Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 155

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 .

This Week in Sound: The Minister of Noise

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the March 14, 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.

▰ Meet Sumaira Abdulali, aka the Indian Minister of Noise: “an eminent environmentalist, renowned for raising voice against under-recognised, severe environmental issues such as noise pollution and sand mining,” as profiled by Apoorva Phutela. ➔ feminisminindia.com

▰ Even casual sports can get loud. The sport known as pickleball gained popularity during the pandemic, due to its relative ease of entry. This had become a problem: “the rapid rise of the game — and the decibel levels, crowds and vocal advocacy it generates — has precipitated an intense backlash in communities across the country,” reports Connor Sheets. ➔ latimes.com

▰ File under unintended consequences: Twitter Spaces posts get an extra promotional boost because Twitter is promoting Spaces in general, so people are using them to promote things other than Twitter Spaces, per Rian Broderick. Thus: “Meme accounts have noticed this and are now basically launching junk Spaces simply for the extra promotion.” ➔ garbageday.email

▰ Learn how so-called “leaky modes” can be exploited to reveal what lays beneath the earth’s surface. (“Leaky modes can occur when a seismic wave is ‘trapped,’ bouncing back and forth between two layers of rock.”) ➔ mining.com

▰ 32 Sounds is a new film by Sam Green that serves as a “participatory documentary” exploring the experience of sound. Even when the movie is projected in person, viewers are expected to use headphones. “No matter the format, it’s important to experience 32 Sounds with noise-canceling headphones (which are provided at live gigs), as the movie is mixed in such a way that the direction the sound comes from is practically as important as the audio itself — plus, it helps to cut out the rustling, coughing and miscellaneous din that so easily distracts in group settings, like film festival screenings,” writes Peter Debruge. (Music: JD Samson; sound design: Mark Mangini.) ➔ variety.com(Thanks, Mériol Lehmann!)

▰ If the intersection of acoustics and construction is your thing, then you want to read about operating rooms and sound clarity in detail. ➔ acousticbulletin.com

▰ “If music is sound produced through modification of materials to make instruments and performance spaces in which to listen, then humans are nearly unique” — from an excerpt of the new book Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction, by David George Haskell. ➔ wired.com

▰ “Although background noises are not spoken, they can contain information about the speaker — where the speaker is and what the speaker might be doing.” James A. Larson wrote an opinion piece about voice privacy. ➔ speechtechmag.com

▰ “Dune, West Side Story and Nightmare Alley won one award apiece during the Motion Picture Sound Editors’ 69th annual Golden Reel Awards.” Those were, respectivley, for effects/Foley, for music and for dialogue/ADR (which stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement). ➔ hollywoodreporter.com

▰ Since today is Pi Day, here’s the first 80 digits being played as musical notes, which, of course, takes roughly 3 minutes and 14 seconds. ➔ youtube.com

Sound Ledger¹ (Leaf Blowers, Sound Documentary, Hearing Aids)

50,000: Estimated cost, in $US, for a Washington, D.C., landscaping company to replace all its gas-powered leaf blowers

32: The number of sounds explored in director Sam Green’s new headphones-only documentary film (more below)

40,000: The fine, in $US, four companies have agreed to pay for “marketing their over-the-counter hearing aids as ‘FDA-approved’”

________
¹Footnotes

Blowers: washingtonian.com. Film: variety.com. FDA: nhregister.com.

Originally published in the March 14, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter tinyletter.com/disquiet.

Bowmaker

Entry to the workshop of a maker (and repairer) of bows for string instruments

twitter.com/disquiet: Aphex Notes, Emoji Fatigue, Gibson Cosplay

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 is the way.

▰ I use multiple communication systems and I have to translate between them based on system emoji vocabulary. Twitter: two options, heart or not. Slack: a broad range. Facebook: a range I rarely employ. Messages: usually just heart or thumb. The emotional translation can be tiring.

▰ Some of the best This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet) material originates with readers. Thanks to Mike Rhode, Alan Bland, and Anne Bell for some of the items in this past week’s issue.

