Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 16

This Week in Sound

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the June 20, 2025, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ WATER LOGGED: “A fiscal watchdog is taking the city’s public art authority to task for spending tens of thousands of dollars on a phone line that allowed people to listen to recorded sounds of the Bow River. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation issued a freedom of information request to the city in 2024, revealing that the Reconnecting to the Bow public art project cost taxpayers $65,194.” You can check it out at calgaryartsdevelopment.com. Story via calgaryherald.com.

▰ BLIND BIRDING: “Shah, who lost his sight in a childhood injury, was one of 11 blind people who tracked and identified more than two dozen bird species Sunday as part of an inaugural, nationwide effort to get those who are blind or visually impaired into birding. The day-long, blind birder bird-a-thon drew more than 200 participants who counted 200 species at parks, gardens and backyards in 34 states, including California, Florida, Idaho, Texas, Montana, Pennsylvania and New York.

“‘I loved it,’ Shah, a lawyer who lives near Northwest Washington, said about his two hours of birding. ‘I’ve never done this before and to be able to differentiate the birds based on their sound and identify them was big. I always thought birding was about seeing or watching birds, but I realized it’s also about listening to birds.’” Dana Hedgpeth, in the Washington Post, profiled blind birders. 

▰ PISS TAKE: Using machine learning to find information in … urination: “One medical test significantly benefiting from AI is sound-based uroflowmetry (SU). This innovative technique seeks to estimate urinary flow patterns during bladder emptying based on the sound generated by urine striking the water surface in a toilet bowl. SU emerges as a remote and proactive alternative to uroflowmetry (UF), a standard clinical test performed by urologists to detect issues associated with urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), such as obstructions or voiding dysfunctions.” At nature.com.

▰ COLD FRONT: “Samsung’s latest smart fridges now support multi-voice recognition powered by the company’s Bixby assistant, which can be used to bring up personalized information on the built-in smart displays based upon which member of a household is speaking.” Via The Verge.

▰ AI? NAY: “Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) is taking a hard stance on generative AI. Today, the organization announced that any film using generative AI would not be eligible for Outstanding Use of Sound Design at its annual Golden Reel Awards. Per TheWrap, this is the first time any professional film organization has made a move like this” Per The AV Club.

▰ GRACE NOTES: (1) Words’ Worth: Tom Gauld had a funny comic about the sound of fountain pens. ▰ (2) Whirs’ Worth: The Washington Post had a multimedia piece about the sounds of electric vehicles. ▰ (3) Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is the Green Warbler (“a rapid rushing warble, often from thick cover”). (4) Mama Cassian: How the sound of Andor was created (an interview with Margit Pfeiffer, the show’s supervising sound editor).

▰ Credit Due: Thanks, Mike Rhode (Gauld, EVs) and Rich Pettus (MPSE, Star Wars).

Scratch Pad: Elvis, Mario, Dronescrolling

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ The TV has a remote and the remote has a mic, so I queried it with “Pump Up the Volume” and, of course, this simply made the TV raise its volume level

▰ Going to see Elvis Costello this week. The tour is of the “early songs,” which apparently restricts itself to merely the first 11 albums (1977–1986).

▰ A friend mentioned having played a “url” show, which I initially figured to be a typo for an “irl” (in real life) show, but it turned out to have been a livestreaming show. I like clearly paralleled typology: There are URL shows and there are IRL shows (and, of course, hybrids).

▰ I had noticed that many shows on this current Elvis Costello tour had, thus far, opened with either “I Hope You’re Happy Now” or “Mystery Dance,” and most featured both, and I thought little of it, but when he sang them here in San Francisco, I realized the first was a sign that you weren’t quite getting what you thought you asked for, and the second includes the phrase “Don’t bury me ’cause I’m not dead yet.”

▰ Exploring some old Mario games, circa 2001-ish. It’s like going back to some summer camp I forgot I’d attended.

▰ A new installment of the Frame by Frame comic series I’ve been doing with illustrator Hannes Pasqualini should appear this coming week. Here’s a sneak peek. Meanwhile, the previous ones are at disquiet.com/fxf.

▰ The wind is prelude. When you hear it blowing, you step outside to confirm that, yes, the Golden Gate Bridge is again singing, and somehow the bridge’s song sounds the same (droning, unearthly) and different (today: steadier, thinner, more persistent, higher-pitched), and you can’t believe this remains a thing.

▰ Finished reading one book this week, Stephen King’s The Long Walk. I think it’s the only Stephen King novel I’ve finished reading, aside from The Green Mile, which I bought when it was first serialized as tiny little paperbacks — and I’m not entirely sure I finished that one.

