Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 151

A Chorus of Sorts

The subway was my destination, and all the more so when I reached the top of the staircase. This was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, last week, toward the end of a recent trip I took back east. I’ve since returned to the Bay Area, where the world is considerably less dense — with people, with activity, with sound. In Greenpoint, it seemed, in that moment — in the moment preceding this audio — like a chorus might be performing down below the surface of the city, the voices gaining heft in the twisting, tiled hallways. I was in no rush to return to Manhattan, so when I took my first step down, I was looking forward to lingering. Buskers are one thing. Buskers transformed by the cavernous sound conduit that is a subway is something else entirely.

However, as is often the case with audio illusions (or hallucinations, perhaps), the impression I had fallen prey to was dispelled the moment I reached for my phone’s record button. It’s not simply a matter that I can’t hear the chorus in the audio I recorded. It’s that I no longer heard it when I was there. It simply evaporated. But the change in atmosphere did not deter me. I continued to record as I made my way.

You can hear those footsteps, my foosteps, here. I had two pairs of footwear on the trip: sneakers that are like marshmallows, and boot-like shoes that are firm as tires. This day was a tire day, and the hard tap of each step is evident. Once upon a time, the presence of those footsteps in the recording would have disappointed me. I would have thought of evidence of my being in the place as a taint. Instead, the footsteps lend a linear context to the sounds. They confirm for a listener, even one who was not present at the time, that space is being navigated. And I was, in the end, rewarded with a voice — not a chorus, per se, but a municipal announcement so utterly altered by the echo that it became a sort of chorus itself. Perhaps the very chorus that had caught my imagination earlier on.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

HVAC Ambience

The drone module installed on this hotel roof is next level.

Disquiet Junto Project 0537: Penitent Honk

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

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0537: Metaphor Play
The Assignment: Do sound design for “a missing gesture” of vehicular life.

Step 1: Consider the sounds drivers make using their car horns. A firm, accusatory blast. A short, sharp alert. A held tone of vein-popping exasperation. What the horn isn’t easily capable of, however, is apologizing. If you make a mistake, and you want to signal your chagrin, there’s no button for that. The writer Rob Walker files such a concept under the heading of “a missing gesture.” Think about that for a moment.

Step 2: For more context, read the issue of Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing newsletter in which a subscriber suggests the following: “We have so many rude gestures, many of which we use while driving. But we don’t have a good gesture to say ‘I’m Sorry!’ If we accidentally cut someone off, we should be able to indicate it wasn’t intentional.”

https://robwalker.substack.com/p/around-the-block/

Step 3: Think about what a car horn would sound like if it were apologizing for the driver’s actions.

Step 4: Record the sound you thought of in Step 3.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0537” (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 “disquiet0537” (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-0537-penitent-honk/

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

Length: The length is up to you. Don’t hog the road.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0537” 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:

This project was proposed by Rob Walker.

More on this 537th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Penitent Honk (The Assignment: Do sound design for “a missing gesture” of vehicular life) — at: https://disquiet.com/0537/

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-0537-penitent-honk/

The Room Tone of the City

I was sitting in a room, perhaps like the room you are in as you read this. It was very early on April 13, 2022, and I had been listening to the city I was in, Manhattan, as it woke, and as I woke along with it. Construction had already begun by the time I lifted my head, and I hit record on my phone to capture the combination of irritant and coziness that the muffled sounds of building provided. On the one hand, these were not comforting noises. On the other, they were quite quiet, especially from my tiny, 12-floor hotel room. I thought about how much the annoyance of the sound was tied not just to the time of day, but to how the small sounds could permeate my otherwise remote and private hotel room: how the sounds could be present without being overwhelming.

And so, having recorded 45 seconds of the sound from where I was seated, at a small desk, I decided to combine the outdoor sound with itself — to, in effect, magnify it. To accomplish this task, I played the initial 45-second recording on my laptop’s speakers, and recorded it as it sounded in the hotel room, while a variation on the outdoors naturally (or unnaturally, depending on your perspective) proceeded. Then I did this layering a second time, and then a third. Each time I added sound, the result was not particularly louder, or even all that eventful. There was clanging and droning, but there was still a lot of space present, not silent space but quiet space: the room tone of the city.

At first I thought I would just upload the fourth track, but instead I made a longer recording that presented the transition from one segment to the next. I treated each of the four recordings with a fade-in, and then I concatenated them, so just before the first recording ended, the second one began, and then the third, and then the fourth. And then I faded out the fourth track, so the full piece didn’t end suddenly. It’s quite remarkable how little happens in the finished piece, how the sound combined with a variant on itself multiple times is not that much more dense, not that much more full, than was the original. It speaks to both the relative quietude of morning Manhattan, and to the way the ear processes aberrations and unwanted occurrences. This is “Construction Kit.”

Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/disquiet.

This Week in Sound: Benjamin Franklin, Jackson Lamb, Sensory Gating

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the April 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.