▰ My computational devices all currently do William Gibson cosplay:

Laptop: Maas Biolabs
Kindle: Cyberdeck
Tablet: Peripheral

▰ One could do worse than to have a reader like Łukasz Langa share their notes after reading your book, as he did with my 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol II. Here’s just one segment.

Also: chapter breakdowns, quotes, personal reminiscences: lukasz.langa.pl.

Algorithmic Art Assembly 2022: Fell / Treanor / Bradbury at Gray Area

I spent a lovely Friday afternoon at the podium, sharing the stage at Gray Area with (beaming in from England) Mark Fell (lower left), Rian Treanor (lower right), and James Bradbury (upper right), talking about musical interfaces that facilitate long-distance collaboration for the 2022 edition of the Algorithmic Art Assembly.

This angle always makes me feel like I’m in Florida, but it’s right here in San Francisco’s Mission District.

This Week in Sound: Crossed Wires Mini Issue

Subscribers to my This Week in Sound email newsletter received an unfamiliar subject line sometime this morning (Pacific Time). I use the same software, Tinyletter.com, to send out both This Week in Sound and the instructions for the Disquiet Junto (a weekly online music community I’ve been managing since January 2012). Unfortunately, I was logged into the wrong account when I hit set.

To make up for my mishap, I posted a follow-up This Week in Sound email with some mid-week links of sonic interest. (Oy — and to add to the confusion, I left out the URL for the fourth item below. I’ll include it in next Monday’s regularly Bat-scheduled issue.)

First, though: Trigger warning for Batman spoilers and animal protection.

▰ More scientific research shows that white noise helps learning — presumably that means the best place to study is on a cross-country flight: “In neural systems, information processing can be facilitated by adding an optimal level of white noise. Although this phenomenon, the so-called stochastic resonance, has traditionally been linked with perception, recent evidence indicates that white noise may also exert positive effects on cognitive functions, such as learning and memory.” ➔ nih.gov(Thanks, Lucas Gonze!)

▰ “The farm’s pens are a cacophony of squeals, screams, barks and grunts, with each sound telegraphing a different feeling or need. Pigs are expressive animals with a wide range of vocalizations. … Interpreting their calls can occasionally stump even experienced farmers. … Decoding the emotions behind those oinks could soon become a little easier. Researchers in Europe have created an algorithm that assesses pigs’ emotional states based on the sound the animals make.” ➔ nytimes.com

▰ A new film adds to the growing list of recent deaf mute (or deaf, or mute) characters. Boy Kills World will be directed by Moritz Mohr, and it stars Bill Skarsgård. Sam Raimi produced it. “It centers on Boy (Skarsgård), a deaf mute with a vibrant imagination. When his family is murdered, Boy escapes to the jungle and is trained by a mysterious shaman … to repress his childish imagination and become an instrument of death.” Okey doke. ➔ deadline.com

▰ “But suddenly, there’s another rumble—one that rapidly transforms to an earsplitting, unnatural shriek. The gunfire stops, the yelling stops, even the roar of the heavy Gotham rainfall gives way to this ever-deafening shriek. The rumble returns as a backing chorus to this horrifying, alien sound—revealing itself to be the banshee-like cry of the Batmobile’s souped up engine screaming to life, equally alien blue flames licking from its exhausts to complete the demonic image.” James Whitbrook waxes rhapsodic about the sound of the Batmobile in the latest installment of Batman movies. ➔ gizmodo.com

Disquiet Junto Project 0532: Other Means

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 14, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 10, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0532: Other Means
The Assignment: Make music about something you find difficult or unproductive to talk about.

Step 1: Consider the following question: When is “talking” helpful or productive for you?

Step 2: Now consider things that talking about doesn’t seem to help, or perhaps even hinders, for you.