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Matthew Wilcock has this ongoing series of sonified videos, on Instagram, of vehicular activity that are fantastic, turning streets and highways and even parking lots into piano rolls. And he’s also done table tennis and pedestrian intersections. (Thanks, Lowell Goss!) ▰ Bruce Levenstein said, on Bluesky, what many of us non-UK folks think: “it’s 2025. i want to pay for access to BBC iPlayer.” ▰ Mahlen Morris provided, on Mastodon, a run-through of resources for what the Golden Gate Bridge sounds like when it’s singing.

Super Mario Clouds for 10 Minutes

I spent all of my mornings this past week writing about sound in video games, and in the process, I kept coming back to the Nintendo GameCube, which led me to think in particular about gaming in the early 2000s, since the GameCube debuted in 2001.

My subject was, and remains currently, the contemplative aspects of video games and video game sound, notably when one is encouraged — or acts on the instinct — to pause without hitting pause, to situate oneself in a virtual space and observe, especially by listening, to the digital world in which one and one’s on-screen counterpart(s) are engaged. Think of this practice as gaming transcendentalism. In our time of highly popular long-form gaming videos that document digital environments, it’s a fascinating subject that brings media archiving into the realm of the somatic.

Throughout this writing I’ve been doing, an inevitable reference point, for me, has been Cory Arcangel’s classic media art piece, the deeply reflective Super Mario Clouds, which he created in 2002 (and which was featured two years later in the Whitney Biennial). This despite the fact that Super Mario Clouds is, in fact, entirely silent. 

For the work, Arcangel took a cartridge of the game Super Mario Bros. and hacked it to remove everything but the blue sky and the cartoonish white clouds. Absent are Mario, and his various obstacles, and even Koji Kondo’s musical score. All that remains are a static sky and those passing clouds, which tellingly resemble thought balloons.

Super Mario Bros. ran on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), aka the Family Computer (Famicon), and was the very first Super Mario game. It came out in 1985, two years after the NES debuted. What may be useful to note is that Arcangel was born in May 1978, so he was about seven and a half years of age when Super Mario Bros. appeared. An impressionable phase of one’s life, to say the least.

While reading up on the topic, I checked out, among other resources, the Whitney Museum’s archive, its online catalog, video of Super Mario Bros. gameplay, and the Whitney page for the Arcangel work, which includes the following description and question:

“By tweaking the game’s code, the artist erased all of the sound and visual elements except the iconic scrolling clouds. On a formal level, the project is reminiscent of paintings that push representation toward abstraction: how many elements can be removed before the ability to discern the source is lost?“

And then I made my way to Arcangel’s own website, which has a page dedicated to Super Mario Clouds, displaying his hacked cartridge — and including a link to his own version/remix of the original Super Mario Bros. software.

I downloaded the Zip file, de-archived it, and recognized the file’s suffix, .nes, from the ROMs for old NES games. We live in the golden age of cheap small portable game consoles that allow one to play outdated video games, so on the chance it might work, I popped the microSD card out of my Anbernic RG35XXSP, a small, clamshell device that pointedly resembles a Game Boy Advance SP. I put the SD card into my laptop, dragged the .nes ROM (file name: arcangel-super-mario-clouds.nes) into the folder titled FC (for Famicon), safely ejected the microSD card, and slid it back into the slot on my SP.

On his website, Arcangel notes that Super Mario Clouds remains, to some degree, a work in progress: “I still need 2 get around 2 cleaning up all the different versions of this code.” So, I wasn’t even sure if his ROM would run, or if it might even freeze up my SP. I turned on the Anbernic, found my way through the menus to the arcangel-super-mario-clouds.nes file, and hit play — and it worked, immediately. The screen turned blue as the brightest day of summer, and the little white clouds began to pass by slowly from right to left.

The dimensions of the image, however, left wide black spaces on either side of the screen, and I recalled that Arcangel’s site had a note that read “Dims: Dimensions variable.” Taking that allowance as a cue, I went through the menus in the alternate firmware I’d installed on my Anbernic SP (in essence, I was running modded software on modded firmware), made a few changes to the arcane settings, and Super Mario Clouds proceeded to fill the screen from edge to edge.

This is when I had the urge to record a long, continuous segment, 10 minutes, to share online. Though Super Mario Clouds is, of course, itself silent — the absence of sound being one of myriad ways Arcangel chiseled his work from larger, more complex source material — that silence speaks to the contemplative opportunities inherent in video games.

