Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 161

The Virtuous Cycle of an Email Newsletter

I get asked on occasion how the This Week in Sound email newsletter comes together, and how much work is required. I wrote up a response to a recent such inquiry, and wanted to post it:

I should start by saying I’ve tried half the note-taking and information-organizing tools under the sun, and I still try out new ones regularly. And in the end, I always come back, for the most part, to two simple things: a text file and a spreadsheet.

I have a text document (actually it’s a markdown file, but for no meaningful reason) that I keep on my computer. Over the course of the week, whenever something of interest surfaces, I put the URL and some associated thoughts in the document. Then, come Sunday afternoon or Monday, I tidy those up and put them in Tinyletter and hit send, along with some other things I’ve written related to sound.

In the spreadsheet, I have a list of resources to remind me to take a look at: specific Twitter accounts, specific publications, specific search returns. I use Google Alerts for some keywords. I use pinboard.in for bookmarks. For all my researching, one of the greatest sources of information is simply hearing from readers.

And that about covers it.

I organize the This Week in Sound email precisely because I come across so much information, that the only way for me to make sense of it, to process it, is to produce the newsletter. If I didn’t do the newsletter, I’d probably read a tenth of what I do, and I’d never hear about the stuff readers send me.

The newsletter is a virtuous cycle: I send stuff out, which means I process and retain the information, and in return, people share related information with me.

Subscribe at tinyletter.com/disquiet.

This Week in Sound: Hippos, Destiny, Scooters

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the January 31, 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.

▰ “Warner Music Group is creating a performance venue in the metaverse.”
engadget.com

▰ New research suggests “hippopotamuses can distinguish friends from acquaintances, and acquaintances from strangers, by the way they sound.” Writes Nicholas Bakalar: “They found that hippos make a lot of noise. Their ‘wheeze honks can be heard more than a half-mile away, and their verbal repertoire includes grunts, bellows and squeals. The wheeze honk is generally considered the way hippos announce their presence, but its social function is unclear.”
nytimes.com
(Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ A “person’s gait, voice recognition and ultrasonic signals” could be used to identify them, based on a new Apple patent. “Various characteristics of the user’s ear provide an echo of the ultrasonic signal which is unique to the user,” according to the patent. “Variations in the surface of the user’s ear canal may cause the ultrasonic signal to reflect off the surface and generate an echo having a signature that is associated with the user. For example, a user having a larger ear canal may result in an echo having a longer reverberation time than a user having a smaller ear canal.”
forbes.com

▰ Another Apple AirPod patent might “allow you to hear certain people but not others, and you’d be able to choose who made the cut.”
tomsguide.com

▰ An electric scooter firm is testing the use of a hum (like a tuba) in order to “prevent accidents and improve their safety record.”
thetimes.co.uk

▰ Sound supervisor/sound designer Robert Hein and re-recording mixer Robert Fernandez talk about their work on director Mariama Diallo’s feature film debut, a horror film titled Master. The movie “draws on Diallo’s own experience of social isolation and exclusion as an African-American student at a predominantly white college.”
asoundeffect.com
(Via twitter.com/asoundeffect

▰ This newsletter is always down for a good hum story: “A strange, low-frequency hum is being reported all around the neighbourhood, prompting complaints to the City of North Vancouver and an investigation by Vancouver Coastal Health.”
vancouverisawesome.com

▰ A subreddit on the popular video game Destiny includes discussion of players’ favorite sounds from the game**, and it has over 1,500 comments. These include:

“It used to be the sound of Titans popping hammers in D1 and the immediate fear or relief it would cause.”

“A dragonfly rampage ringing nail was the best sounding for me.”

“The sounds of popping a fallen’s head off it’s very satisfying to hear”

“The whipcrack from the Chaperone reload.”

“The whistle of a Dead Man’s Tale hitting max stacks.”

“The sound when you select a shotgun.”

And there is a ton of colorful onomatopoeia: KAH KOWWWW, BRGHHHH CLANK, PANG PANG PANG, shhhuiiiing, BONK-DAFF-DAFF-DAFF, fiuuuuuuu, SCHING BONNNNG
reddit.com

Sound Ledger¹ (Fish Heads, MIT Ears)

155,000,000: The estimated number of years ago that that sound production appeared in ray-finned fishes

33: The number of times sound evolved separately in the fish family tree

1,500: The number of virtual models of human listening developed by MIT neural network researchers in order to train an AI to spatially locate sound much as people do

________
¹Footnotes: Fish: sci-news.com. MIT: mit.edu (Via Paul Roquet).

Originally published in the January 31, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter tinyletter.com/disquiet.