Step 3: Make music about the topic or concern that arose from Step 2.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0532” (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 “disquiet0532” (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-0532-other-means/

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 14, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 10, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Take the time you need.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0532” 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 532nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Other Means (The Assignment: Make music about something you find difficult or unproductive to talk about) — at: https://disquiet.com/0532/

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-0532-other-means/

RIP, Ron Miles (b. 1963)

Trumpeter Ron Miles died yesterday at age 58. He played with a lot of my favorite musicians, including drummer Ginger Baker and clarinetist Ben Goldberg, and released at least a dozen albums of his own. I first experienced Miles when he was a member of the quartet of another favorite of mine, guitarist Bill Frisell. (Like Frisell, Miles was raised in Denver, Colorado.)

Frisell’s mid-1990s group, which also featured Eyvind Kang (violin) and Curtis Fowlkes (trombone), debuted with the 1996 album Quartet. The record is rich with arch instrumentals that explore noir atmospherics and hint at the electronically mediated Americana of Frisell’s work to come. It consists primarily of music composed for film and TV, including a Gary Larson Far Side special.

Miles’ trumpet, his voice, could achieve a tonal peacefulness, a poise and composure, that was all his own. He could also engage in a playful, communal, musical banter in whatever band he was part of. The above video is a live performance, apparently in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from the year after the release of Quartet. Just last September, Miles headlined at the Village Vanguard in Manhattan when it reopened after the pandemic lockdown. And now he is dead, due to a rare blood disorder. He will be missed.

This Week in Sound: Comics, Construction, Illusions

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the March 7, 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.

▰ Si Spurrier and Matías Bergara have created a new comic book, Step by Bloody Step, that has no sound — no dialogue, and no sound effects. Spurrier, the series’ writer, makes the case that the absence of sound eliminates one of fantasy fiction’s crutches: “I think that the reader’s desire always gravitates towards detail. That’s why you end up with endless maps and encyclopedias and taxonomies and ancient histories, all of which don’t actually help you to tell the beating, throbbing, emotional heart of the story.” A lot of my favorite comics and graphic novels don’t use sound effects. (That said, some of my favorite comics have extraordinary sound effects, notably Michel Fiffe’s.) Dispensing also with dialogue entirely — not for a special standalone issue, but for the series as a whole — is next level, especially for a comic targeted at a popular audience. ➔ ew.com (Via Mike Rhode)

▰ “Construction vehicles are equipped with new back-up alarm systems featuring multiple broadband frequencies, which replace the traditional ‘beep-beep’” — breaking municipal news from Montréal. ➔ montreal.ca (Thanks, Anne Bell)

▰ Diana Deutsch, author of the book Musical Illusions and Phantom Words, is one of the subjects of the Unexplainable podcast episode on how sound becomes hearing, part of a six-episode Making Sense sequence. ➔ pod.link/unexplainable (Thanks, Alan Bland)

▰ “Duvall Hecht, whose boredom at listening to music and news on the radio during his long daily commute in Southern California led him to start Books on Tape, which broadly commercialized the audiobook, died on Feb. 10 at his home in Costa Mesa, Calif.” And: “In 1975, Mr. Hecht was craving intellectual stimulation during his rush-hour commutes between his home in Newport Beach and his office in Los Angeles, where he worked in marketing for the investment banking firm Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards. At first he rested a reel-to-reel tape recorder on the seat beside him and played recordings of books that had been made for blind people.” ➔ nytimes.com

▰ Pranay Parab of Gizmodo came up with eight ways to make Siri less annoying, among then: changing when Siri shares spoken responses, disabling “Hey, Siri,” and stopping Apple from listening to your interactions with Siri. ➔ gizmodo.com

▰ The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast explores the “signature, soothing voice” of painter Bob Ross. ➔ shorefire.com

▰ David Haskell is the author of the new book Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction. He spoke with KQED radio: “Haskell describes a global sonic landscape that’s threatened by human-induced habitat destruction and noise pollution and warns that by smothering the earth’s many voices, we’re not only imperiling species but losing our connection to the natural world.” ➔ kqed.org

▰ “Underwater noise pollution is causing turtles to experience hearing loss that can last from minutes to days” — per Andria Salas, researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts. ➔ phys.org