I also recalled that game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario, had, early on in his work at Nintendo, been tasked with finding a creative reuse of thousands of abandoned arcade consoles originally designed for a failed game called Radar Scope (1980). In Radar Scope, the screen shows an image that goes off toward a distant horizon, providing a sense of three-dimensional play. Miyamoto dispensed with 3D, and embraced the creative constraint of merely two dimensions. The result was Miyamoto’s first classic (of many), Donkey Kong (1981). There’s a connection to be drawn between Miyamoto’s reduction of the arcade game format to two dimensions, and Arcangel’s further reduction of Miyamoto’s original Mario game to merely its backdrop.

Now, on the one hand, my video of Super Mario Clouds on a modern handheld is, like Arcangel’s original work, entirely silent. On the other hand, the piece’s elegance and its (virtual) environmental focus make it part and parcel of the gaming transcendentalism that I happen to explore mostly through video game sound. To reinforce this point, I almost edited my video to a length of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, following John Cage’s template, but then I decided that 10 minutes allowed for a more immersive experience.

Disquiet Junto Project 0703: That’s How You Got Killed Before

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0703: That’s How You Got Killed Before
The Assignment: Revisit something that you just couldn’t get to work last time.

Step 1: Think of something difficult you were trying to accomplish, something music-related that you just couldn’t get to work. It may be a piece of software, or a playing technique, or a part of a musical work-in-progress.

Step 2: Block out time and dedicate that time solely to putting a lot of effort into doing what you previously couldn’t. Even if you don’t solve the problem this time around, you will likely make some form of progress.

Step 3: Record something that reflects, expresses, or otherwise involves the effort you expended in Step 2 above.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0703” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0703-thats-how-you-got-killed-before/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, June 23, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 703rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, That’s How You Got Killed Before — The Assignment: Revisit something that you just couldn’t get to work last time — at https://disquiet.com/0702/

Tube Layout

This is the “tube layout” for an ancient stereo console that someone left out on the street. The sticker, undated, was on an inside wall of the piece of furniture. When I complain about how absurd dealing with metadata of audio files continues to be, I like to remind myself that the past had its own difficulties and complexities.

Samson Young at SFMOMA

A friend some time back shared a photo of an object in the current installation by artist Samson Young, Intentness and song, that is on view at SFMOMA (December 21, 2024 – June 22, 2025). I first encountered Young’s work when I reviewed Seeing Sound, an exhibit curated by Barbara London at the Kadist gallery here in San Francisco back in mid-2021. This new Young exhibit is a sizable space filled with ephemera, notably small gadgets that emit little bits of light and sound, much of it on tight loops, all of which resists easy mental collation. I was touched to find old familiar gadgets, like an Apple Newton and a Sony MiniDisc player, in the mix, as well as this book by the late sound artist Steve Roden, i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces. Young seemed to have excavated his own memory palace and created a vaguely Lego-like zone of contemplation.

Ruth Asawa at SFMOMA

The Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA is a dozen shades of fantastic. I fear it’s becoming cliché to note it, but with the sculptures, the physical objects are only part of the story. The shadows carry a lot of the weight, so to speak. And it’s really the interplay where things happen. It’s like the sculptures are the guitar solo, and the shadows are the result of delay and reverb pedals.

On Repeat: Cimini, Tasselmyer, Frisell

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Amy Cimini has been recording since the early 2000s, and yet See You When I Get There — its title suggesting a certain amount of belatedness — is her first solo album, and it’s a solo viola record, to boot, exploring a range of timbre, textures, and techniques, with an emphasis on noise and and electronic mediation. Cimini is also the author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life.

▰ I don’t focus enough on iPad music-making here, though I listen to a bunch, and many musicians I pay attention to include it prominently in their set-ups. This is Andrew Tasselmyer at work sampling and looping, as he puts it, in real time. Watch as it proceeds.

▰ This is a new-to-me (and newly uploaded) streaming bootleg of Bill Frisell playing solo at the Jazz Standard in Manhattan on November 21, 2019, just pre-pandemic:

Scratch Pad: Neighbor Band, Hate-Shazaming

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Kudos to whoever on the Poker Face team ran the episode 7, season 2, credits in the typeface from the movie Heat

▰ It appears a drummer now lives near the tiny office I rent. I think I can work with this, as traffic noise and distance muffle much of it. Headphones can manage the remainder. I mean, someone can’t practice drums all day. Right? Right??

▰ So much of my favorite music is glitch. Thelonious Monk is piano glitch. Kid Koala is turntable glitch. Gregorian chant and early polyphony are architectural glitch. Janis Joplin is vocal glitch. I love when the fragility of engineering is put to purposeful use.