Kobo Abe’s Synthesizer

My favorite things have aligned. Here’s a video, from 1985, of Japanese novelist Kobo Abe (The Woman in the Dunes, The Ark Sakura) talking about his synthesizer, an EMS Synthi AKS, as part of his efforts in the theater. (I recommend Nancy Shields’ book Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe if that aspect of Abe’s output is of interest.) I worked in manga for five years and the only word I recognize is “ongaku” but that’s on me. Fortunately, the Japanese musician NRV (aka Nerve, aka Manabu Ito) generously posted this translation of it in reply to my initial tweet.

Kobo Abe: This is…

Interviewer: A synthesizer?

KL Yes, that’s right. You know, I don’t mean to sound pretentious, but… When you’re doing a play, if you ask a composer to do it, the music is done at the last minute. In the worst case, the music is not ready until the stage rehearsal. In my case, it’s not good if the music doesn’t come first. I’m an amateur, but I thought if I could manage it myself, so I started to make music by buying these things. So from a certain point, I’ve been adding my own music to all my plays.

I: So you have a piece of work, could you play it?

K: Yes, it’s a bit of an exaggeration to call it a work, but I make various sources.

I: Sound sources?

K: Yes. And I put them together in various ways.

I: So it’s a work of chance?

K: A kind of, and sometimes I get interesting sounds. Would you like to have a listen?

I: Yes, please.

K: It’s like the sound of a bell, isn’t it? This is a beautiful sound, isn’t it? This is how I make music.

. . .

Update: And in the ongoing discussion on Twitter, Jim Whittemore uploaded this 1976 photo of the U.S. importer of EMS synthesizers, EMSA (EMS America) in Northampton, MA. Credit for the photo goes to Dennis Kelley.

twitter.com/disquiet: Bruford, Syfy, Bleep

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.

▰ Score. Bill Bruford has his own YouTube channel now. He’s posting old performance clips, lectures, and more.

▰ Got the This Week in Sound email out, fourth week in a row, if a little later in the day on Monday than I hope to be the norm going forward.

▰ As the reboot culture went on and on, I frequently joked about (slash wished for) a remake of a distant childhood memory, the TV series Ark II. When I read about the new Dean Devlin sci-fi (slashSyfy) series (titled: The Ark), I briefly imagined that’s what it is.

▰ My 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II is now available via the mothership, bleep.com.

Listening on the Way to an Angry Planet

I love when a science fiction book “sounds” as great as a film or TV series might. This is from early on in Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Disquiet Junto Project 0526: Magic Number (2 of 3)

Special Note: You may contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. This week you can do a second one. Please see additional details in Step 5 below.

Answer to Frequent Question: You don’t need to have uploaded a solo in last week’s project to participate in this week’s second phase of the trio sequence.

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, January 31, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 27, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0526: Magic Number (2 of 3)
The Assignment: Record the second third of an asynchronous trio.

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0525). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Important: Leave space for what is yet to come.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to the pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from. The majority are in this playlist:

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

And additional appear in the discussion:

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

(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up in or disappear from that playlist and discussion. Things are fluid on the internet.)

To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.

Note: It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.

It is strongly encouraged that you look through the above discussion on the Lines forum, because many tracks include additional contextual information there.

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.

Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do up to two total. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet ( look at the project’s post on Lines, linked to in these instructions, or to the project playlist, which will be posted here once tracks start coming in). The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0526” (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 “disquiet0526” (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-0526-magic-number-2-of-3/

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, January 31, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 27, 2022.

Length: The length should be roughly the same as the solo track you selected.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0526” 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 526th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Magic Number (2 of 3) (The Assignment: Record the second third of an asynchronous trio) — at: https://disquiet.com/0526/

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-0526-magic-number-2-of-3/

Sticker of Theseus

I’m certain I’ve previously taken a picture of this aging sticker that is exposed through the front window of a storefront and has seen more than its share of direct sunlight, such that much of it has been bleached beyond recognition. The thing about taking pictures of a thing in decay is that even if you take another photo down the road, the thing has become, in essence, a different thing during the interim. It’s like a corollary the Ship of Theseus thesis. Sure, it’s interesting to think about whether the whole remains the same as its parts are replaced over time. But what if the parts remain, and simply themselves change, and if so what is a marker of meaningful change? When is it so changed that it’s no longer the same thing. Certainly, for a sticker, by the time its message is no longer comprehensible. How long has this one been in such a state? Presumably this was a long ago warning about store security surveillance. Is the camera even still functional? Or is the store no longer watching us, and we’re just watching it? A passerby would have ignored this sticker when it was serving its generic sentinel purpose. Now that it is significantly altered, it is a focus of attention.

