Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 154

Albers in the House

Filled that poster void in the office.

This Week in Sound: School Acoustics, Sound Eclipse, BAFTA Bully Pulpit

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the March 21, 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.

▰ “Sound Eclipse is a new prototype device that aims to give city dwellers a chance to fight back against the noise and reopen their windows. Designed by Moscow-based industrial design firm Kristil&Shamina, it’s a noise-canceling orb that’s meant to hang elegantly in a window, with the smooth black curves of a high-end stereo.” The device produces sound that canels out what the device’s microphone receives. It can reportedly lower volume by up to 15 decibels. ➔ fastcompany.com

▰ “[A]coustics is equally as important as lighting or air quality, and perhaps even harder to get right. If you are cold you can put on another piece of clothing, or open a window if you are hot. But in the case of acoustic comfort, it is very complicated to change the room to make it more comfortable.” From an interview with Professor Arianna Astolfi, whose work led to the current acoustic standard for schools in Italy. ➔ acousticbulletin.com

▰ “I have a suggestion — perhaps next weekend don’t just go see a movie … go hear a movie.” That was Mark Mangini when he, Ron Bartlett, Theo Green, Mac Ruth and Doug Hemphill accepted the BAFTA sound award for Dune earlier this month.

▰ “We want to give people cues that are familiar, but also communicate electric power.” Car manufacturers are sorting out the right balance for the sounds that new electric vehicles are designed to emit. ➔ freep.com

▰ You need to complete this “interactive puzzle and sound toy brought to you by Google Developers” to reveal details about the company’s upcoming I/O 2022 event:

➔ io.google/2022, businesstoday.in

▰ “Supporters of the crypto plant promised an expanded tax base and job creation. What residents say they got was the constant din from massive computers and equally massive cooling fans.” ➔ washingtonpost.com

▰ “Contrary to popular belief, roosters — this one included — do not just crow at dawn; they crow all day.” Ryan Kost on how a loud bird added one challenge atop so many others that define life in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. “Roosters, it so happens, are legal in San Francisco. (This is not the case in Oakland, or in the city of Portland, one of the epicenters of the urban farming craze.)” ➔ sfchronicle.com

Sound Ledger¹ (Copters, Tropical Birds, Hearing Study)

300,000,000: The estimated number of participants in the recent Apple Hearing study to assess sound level measurements

99: The estimated percent of birds identified by sound, not eye, in dense tropical forests

7: The increase in helicopter traffic between 2018 and 2019 in the summer months in part of Long Island, leading to a “Stop the Chop” movement

________
¹Footnotes

Apple: myhealthyapple.com. Tropical: kqed.org. Chop: easthamptonstar.com.

Originally published in the March 21, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tiny....

From Paper to Sound

This paragraph is from early on in Flaubert’s Parrot, a novel by Julian Barnes that is so colorful and precise in its details that it reads like a European variant on the sort of observational detective work one expects from Paul Auster or Nicholson Baker. So far (I’m barely a quarter through), the book is like a highly sensitive Simenon protagonist trying to sort out the identity of a literary Maltese Falcon (minus any particular consequence, at least where I’m at in the book).

In this moment, Barnes (or the character narrating the book) is telling us, the reader, about a reproduction of a statue of the famed novelist (1821-1880, best known for Madame Bovary). Flaubert is long dead, as is his parrot, and Barnes is depicting a transmutation, a creative process, that ends in a state that the reader might not have expected: not with story, or novel, or memory, but with “sound” itself. The end of the line is not so much an anticlimax, in the William F. Buckley Jr. sense of the word, as it is a surprise.

No doubt this idea of human sound as a signature of our species is going to play a role as the book proceeds. We’re also told of the title subject: “The parrot, the articulate beast, a rare creature that makes human sounds.” Thus, sound is what we work toward, and what makes us human, and what provides a unique point of intersection with a beast that can imitate us. We’re listening to Flaubert’s parrot listen to us.

Not This One

When one lives above a frequented business

twitter.com/disquiet: Dilla, Naming, Automation

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 in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s 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.

▰ This was certainly a fun moment in my day. Michel Banabila emailed me in the morning saying he was asking people to help him name his track. He went with my proposal: “Waking Memory.” Here’s the track: soundcloud.com/michel-banabila.