▰ The recent documentary (really more like a commissioned group memoir) Becoming Led Zeppelin was very enjoyable, and it was fun to be reminded of Jimmy Page having, in his early work as a session musician, done work on Muzak. I’d love if some superfan had managed to track down the specific material he contributed to.

▰ Keeping an eye on my Mac Mini via Screen Sharing on an iPad connected to my MacBook via Sidecar is my mundane version of Inception

▰ My Shazam is 90% music I disliked so much I had to find out what it was (maybe call this habit “hate-Shazaming”), and 10% stuff I loved but couldn’t identify, half of that originating from the inside of taco trucks

▰ I am far more up for this Superman movie than I expected to be. The trailer roll-out is doing its job. I mean, the teeth making a sound when they hit the camera after being knocked out by a punch (at 1:15)? Bonus points for major Frank Quitely vibes. Sign me up.

▰ Update: the drummer who moved near (but not too near!) the little office I rent appears to have made a bassist friend. They dig Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath.

▰ This hold music is like a weaponized lullaby

▰ Update: The drummer near my little rental office skipped a day of practice, but filling the void was someone a few buildings away screaming on a phone for so long and so intensely that someone in a neighboring office started laughing.

▰ Finished reading one book this week: The Mushroom at the End of the World by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Well into several others, including the second Bosch and Stephen King’s The Long Walk, and probably too many others to count.

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Tom Gauld posted, on Instagram, a four-panel comic involving the sound of a fountain pen, and I won’t give away the ending. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰  Robin Fox, on Instagram, posted the internal organs of a 1939 instrument, the Hammond Novachord, that contains no fewer than 163 (!) vacuum tubes. ▰ The account that goes by c1t1zen had a funny response, on Threads, to my latest doorbell post.

Clicking with Neal Stephenson (1994)

Every few years I re-read “Spew,” the Neal Stephenson story published in the magazine Wired in 1994. It’s still online, as are we all.

“Spew” is a prescient if purposefully exaggerated consideration of what was already called the “social graph” but wouldn’t achieve poisonous fruition until Facebook and its ilk took off a decade-plus later. Here, in a story of hyper-focused advertising, Stephenson gets close, with the term “social web.” Gmail, which scanned people’s emails to produce targeted ads (as may Yahoo and other email providers to this day, apparently), wouldn’t launch for another 10 years. Stephenson in “Spew” took early note of what we today term surveillance capitalism.

He also paid attention to the ability to turn the tools of internet-connected observance on oneself. YouTube, foreseen here in some technology-intensive live-streaming, debuted the year after Gmail, in 2005. Back in 1994, this idea was, one might recall, still a stretch: “You have turned your room — my room — into a broadcast station,” the narrator exclaims believably. Twitch didn’t surface until 2011.

The subjects of Stephenson’s premonitions include his own future work. He calls the troubling sludge that is the foreseen horrible Internet (capitalized back then) the Spew, not unlike the Miasma, as it would be labeled decades later in his novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019).

I recently re-read Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, so my eyes were primed to notice, this time around, Stephenson’s use in “Spew” of the word “gomer” to mean someone old, embarrassing, and ultimately disposable. In Cryptonomicon, that word is half the name of a furniture company, Gomer Bolstrood, which later appears (earlier chronologically) in his Baroque Cycle. So, while the tone of “gomer” is different, the usage in “Spew” is very much this story’s narrator’s perspective of something out of date.

There are some great lines throughout, such as this one, echoing the Rolling Stones’ classic anti-advertising/consumerist rant, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: “I can tell you’re cool because your water costs more than your beer.”

I mention “Spew” now because this following section of the story stood out to me in a way it hadn’t on previous reads. Note how the fetishized fine-tuning of sound design provides a tactile quality and utility in an increasingly frictionless media landscape:

Click. Course, it never really clicks anymore, no one has used mechanical switches since like the ’50s, but some Spew terminals emit a synthesized click — they wired up a 1955 Sylvania in a digital sound lab somewhere and had some old gomer in a tank-top stagger up to it and change back and forth between Channel 4 and Channel 5 a few times, paid him off and fired him, then compressed the sound and inseminated it into the terminals’ fundamental ROMs so that we’d get that reassuring click when we jumped from one Feed to another. Which is what happens now; except I haven’t touched a remote, don’t even have a remote, that being the whole point of the Polysurf. Now it’s some fucker picking a banjo, ouch it is an actual Hee Haw rerun, digitally remastered, frozen in pure binary until the collapse of the Universe.

You can read the full story at wired.com/1994/10/spew, though that may be behind a paywall.