Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 157

Sounds in an Absence

One more (for now, at least, since I’ve finished reading the book) from Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. This occurs shortly after William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne/Agnes Hathaway, moves into the home he (largely in absentia) has purchased for the family.

This Week in Sound (Ocean Gaming, Sound Radar)

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the February 28, 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.

▰ I am in my happly place when I come upon a forum of video game devs discussing the nuances of deploying ocean sounds: “The setup process can be automated if the environment is not changing, so I pre-generate zone sounds depending on the water level and placed or generated objects. If you have day-night cycle with dynamic weather conditions you have to consider more options.” ➔ gamedev.net

▰ “Cornell University developed a wearable smart camera that can detect voice commands even when the user doesn’t mutter a sound.” Writes Andrew Liszewski, “The camera points upwards, capturing high-contrast video of the wearer’s chin movements, which, after some training, can be used to figure out what someone is saying without them making any sound.” ➔ gizmodo.com

▰ “The bill would permit law enforcement to use x-ray vans and wall-piercing radar as well as voice recognition tools.” The bill in question is being supported by the Chief of Police in New Orleans. It is also a reversal of restrictions that are barely a year old. And such reversals are not unique to New Orleans. Jim Nash’s reporting notes moves in Californa and Virginia, as well. ➔ biometricupdate.com

▰ “The simulation of a medical interaction as a caring, stress-free, and even de-stressing experience may be why some people use ASMR content to self-soothe before heading to a dreaded doctor’s appointment.” And now practitioners are looking to how ASMR can play a role in healthcare, writes Molly MacGilbert. ➔ medscape.com

▰ Air raid sirens were among the early signals of the active Russian war on Ukraine. ➔ msnbc.com, cnn.com

▰ Spotify has created its first hardware device, the Car Thing. Yes, that is what it is called. “It mounts to your dash, with the goal of bringing a better way to safely stream music to drivers missing one of those fancy infotainment systems — no dashboard teardown or new car required,” writes Joan E. Solsman. If you’re of a certain age, you recall the need for actual devices in your car to play things like CDs and cassettes, all of which sort of evaporated when anyone could connect their phone to the car’s stereo with a cable or (finicky Bluetooth gods willing) wirelessly. ➔ cnet.com

▰ If you’re hoping for a CD revival, one thing you may mention to friends is how streaming audio isn’t the same sound quality as CDs. That is slowly changing, as streaming services, such as Apple Music, adopt “lossless” delivery. In addition, the company says “says that more than 50% of Apple Music subscribers are now listening in Spatial Audio.” ➔ macrumors.com

▰ “Ford is testing a new system in Europe that pairs automatic hazard detections with in-car sound effects so drivers are aware of hazards before they actually see them.” ➔ gizmodo.com

▰ “Sound radars” are all the rage among local governments deraling with vehicle noise pollution: “The sensors can detect and take pictures of vehicles making excessive noise, a problem that officials say has gotten worse in recent years. The hope is to eventually set a noise-pollution limit and fine those motorists exceeding it.” (As a primarily pedestrian, I think speed is more an issue than noise, but I defer to the locals.) This report, by Emma Bubola, focuses on France. ➔ nytimes.com

▰ Siri has added its fifth voice for American users. “The voice has arrived a little under a year after Apple added its last two American Siri voices, and stopped defaulting to using a female-sounding voice.” Also: “it was recorded by a member of the LGBTQ+ community, though the company didn’t offer any further details on the voice actor’s identity.” ➔ theverge.com

▰ Clubhouse, once an audio-only social network, now lets users text each other. ➔ 9to5mac.com

Sound Ledger¹ (France, ALAC, ASMR)

147,000,000,000: An estimate of the annual cost, in Euros, for France as a result of noise pollution

75,000,000: Number of songs in Apple Music’s “entire catalog”

45,000,000: Approximate number of ASMR videos on YouTube as of 2019

________
¹Footnotes: France: nytimes.com. Lossless: macrumors.com. ASMR: medscape.com.

Originally published in the February 28, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter tinyletter.com/disquiet.

синтґесйзер

This week I learned that the synthesizer firms knob.farm, happynerding.com, and dnipro-modular.net are all Ukrainian, as is the music software firm sinevibes.com. Make some space for them in your rack and in your heart. (I have no idea if that is actually the Ukrainian word for “synthesizer” up there, but Google Translate tells me it is.)

Mœbius Realist

Neighborhood graffiti has entered its Mœbius realist period

twitter.com/disquiet: Chapman Stick, Minimal Code

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.

