Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 144

twitter.com/disquiet: Expanse Sound, Ikea turntable

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 love the readymade poetry of the “notable deaths” page on Wikipedia.

Russian cosmonaut
Egyptian film producer and production manager
Moldovan composer
Italian hotelier, heart attack

▰ This is some next generation interface that seems to being tested on Twitter. I see it on occasion. Among the weird things about the now five arrows (count ‘em) is the one that seems to mean “I like it” turns red when you click on it, and the red looks more like the Defcon level has gone up.

After a while, even the word ballon starts to look like an arrow.

▰ Based on a recent show at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I can confirm that seeing an outdoor production of The Tempest during pouring rain qualifies as an immersive theater experience. One of my fellow attendees called it “method viewing.”

▰ I love how much The Expanse focuses attention on how the ships sound. The immediate context for this moment, from the ninth book in the series, is just how much death and destruction is occurring around the protagonists.

▰ IKEA teamed up with Swedish House Mafia to make a turntable and a desk. When you think about it, isn’t Ikea the Swedish House Mafia? (engadget.com)

▰ Been down a rabbit hole for a couple weeks. Apparently YouTube has more on it than live videos of John Fahey and Bill Frisell. Who knew? means seriously. Whew. Just breathtaking stuff, Fahey in 1981.

Peers and Friends Remember Justin Green

John Kelly at The Comics Journal put together a great memorial to comics artist Justin Green, whose work I edited in Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine for many years.

Bookended with pieces by Carol Tyler, Justin’s wife, at the start and, at the end, Catlin Wulferdingen and Julia Green, his daughters, there are entries by Bill Griffith, Denis Kitchen, Kim Deitch, Robert Armstrong, Dan Clowes, Jim, Woodring, Ron Turner, Patrick Rosenkranz, Shary Flenniken, Drew Friedman, Dan Nadel, Paul Karasik, Seth, Mark Newgarden, Glenn Bray, Kayla E., Joe Matt, Glenn Head, Monte Beauchamp, George Hansen, Bruce Chrislip, Jon B. Cooke, Bruce Simon, James Romberger, Steve Powers, John Kinhart, Everett Rand, Robert Beerbohm, and John Paul.

Here is mine:

Justin Green lived in Sacramento when I did, in the early 1990s. As I write this, it’s been barely a month since he died. I still grieve for my friend who taught me about art and life, emphasis on the “and.” A folder filled with remnants of our collaboration provides some solace.

I’d moved from Brooklyn to California’s capital city in 1989, a year out of college, to take a job as an editor at Pulse!, Tower Records’ print magazine. After two years, I suggested to my fellow editors that we experiment with comics in the magazine. The first two artists I signed up were local. Having never edited comics before, I looked for people whom I could work with in person. This was late 1991. Email was rare, cell phones even more so. We spoke by landline, sent faxes, wrote letters, and met in midtown Sacramento cafes like Greta’s and the Weatherstone. The first of these artists was Adrian Tomine, who I knew lived in town because his mailing address appeared in his self-published Optic Nerve, one of numerous minicomics I was buying at the time. The second was Justin Green.

I was aware of Justin’s comics from the magazine Raw, the 1991 issue of which listed Sacramento as his location. I tracked him down, and thus began the longest-running comic that Pulse! published, for upwards of a decade. It’s comically—forgive the common pun—absurd that the first two artists I published in Pulse! were so talented, given that I actively, at the beginning, limited myself to locals. It’s also cosmically—pushing the pun further—intriguing that one of them had, decades earlier, produced an ur-text of autobiographical comics, and the other was among the youngest artists pursuing that line of creative activity. Arrangements were formalized at the end of 1991, and their initial Pulse! comics appeared in the first issues of 1992. Justin’s presence in the magazine no doubt helped as I built our roster of contributors, who in time came to include his wife, Carol Tyler.

There are a lot of things I could share about working with Justin at such length and regularity. I could talk about his love for glass ink nibs. Or about how he aggressively remade any scripts supplied by writers other than himself (I wrote a few), always for the better. Or about his painstaking use of multiple drafts to refine stories. Or about how the strips’ seemingly most surreal grace notes were often there from the first sketch (whimsy as linchpin). Or about how telling it was, to me, that this elder statesman of underground comics was always open to editorial input, while some far younger artists (not Adrian) flinched and bristled at editing, needing to be sensitively coaxed.

The thing I think is important to share in the context of The Comics Journal is how central financial matters were to Justin’s comics. He was, in the truest sense, a working artist. His art (in Pulse!, other commissions, sign painting) was defined by his need to make a living. It’s understood how Justin’s autobiographical work was informed by his religious upbringing. It’s just as important to understand how, in adulthood, practical matters determined and shaped his self-expression. One marvel among many of Justin’s comics is just how much of himself he brought to what was, always, the next job.

