assigning the numeral three to one button, and there are two separate buttons for the numeral four, assuming the top right is a four — and then there is a button that has no designation whatsoever. That button sits between the original half dozen and what might be thought of as the second four — button four, that is. The “original” four, five, and six can be presumably identified, based on the placement of two and three. Of that set, one and five are virtually illegible. The original four is blank. And button number six looks like someone actively removed it. It’s almost as if the odd unmarked button, the tallest among these, hides in plain sight thanks to all the chaos around it. Urban doorbell makeshift aftermarket fixes are marvels of choices understood only to the inhabitants — or to their landlords.

twitter.com/disquiet: Takahashi, Strange, Stephenson

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.

▰ Level of tired: I looked at my desk before going for a walk and thought “My earbuds are charged, but are my sunglasses?”

▰ Familiar moment where someone nearby is doing construction work and my first thought is, “I have this record somewhere.”

▰ Next week marks the 550th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto music community project. Here’s a list of the 549 projects to date, from the first (making music out of the sound of ice in a glass) to the latest (getting intentional with stereo).

▰ RIP, Yu-Gi-Oh! creator Kazuki Takahashi, just 60 years old. I got to meet him when I was editor-in-chief of the English language edition of Shonen Jump. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the manga, anime, and games.

▰ Wonderful to see Allen Strange’s classic book, Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls, coming up for a long-overdue reprint, thanks to the Kickstarter campaign of Toronto Metropolitan University professor Jason Nolan: kickstarter.com

▰ I’ve read all of Neal Stephenson’s novels, excepting the Baroque Cycle, which I tried several times. It’s safe to say that this time around I’m digging it. From Book 1, Quicksilver:

▰ I’m certainly not alone wondering what song would work if Vecna had me in its sights. I’ve come down to two options: Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” or Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. (The former’s length is roughly six seconds under three minutes. The latter: one minute over an hour.)

Cause and Effect

I have no idea if there’s actually any cause and effect, any functionality, between this doorbell and the adjacent speaker.

Note-taking Process

Junto participants have been doing a great job recently of including at least a short description of their efforts when posting project tracks, which has been super — not only helpful to your fellow Junto members, but also just a good practice in general. You won’t necessarily, down the road, remember everything you did. Notating it a bit for future reference is a good habit. In fact, just noting it in the first place gets it in your brain in a way it wouldn’t otherwise, even if you never subsequently choose to look back.