Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 152

Dark Rooms of the Past

Before dads had modular synthesizers they had dark rooms. My dad’s was heavy duty.

This Week in Sound: Voiceprint Lawsuits, Breath of a Blackbird

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the April 4, 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.

▰ “A flexible, wearable, fabric microphone”: that’s the topic of recent Nature coverage. It’s a report on MIT professor Yoel Fink’s “fabric ‘ear.'” Not only can one fiber of Fink’s ear technology capture sound, two fibers can “be used to identify the direction that a sound came from.” The potential deployment of this technology is still in the works: “Yoel thinks that a wearable fabric mic that sits directly on the body opens up a wealth of potential applications, from helping people with hearing aids to focus their listening on a specific speaker in a noisy room to providing long-term, comfortable monitoring of heart or respiratory function, even monitoring a baby in the womb.” ➔ nature.com
(Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

▰ According to the National Law Review, “voice recognition data — another growing area of potential litigation risk.” ➔ natlawreview.com

▰ Opinions are coming in on the Zone, a Dyson product that combines air purification with Bluetooth headphones. The Verge: “we’ll have to see whether customers will be willing to embrace this extremely odd-looking product.” Wired: “either a bold new world of personal pollution protection or an economic and PR disaster for Dyson. Frankly, we’re not sure which it will be.” The Guardian: “sure to draw quizzical looks.” Designboom: “bizarre combo.” Nerdist: “you don’t want to look like a Benzite from Star Trek.” ➔ wired.com, theguardian.com, designboom.com, nerdist.com

▰ “The world’s cities must take on the cacophony of noise pollution” — a report from the Financial Times: “Good measures have been applied already in urban areas across the world: from London’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone, ‘noise radar’ in Paris and Berlin’s new cycle lanes on wide roads to Egypt’s national plan to combat noise and Pakistan’s 10bn trees ‘tsunami’.” ➔ unep.org, ft.com

▰ “It’s a regular beanie hat with a reinforced flap around the ears wherein two materials have been combined to make it sound-absorbent and noise-blocking.” That’s the Little Snooze, a children’s hat. ➔ innovationorigins.com

▰ “PetSmart required warehouses workers to use the technology to create an individual voiceprint, unique to each person,” according to a putative class action lawsuit. “Workers then carried out orders sent from a central computer by interacting with voice recognition software, which responded based on their voiceprint. The voiceprints, stored in a file containing the worker’s name and employee number, could have been subject to hacking and put the workers at risk for identity theft, according to the lawsuit.” ➔ hrdive.com

▰ “The project aims to understand whether artificial motor sounds on electric scooters can improve audible detectability of these vehicles by people with visual impairments while avoiding contributing additional noise pollution to our cities.” Read about the collaboration between the Royal National Institute of Blind People, the University of Salford, and Dott, a European mobility operator. ➔ theiet.org

▰ You must click through to see the breath of a red-wing blackbird in frigid air while it sings: ➔ thisiscolossal.com
(Via warrenellis.ltd)

Sound Ledger¹ (Dyson’s Mask)

0.1: The size, in microns, of particles filtered by the Dyson Zone

5: Number of liters of clean air delivered per second by the Dyson Zone

90: Number of minutes of use of the Dyson Zone at its highest level

________
¹Footnotes

theguardian.com

Originally published in the April 4, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.

Fell / Treanor / Bradbury Interview

Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury beamed in on the big screen at Gray Area in the Mission last month, on March 11, so I could interview them in front of a live audience. The setting was the second-ever Algorithmic Art Assembly conference-cum-festival.

There was a meta quality to the hybrid live/Zoom scenario, in that the topic of discussion — the trio’s excellent web audio project at intersymmetric.xyz — was the way they created virtual environments for individuals to make music collaboratively from a long distance. They discussed how it arose out of the constraints of pandemic performance, how unsatisfying they found live-streaming of traditional concerts, and how they did test runs of the software with children, among other aspects of the project. (Speaking of meta, I kind of love how in the video you see my gesticulations repeated behind me on the video screen, and how they’re delayed ever so slightly, a split second. It’s latency in action.)

This is the interface of their first intersymmetric.xyz project, commissioned for the No Bounds festival in 2021:

This is the interface of their second intersymmetric.xyz project, commissioned for Algorithmic Art Assembly 2022:

And here’s footage of a live performance by Fell and Treanor on the AAA version of intersymmetric.xyz, introduced by AAA founder Thorsten Sideb0ard:

twitter.com/disquiet: Calix, Jeck, HVAC

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.

▰ Haven’t stayed in a hotel in many months. Diggin’ the subtle HVAC. The drone is comforting: the breath of a benevolent entity. And there’s the street noise of a true metropolis. New York isn’t quite back to being the city that never sleeps but it still stays up past its bed time.

▰ RIP, Garry Leach (b. 1954). Miracleman (né Marvelman) blew my mind once upon a time.

▰ It was from Stephan Matthiew that I first learned of the death of musician Philip Jeck (b. 1952): twitter.com/stephanmathieu.

▰ This is just terrible, terrible news. RIP, Mira Calix (b. 1970). I can’t imagine Warp having become the Warp it is without her.

▰ First Oscar-winning movie in which a prominent character wears a King Crimson Discipline t-shirt?

▰ Got a new thumb drive. Stuck it into my laptop. It helpfully includes examples of MP3s and JPGs, and MOVs, oh my — I suppose in case you’re not sure what such things are. Continuing my Gen X habit of currently naming all my digital gadgets after William Gibson material, this thumb drive is now called Overdrive.

▰ A request from Nicoles Robson, PhD researcher at Queen Mary University of London, to take part in her next study: “Exploring the Experience of Listening to a Spatial Sound Art Installation”: twitter.com/nicolesrobson.

▰ Madrona Labs’ Randy Jones reports on the noise of his new Mac Studio: twitter.com/madronalabs.

Exterior Infrastructure

“Honk if you like scaffolding.” (Judging by the hyper-local soundscape, everyone likes scaffolding.)

Disquiet Junto Project 0535: Jigsaw Disjunction

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

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0535: Jigsaw Disjunction
The Assignment: Break a familiar melody into pieces and play it in a different sequence.

Step 1: Choose a favorite melody. It’s preferable to use one that’s in the public domain.

Step 2: Break the melody into pieces. It’s recommended to think in terms of bars, but you might break it into notes or phrases, or into random segments of time. It’s entirely up to your ear, of course. Experiment until you arrive at a satisfying approach.

Step 3: Play the melody back in a new order, reassembled from the pieces resulting from Step 2. The optimal approach is to do this live: to play the newly reconstructed melody as if it were the original melody. Doing so might take some rehearsal. Alternately, you might use cut and paste or other production techniques.

Step 4: This step is optional. You might include additional instrumentation to flesh out the piece resulting from Step 3, or you could leave Step 3 as it is.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0535” (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 “disquiet0535” (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-0535-jigsaw-disjunction/

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 “disquiet0535” 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 535th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Jigsaw Disjunction (The Assignment: Break a familiar melody into pieces and play it in a different sequence) — at: https://disquiet.com/0535/

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-0535-jigsaw-disjunction/

The Weather’s Onomatopoeia

Still deep into Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, which arrives at some spirited onomatopoeia. We’ve long since recognized a bird that does the rare thing: repeating human speech. Now the weather engenders something like the sounds of birds themselves.

Who Could Say No?

Who could say no?

Music to My Ears for Airports

Onward and upward (SFO -> JFK)