▰ Favorite current sound: collective room tone of large virtual conference meeting that’s delayed starting. A half dozen or more people present, no one speaking, sounds of typing, someone sips a beverage, layers of spatial sound, drawer opening and closing, animal noise, footsteps.

▰ Unique circle of hell: when your current earworm is your wake-up alarm melody

▰ Afternoon ambience: Marcus Fischer’s heavenly, 11-minute track streaming in advance of the release of Robert Takahashi Crouch’s remix/rework album, also featuring Lawrence English, France Jobin, Faith Coloccia, Byron Westbrook, Yann Novak, and Christina Giannone.

Ritual Variations by Robert Takahashi Crouch

▰ Haven’t been in a theater for awhile, so I only just learned pretty soon after Spider-Man: No Way Home starts, it launches into Talking Heads’ “I Zimbra,” right up through (and making comic use of) the cold stop.

▰ I’m getting used to the Junto going our while I’m asleep. At some point automation will let me down, but for now it’s doing what it does. I can sleep soundly.

▰ In college, a hallway neighbor rushed into my room one day to tell me I was playing a Bach harpsichord CD too loud. Why? Not because it was penetrating the walls, but because it was louder than a harpsichord sounded. I got to hear a harpsichord yesterday, close up. It was loud.

It was just crazy loud. I was, of course, standing super close to it, directly where the soundboard resonates against the lid, so to my former hallmate’s point, neither the player nor the audience would hear it this loud.

I think my reply to my hallmate was along the lines of how microphones let you be inside the sound rather than have the sound come to you.

▰ I would describe how I’m trying to really get minor key scales by practicing modes of major scales but I don’t think I have the vocabulary to do so, and the first half of this sentence may not have been accurate. Nonetheless, guitar class remains a favorite half hour of my week.

▰ In this (at lithub.com, via warrenellis.ltd), CM is Cormac McCarthy. CO and LW are high school students who emailed questions to Friend. Friend is someone LW is in touch with through a boyfriend. Friend is a friend of CM.

▰ Q: Marc, you seem to enjoy all the novels you read. How is that possible?

A: With rare exceptions, I simply stop reading the novels I don’t enjoy. (After completing Le Carré, it took a lot of false starts to locate Mick Herron. Same thing on the long trip to Becky Chambers.)

▰ Why did I wait this long to start reading Julian Barnes?

▰ I need a new, long poster for my small office space, something long to fill the wall above a heating vent. I look through my old posters, and of course find I need a new poster. Recommendations appreciated. Roughly 3′ to 4′ feet long, preferably 2′ (up to 3′) feet wide.

▰ You can have your iOS Shortcuts, and your Memoji, and your Interactive Memories — the great thing, for me, about iOS 15 is the newly introduced (as of 15.4) Universal Control, a serious variant on Sidecar, where your MacBook keyboard can control your iPad. It’s remarkable.

▰ “digital indigestion”
noun

When you start to receive repeating email advertisements from a restaurant shortly after dining there for the first time.

__________
late Middle English; early 21st-century

▰ Waiting for my copy of Dilla Time. Meanwhile, there’s Ethan Hein on it: “we don’t have the analytical tools to study this music, and we need to develop them, because there is a whole world of microrhythm and groove out there that we have been neglecting.”

▰ Relieved that, according to today’s time-travel episode of Picard, there’s no radiation fallout evident in Earth’s atmosphere in the year 2024.

▰ I don’t think that rattle was the bus passing by. (Quake data: ktvu.com.)

Marquee Dusk

Did I mention that I love my neighborhood?

Absorbing Change Slowly

From today’s weekly edition of the email (tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto) I send to the Disquiet Junto community members:

Sleepily, I typed this while the cup of coffee to my right slowly dissolved the two ice cubes I placed in it a little over 10 minutes before starting. The time was 7:16am as I began typing this email, though my body knew it was really 6:16am. These cubes — of course not these exact cubes — were in my cup of coffee the very first week I sent out the Disquiet Junto, way back in January 2012. The sound of the ice popping, rattling, and whizzing partly informed the original Junto project, the one we now do at the start of every calendar year.