John included four piece of ephemera I shared with him, including two rough drafts and a two-page letter Justin sent me. Here’s one of the rough drafts:

Read the full collection of Green tributes here:

https://www.tcj.com/remembering-justin-green/

Teal

I read something long ago that Nicholson Baker wrote — I think it was in The Size of Thoughts — about how he didn’t change his mind; rather, he’d at some point realize that his mind had changed. It’s in that sense that I woke up one day not long ago and realized that I no longer hated the color teal. That is my #ColorCodeStory for HiLobrow. It begins:

I’m not saying that teal (or its adjacent tones, a highly concentrated array that I can’t quite distinguish between — I’m probably mistakenly including a solid band of cyan in my personal definition) is my new favorite color. I will say, though, that I disliked teal vehemently for the longest time, associating it to a degree with a certain aspect of Floridian kitsch (redundant?), and that I had a near-lifelong near-visceral negative reaction to teal — and yet recently something changed. And quite suddenly.

Here’s the full piece: hilobrow.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0545: Unself-Awareness

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, June 13, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 9, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0545: Unself-Awareness
The Assignment: Learn from feedback intended for others.

Step 1: This project builds on the previous one, but you needn’t have participated in project 0544 to do 0545. In project 0544, participants posted tracks for which they wanted feedback from other participants. Familiarize yourself with the discussion here:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0544-feedback-loop/

Step 2: Pay particular attention to the feedback provided in the comments as the discussion thread proceeds.

Step 3: Choose one bit of feedback, and think about how you might apply it to your own music.

Step 4: Create or make a new track that benefits from what you learned in Step 3.

Step 5: Consider providing feedback to other people’s tracks.

Note: The Lines BBS runs on a discussion platform called Discourse, which has some built-in restrictions. Among these is that you can’t reply too many times to the same thread before someone else replies first. This is a “consecutive replies” matter. The best practice is to compile feedback to multiple tracks, and to tag reach recipient in one reply. If those instructions aren’t clear, just wait a little while after tracks begin to appear on the thread. Soon enough you’ll see examples of people doing exactly this.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0545” (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 “disquiet0545” (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-0545-unself-awareness/

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, June 13, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 9, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Consider it’s a lot to ask people to listen to something very long.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0545” 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 545th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Unself-Awareness (The Assignment: Learn from feedback intended for others) — at: https://disquiet.com/0545/

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-0545-unself-awareness/

Office Accessory

New workspace essential. Really nice. The mono mix out puts the guitar into the left and right channels, and uses a 3.5mm jack — so: right into the headphones; no adapter needed. And no, I’m not playing it loud through the headphones. This is just for practicing half an hour or so — and for not bothering other people with (currently) the minor pentatonic on repeat all over the fretboard.

This Week in Sound: Singing Volcanos, Rats with Mics

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the June 6, 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.

▰ “[R]esearchers have found a new way to identify key signs of Kilauea’s eruptive potential—by listening to vibrations from these lava lakes. Eventually, they hope to use these lava ‘songs’ to forecast when a volcano will start and stop erupting.” Zack Savitsky reports on the phenomenon of “singing” lava lakes. ➔ science.org

▰ “Takara Tomy, a popular Japanese toymaker, will soon release its AI smart speaker that can easily copy a person’s voice using deepfake. … This smart home gadget is perfect for parents who want to read bedtime stories to their children even though they are away from home.” This is either a technological marvel or a dystopian act of outsourcing affection. Perhaps both. ➔ techtimes.com

▰ “A call made by a humpback near Bermuda,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert, “would take twenty minutes to reach a humpback swimming off the coast of Nova Scotia. If the Canadian whale answered immediately, it would be forty minutes before the Bermuda whale heard back. To imagine what it’s like to be a whale, ‘you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,’ Clark says.” (Clark is Christopher Clark, a Cornell researcher.) ➔ newyorker.com

▰ Matt Burgess summarizes the state of voice privacy, as well as the main ways to maintain enhance it. These include “obfuscation”: “Simple voice-changing hardware allows anyone to quickly change the sound of their voice. More advanced speech-to-text-to-speech systems can transcribe what you’re saying and then reverse the process and say it in a new voice.” And “distributed and federated learning” (“where your data doesn’t leave your device but machine learning models still learn to recognize speech by sharing their training with a bigger system”). And “anonymization” (“attempts to keep your voice sounding human while stripping out as much of the information that could be used to identify you as possible”). ➔ wired.com

▰ To the rescue: “rats will wear tiny backpacks with built-in microphones so rescue teams can communicate with survivors trapped in rubble.” ➔ boingboing.net