This Week in Sound: Toilets, Virtual Sound, NSFW

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the January 24, 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.

▰ Office privacy update: “Info-Masking technology developed to cover the human voice in unwanted areas with a sound level that’s 8 dB less than conventional systems and environmental audio with four types of sound that is mixed to the speech sound masker.”
mytechdecisions.com

▰ Excellent interview with editor Michael Block on the role of quiet in setting a scene when working on the film Watcher: “A lot of this was approached through sound design, which presented unique challenges. Watcher is often a very quiet movie and takes place in a big empty apartment. So, what does ‘quiet’ sound like when you’re trying to express the correct emotion? What was tense quiet vs lonely quiet vs calm quiet?”
filmmakermagazine.com

▰ For 19 years, a legal battle’s been waged in Italy by someone who felt their neighbor’s toilet was too loud. “The sound of flushing — ‘aggravated by frequent night use’ — compromised their quality of life.” They won. Per a local journalist covering the story: “If Franz Kafka had been an Italian citizen of today he would not have written ’The Trial,’ he would have written ‘The Toilet’ to describe justice in our country.”
washingtonpost.com
(Thanks, Mike Rhode)

▰ Trade magazine for event producers focuses on “audio-centric activations.” Mentions the FX network, Bowie’s estate, Sara Auster’s sonification of a Sherwin-Williams paint line, and others.
eventmarketer.com

▰ What role will sound play in the reboot of virtual reality we’re now calling the metaverse? A run through factors (synthetic voices, latency issues) and companies (High Fidelity, Vivox, Voicemod) involved.
protocol.com
(Thanks, Lucas Gonze!)

▰ Cheryl Tipp on “sound archives, how they are managed and the ways in which animal studies scholars might use them in trying to research animals.” Tipp is the British Library’s Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds.
theanimalturnpodcast.com

▰ Four UK cathedrals are among the historic locations that are part of the acoustic models that make up the Acoustic Atlas project. “Now anyone can dial in via the Acoustic Atlas app and hear their voice reverberate as if they were acoustically present in selected heritage sites,” says Dr. Cobi van Tonder, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of York’s Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media.
yorkshirepost.co.uk

▰ Alex Moshakis surveys efforts to keep the quietest places on our planet that way. Says Gordon Hempton, famed field recording artist and audio ecologist, reflecting on the impact of the pandemic: “Quiet is no longer a word that has no experience. The whole world got to experience what we’d been missing. And initially, of course, it was alarming: ‘Why are things different?’ ‘What’s going to happen next?’ But now we’re beginning to emerge, we can reflect on how there were aspects of that quiet that made us healthier, made us more aware of who we are and what we believe in, what we want to do.”
theguardian.com
(Thanks, Bruce Levenstein!)

▰ Profiles of Caroline Spiegel, CEO of the audio porn service Quinn: “‘It was created to give women an alternative to the standard, visually-dominated porn that is normally consumed by men,’ she said.”
theinformation.com
nypost.com

▰ Wired magazine’s Vincent Acovino thinks “rhythm games” may be due for comeback (remember Guitar Hero and Rock Band).
wired.com

▰ The researchers Joel Frank and Lea Schönherr have developed a unique defense against voice deepfakes, drawing from TTS (text-to-speech), vocoders, and neural networks.
biometricupdate.com

▰ “Sonic weapons have been considered as a way of deterring people seeking asylum from crossing the Channel, it has been reported.”
kentonline.co.uk
news.sky.com

▰ Directional audio (now “Smart Beaming,” from the company Noveto) is being upgraded: “It works by sending ultrasonic waves directly into your auditory system — while everyone else experiences no more than a whisper.”
tomsguide.com

Steampunk

The presence of a gothic drop cap on my ereader is the single most steampunk thing in my life at the moment.