Change has come slowly to the Junto over the past decade, but when change works, it has a tendency to settle in. For example, only this year did I begin to use automation to post the latest Junto project to Disquiet.com and to twitter.com/disquiet while I’m asleep. If Tinyletter could do automated emails, you’d have received this already. Likewise the llllllll.co post. Instead, I’m sending and updating now that I’m awake — or as soon as the coffee kicks in. (Last week it hadn’t, which is why I first accidentally sent the project to my other email list, This Week in Sound: tinyletter.com/disquiet. That was a mess, though no one complained — at least not to me.)

Similarly, the trios project sequence (more on which in the instructions, if you’re new to the Junto and it isn’t familiar) that was an experiment back in 2018 has become so routine that I find it hard to believe we hadn’t started it years earlier. One thing about the trios project sequence is that each time the third of the weekly phases is complete, I have it in mind to do a fourth round that takes the collective material as a shared sample resource, but most of the time it feels like overkill. And so this year I waited a few weeks. And now we’re going to revisit the recent trios project in the form of a communal remix. Can’t wait to hear what people do with it. The instructions are brief, just two steps, but please read them carefully, especially the second step.

Each week I say thanks for your generosity and your creativity. In the case of remix and collaborative projects like the trios, the word “generosity” is more literal, in that I am referring, in part, to your comfort in making your music available for others to alter. That takes some amount of trust, and I want to say that trust is appreciated. 

Disquiet Junto Project 0533: Numbers Magik

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, March 21, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 17, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0533: Numbers Magik
The Assignment: Remix a trio — potentially using its subsets and variants.

Step 1: In a recent project, Junto members produced, over the course of three weeks, a large collection of asynchronous trios. In the first week, people recorded solos. In the second week, someone turned the solo into a duet, adding a second track but leaving room for a third. In the final week, someone completed a duet by adding that final piece of the puzzle. The tracks are accessible via the following Lines threads and SoundCloud playlists. Check ’em out:

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0525

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0525-magic-number-1-of-3/

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0526

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0526-magic-number-2-of-3/

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0527

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0527-magic-number-3-of-3/

Step 2: This project is to remix one of the trios. You might simply choose a trio, download it, and rework it. But you could do something more. You might locate other tracks that overlap with it. For example, there might be another trio based on the same duo, or you might use the duo or solo from which the trio was built. Take the materials of your choice, and remix them.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0533” (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 “disquiet0533” (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-0533-numbers-magik/

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, March 21, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 17, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. You needn’t stick to the length of the source audio.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0533” 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 533rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Numbers Magik (The Assignment: Remix a trio — potentially using its subsets and variants) — at: https://disquiet.com/0533/

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-0533-numbers-magik/

Remembering Jeffrey Melton

It’s been almost nine years since Jeffrey Melton died. On Twitter, he was better known as Nofi. Melton was an early Junto member, a key participant in Twitter Junto discussion. He and I never met in person. I never heard his voice. His death was a unique one for me. It felt unusual in March 2013: a sorrowful, abstract gut punch.

A wise friend once told me you’re never sad about one thing at a time. At the time of Melton’s death I was sad for the loss, sad for his family (he and his wife had a son), and sad at the premonition: short of war (which of course, as I write this, is actual, not hypothetical, and all the closer due to online friendships and news), we may very well lose many more people than our parents lost. It will be a different loss than they experienced, much as people who never leave their hometowns have different personal connections than those who go away for school, who travel, and who settle somewhere else, if they settle at all.

Nine years after Melton’s death, adoption of online life has spread, scaled, mutated, and become normalized even as it mutates further. I think, perhaps, we’re a little more used to deaths of digital friends now. Not inured, just a little more familiar — a strange gap where there had been a kind of presence, an echo that no longer echoes, a source that has run dry, a potential sounding board that has evaporated, and over time: a memory that always lacked a physical form; a silhouette of a concept that was always, to some degree, a concept.

In 2013, within a week of Melton’s death, we memorialized him in the 66th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, when participants played along with one of his recordings: “Communing with Nofi.”

At the time of this writing, Melton’s Twitter account remains public: twitter.com/nofi. There are a little more than a dozen of his tweets mentioning the Junto, among them ones about his efforts to compile a list of the email accounts of Twitter participants. There are additional ones in which he and I corresponded. In what appears to be the last one, he quoted some language that had come out of the Junto project: “Social music is about participating not promoting.”

Jeffrey Melton was from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he died in Indianapolis at the age of 42. There’s a brief obituary for him at .