▰ The TV series Under the Banner of Heaven‘s sound editor, Michael J. Benavente, talks about accomplishing “Utah quiet” in the making of the show. From a police stations to neighborhood kids playing, he always pulled things back, in his words, to get at the region’s atmosphere. ➔ youtube.com

▰ “Road traffic noise outside schools may impair the development of a child’s attention span and short-term memory.” A studied looked at data on 2680 students from 38 schools. “The children in schools with higher average indoor noise levels — defined as above 30 decibels, about the volume of whispering — saw a slower improvement in attentiveness, measured by comparing their performance on tests at the start of the year with those at the end of the year.” Quoted in the coverage is Maria Foraster, Assistant Research Professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health. ➔ newscientist.com, theguardian.com

▰ As voice expands its presence in the asynchronous web, new UX scenarios arise. In Discord, “users can drop a link, text, GIF, emoji, in the chat during their video calls.” ➔ 9to5mac.com

▰ Slack update: “New features include the option to add name pronunciation guides (either by recording audio or adding phonetic spelling).” ➔

▰ Apple had one of its occasional products/services/software announcements today. In terms of sound, “Personalized Spatial Audio uses the TrueDepth camera on an iPhone running iOS 16 to scan your ears and the area around you, delivering a unique listening experience that’s tuned to you.” Also, the new MacBook Air retains its 3.5 mm audio jack. ➔ macrumors.com, apple.com

▰ “While the top of the podcast charts on Spotify and Apple are still dominated by garrulous, jawboning hosts, these days you can also reliably find a smattering of white noise shows appearing in the mix,” reports Ashley Carman. One white noise purveyor is making over $18,000 a month. ➔ sfgate.com

▰ “If you are a billionaire, you can afford the best soundproofing, so when we are in the company run by Mike Prince [played by Corey Stoll], it’s very quiet.” Notes on sound production work for the TV show Billions. ➔ mixonline.com

Sound Ledger¹ (AI, Parrots, Big Voice)

7: Number of years in the contract between vehicle manufacturer Hyundai and voice AI company SoundHound

21: Number of days after which parrot chicks begin to babble

20,000,000,000: Projected value, in $U.S., of the “Big Voice” industry within a few years

________
¹Footnotes

SoundHound: finance.yahoo.com. Parrots: science.org. Voice: wired.com

Originally published in the June 6, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.

Revisiting Ark II

Jetpacks, a talking monkey, capricious gang leaders, child endangerment, full-on societal collapse — children’s TV in the mid-1970s was awesome. I revisited the short-lived series Ark II for hilobrow.com. The piece begins:

A year before the arrival in theaters of a movie we’d come to call A New Hope, CBS broadcast the serial Ark II, now a mere 15-episode footnote from the Golden Age of Saturday morning television. While our current cultural moment, a Golden Age of Golden Age reboots, has arguably run its course, I’d sure welcome an opportunity to revisit and perhaps revise this short-lived bit of just-pre–Skywalker science fiction. I, then age 10, wouldn’t learn to regularly employ the four syllables that constitute “millennium” for another 12 months, but Ark II was already set a full half millennia in the future — 2476! — on an Earth so devastated by societal collapse that it could almost pass for the desert planet of Tatooine.

Not music-related, but wanted to mention it here. Read in full at:

https://www.hilobrow.com/2022/06/06/kojak-enthusiasm-20/

Plastic Device

I dropped by someone’s place and knocked on the door — clearly, since ringing the doorbell wasn’t an option. This extensive protective treatment of the mechanism certainly begged explanation. I was told the bell was so loud that it caused the skittish family dog to have heart palpitations, and the device itself didn’t have an adjustable volume. Hence the makeshift reinforced warning system.

twitter.com/disquiet: Ingram, Elvia, ADDAC

I do this manually each Saturday, 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.

▰ YouTube’s automated captions turned “one volt per octave” into “wonderful proactive” and I’m OK with that.

▰ I dug Oval, by Elvia Wilk, the 15th novel I’ve finished reading this year. When this book (about many things, among them corporations and philanthropy commingling in Berlin) pushes from club-hopping to unfettered environmental tinkering it gets invigorating and scary. Looming threat is only fully evident in the rear-view mirror.

▰ When driving over a long bridge triggers memories of early flight simulators

▰ OK, website, I’ll allow you one cookie: the cookie that tells you I don’t want you to use any cookies.

▰ Those are some serious cables.

▰ This but AI-generated short reviews of music sent by individuals who like to “just follow up” a half dozen or more times

Per twitter.com/nearcyan, via qDot.

▰ I’ve got a short piece coming up in the near future at hilobrow.com. Two, in fact. This one’s about a color.

▰ I interviewed Ingram Marshall last year around this time. We ended the call with plans to follow up down the road. That road has ended for him. He died this past week at age 80. I’ve thought of his music whenever I’ve heard the San Francisco Bay fog horns, and I always will.