▰ Briefly went down a Chapman Stick rabbit hole on YouTube and have probably destroyed my home page’s algorithmic recommendations for the next month.

▰ This week we’re making “minimally viable music,” such as this bit of audio-emitting code one participant committed. (Listen on llllllll.co.)

▰ In my Algorithm-served ads this week was one for “syringe tin solder paste,” so clearly I’m doing something correctly.

▰ Novels I finished reading, 2022, #6: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: very fun multi-species, feelings-on-your-sleeve, family-you-choose sci-fi about a tight spaceship crew finding its way through the universe and through life. I’ll be reading the sequel for sure. (In fact, I’ve already started.)

▰ Weekend plans if you need ’em:

Find unfamiliar records produced by whoever produced a favorite of yours.
Sort your albums in the order you obtained them.
Listen to an album straight through while you just, you know, sit there.

7:50pm – 8:07pm

It’s 7:50pm as I start typing. A siren went by just now. I wasn’t planning to write anything. It’s Friday evening. I had written enough. The siren alerted me, though — not just to some pressing drama in the neighborhood, but to listening in general. Once the siren was gone, I was all the more attentive to what it had briefly masked with the shock of its noise. The siren was a short burst, confusing any sense of trajectory, of direction. Almost immediately after, a car sped by, and following so quickly as it did on the brief presence of an emergency vehicle, the car might itself have been part of the action, even though cars speed past all the time. Elsewhere at home there is typing, each sequential pair of keystrokes framing brief snippets of silence. The short snippets go by quickly. The longer ones are filled with some measure of consideration. When will the next key come? What is delaying its arrival? Presumably the majority of the pauses are between words, or sentences. As for the newfound relative silence, the post-emergency silence, it is all the more quiet because there is no music playing. I was listening earlier to a track on repeat, something from the latest Disquiet Junto project, and then I spent time with an album I wanted to write a bit about. Now it is just minor domestic activity after another long work week in what will be another long year, one whose trajectory is unclear, though newspaper headlines certainly suggest a state of alertness, if not of outright emergency, is underway. And now it is 8:07pm.

Steve Swartz Inhabits the Landscape

Desert Meditations by Swartz et

There’s an evident buzz above the surface of “Department of the Interior,” the first track off Steve Swartz’s album, Desert Meditations, that sounds like a fly circling the ointment, like your stereo has a bum speaker cone, like there is dust on your needle — like a musician has had enough of digital production techniques that emphasize frictionless grace and, in turn, inadvertently sever listening from the physical experience of sound in everyday life.

The drone that arrives is not mere drone — not that any great drone is mere drone, or a casual one for that matter, but the drone here is more than just reverberating ambience, even more than reverberating ambience with a dollop of rasty sonic discomfort. There’s an abundant, if willfully slow-moving, generosity to the shifting layers. There’s a flute (or flute-like instrument) somewhere in the mix, and not so deep to be pure texture. It brings to mind the more sublime efforts of R. Carlos Nakai as much as it does the 1970s ambient of Brian Eno.

Swartz apparently recorded the album while in the southern Utah desert. The full album, like this track, certainly correlates with the arid, the remote, but it also doesn’t stick with easy illustrations of desolate natural landscapes. This is not just dust and decay. It very much down in the dirt. The music emanates the impact of heat and isolation. A lot of music that is conceptually tied to a territory is said to “map” the landscape. This doesn’t merely map the landscape; it inhabits the landscape. It’s heady and spacious and meditative, certainly, but also of the body, through and through.

Desert Meditations is due for release on April 8, 2022. It’s available at swartz.bandcamp.com. More from Swartz, who is based in Detroit, Michigan, at swartzet.tumblr.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0530: Minimally Viable Music

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, February 28, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 24, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0530: Minimally Viable Music
The Assignment: How much less is just shy of too little?

Major thanks to Saga Söderback for having come up with this project. There is just one step:

Step 1: Make the thing you think is the minimum viable music.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0530” (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 “disquiet0530” (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:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0530-minimally-viable-music/

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, February 28, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 24, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Is longer more, or less?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0530” 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:

Major thanks to Saga Söderback for having come up with this project.

More on this 530th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Minimally Viable Music (The Assignment: How much less is just shy of too little?) — at: https://disquiet.com/0530/

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-0530-minimally-viable-music/

Let’s Get Lost

I really need a glass-bottom rack. It’s unfortunate the flip side of synthesizer modules end up inside a box and out of view. Printed circuit boards are beautiful, or at least can be.