▰ “Filtering acoustic information according to its relevance, a process generally known as sensory gating, is crucial during sleep to ensure a balance between rest and danger detection.” Read a study from Nature’s Scientific Reports on neurological research into sleep-deprived rodents. ➔ nature.com

▰ Apparently many deepfake detection systems are trained on catalogs of pre-existing deepfakes. A new system, developed by researchers at University of Federico II in Naples and the Technical University of Munich, “looks only at real videos of a subject, and then uses those videos to create a biometric profile of that individual.” ➔ findbiometrics.com

▰ Farts are a central component of the sound design that depict the character of Jackson Lamb, as depicted by Gary Oldman in the new TV series Slow Horses. (I’ve read all the novels in the series. The show is a fairly solid adaptation so far, if lacking the books’ signature digressions into atmosphere.) ➔ cinemablend.com

▰ There was a glitch that had Android’s Google Assistant reading Brazilian Portuguese to people in Portugal, and vice versa. ➔ androidpolice.com

▰ “Sound, timing, feeling, instinct; we both rely on all of that. That’s because we use ambience to tell the story. It’s more important than music.” Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, sound designer for such Apichatpong Weerasethakul films as Tropical Malady and, more recently, Memoria (which, no, I haven’t seen yet but very much want to) talks about the role of audio as a narrative and emotional tool. The interview is by Lukasz Mankowski. ➔ mubi.com
(Via Cormac Donnelly)

▰ A special “Sonic South” issue of Southern Cultures has been edited by Outkast scholar Regina N. Bradley, who wrote an detailed exegesis of video of Sandra Bland’s arrest back in 2015. ➔ southerncultures.org
(Thanks, Rob Walker!)

▰ Duncan Geere shares details of a sonification tool he is building for the free virtual modular synth program VCV Rack: “What I’m trying to do is create a virtual module which loads a CSV file containing data, allows the user to pick a column, then jumps from datapoint to datapoint every time it receives a trigger, spitting out control voltages based on the data that you can send other modules that actually make sounds.” ➔ duncangeere.com

Sound Ledger¹ (Holy Noise)

301: The number of religious locations (“mosques, temples, churches,” etc.) alerted by police in Bangalore, India, about possible noise infractions by loudspeakers

1,001: The number of locations alerted by police in Mangalore, India, about possible noise infractions by loudspeakers

620: The number of those Mangalore locations that are either mosques (168), temples (357), or churches (95) 

_________
Footnotes: Bangalore: livemint.com/news. Mangalore: indiatimes.com.

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

Going Down

A passive aggressive elevator

twitter.com/disquiet: Teen Wolf

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.

▰ Safe to say my parents’ records did have an influence on me:

And yes that’s a slide projector, for added ’70s feel, holding up the LPs in the rear.

▰ That thing where you find a typo in your tweet so you confirm no one has liked it yet and then you delete it and (re)tweet it.]

▰ A touching memorial for Tom Moody (hashtag: netart 8bit ogblogger) by Cory Arcangel: artforum.com. Moody was an early Disquiet Junto member. He played at the concert we did for Rob Walker’s 2012 Apex Art exhibit. Some of the old internet died with Moody last month. And here’s an obituary for Moody: artnews.com. And Gene McHugh on Moody: rhizome.org. And remembrances: rhizome.org.

▰ Big memories: “Cult heroes: Thin White Rope were scorched, alien, hostile” at theguardian.com by Graeme Thomson. Thin White Rope were a constant presence when I lived in Davis and Sacramento, working for Tower’s Pulse! magazines. In fact, I got my room at a house in Davis when TWR’s drummer vacated it to go on tour. They did my favorite Can cover ever, “Yoo Doo Right.” (Via Marc Masters)

▰ Briefly in New York, thus back in my childhood bedroom. My dad made these narrow shelves for me a million years ago, back when dial-up BBS was social media. These shelves fit behind the door, and they’re the depth of a paperback book. Of which I had many. Floor to ceiling.

▰ Oh yeah

▰ Not sure why voice recognition is much better on the iPhone than the iPad, but:

“Link weenie link weenie and clams are us for dinner oh my god. Clamor sauce.”

I do have that mess to thank now for the phrase “clamor sauce.” Seems like a great term for failed voice recognition.

▰ I’ve been publishing something or other since I entered 10th grade in 1981 and joined the school newspaper, and I still find that the phrase “full bleed” (in printing terminology) makes me palpably uncomfortable.

▰ What you find in the basement when your dad taught high school biology:▰

▰ Watching the Ken Burns Ben Franklin documentary, hoping for some OG Junto info. Ended up watching the second episode first. That’s after the Junto, but it had this tasty sonic bit, Franklin on the rattlesnake:

“One of those rattles singly, is incapable of producing sound, but the ringing of thirteen together, is sufficient to alarm the boldest man living.”

▰ Thank you, Zoom, for reminding me every time I cough (I caught a bad cold) that I have my mic muted.

▰ Been quiet on Twitter ’cause I’m on Long Island with my parents (and a bad cold). Last time here, I heard trains from the top of the hill, which I don’t recall from childhood. This time I noted these beautiful wood floors used to be carpet. Totally changes things for the better. Of course by “quiet” I don’t mean “silent,” and of course in the general course of life, “silent” doesn’t mean “silent,” either.

Home Again

Requisite childhood home doorbell selfie

Disquiet Junto Project 0536: Metaphor Play

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

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0536: Metaphor Play
The Assignment: Take a favorite figure of speech as a creative prompt.

Step 1: Think of a metaphor you frequently use or that you particularly love.

Step 2: Think about how that metaphor could be applied to making music or otherwise working with sound.

Step 3: Make a piece of music in which that metaphor plays a role in how you plan and execute the work.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0536” (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 “disquiet0536” (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-0536-metaphor-play/

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, April 4, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 31, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0536” 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 536th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Metaphor Play (The Assignment: Take a favorite figure of speech as a creative prompt) — at: https://disquiet.com/0536/

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-0536-metaphor-play/