Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 164

#Jamuary Is Happening

It’s Jamuary, which, if you take note of the switch from “n” to “m” in the month, helps explain why YouTube is even more jam-packed with uploaded music tracks than usual. Like National Novel Writing Month (which takes place each November) or the somewhat lesser-known February Album Writing Month (which helpfully follows on the creative sparks of Jamuary’s heels), but more performative, more in-the-moment, Jamuary is a celebration of musical activity to kick off each new year. Jamuary is, in many ways, what is best about hashtag culture — about the way a communal rallying cry can provide an asynchronous-but-coherent sense of dispersed collaborative experience.

By way of example, there’s this reworking of various samples by the musician who goes by Keurslager Kurt. Piano and other sounds are layered, filtered, looped, and otherwise tweaked on the Digitakt (from the Gothenburg, Sweden, company Elektron) over the course of six minutes. Kurt credits another musician, Oscillator Sink, for having introduced the technique employed. (Also credited is the source of the piano sample: the Leo Svirsky album River Without Banks.) Oscillator Sink explains in his own tutorial that what he’s doing is using the Digitakt for — rather than the standard triggering of beat samples on a clock — “manipulating an ongoing sonic event.” That approach lends both the Oscillator Sink and Keurslager Kurt pieces an ambient quality, one that emphasizes stasis and texture rather than rhythm and percussion.

Jamuary is by no means a YouTube-exclusive pastime. It’s flourishing on Instagram, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Twitter, and elsewhere.

This is the first video I’ve added this year to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live ambient performances. Video originally published at YouTube. More from Keurslager Kurt, who is based in Belgium, at keurslagerkurt.bandcamp.com and at tindie.com, which has a collection of synthesizer kits for the AE Modular system, including a take on the excellent Sloth, originally created by Non-Linear Circuits.

Disquiet Junto Project 0523: Chill Communication

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 10, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 6, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0523: Chill Communication
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects — in fact, to the 10th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each year since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0523” (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 “disquiet0523” (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-0523-chill-communication/

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 10, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 6, 2022.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. It should likely end before the ice melts.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0523” 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 523rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Chill Communication (The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it) — at: https://disquiet.com/0523/

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-0523-chill-communication/

The Disquiet Junto Turns 10

This is a bit of a ramble. Tomorrow, January 6, 2022, marks the 10th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto. A decade ago, I sat at a coffee shop, having put together this idea I had about how musicians communicate online, how they provide each other with mutual support, how they thrive thanks to indirect, asynchronous, long-distance communication. And then I proposed something.

It was the first week of January 2012, six years after I started sending proposals to musicians to respond to a prompt — a concept, an inquiry, an idea — in musical form, in sound.

The first time was to rework some Brian Eno and David Byrne stems, off their album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The stems weren’t themselves the impetus. The impetus was how much I didn’t like the music I heard that used the stems. See, Eno and Byrne posted the stems for free use as part of an anniversary promotion. I let some musicians know about the source material, and they all told me they liked the idea, but agreed the resulting music was lacking. And so we released it ourselves at the Internet Archive, under the title Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet.

Subsequent projects happened when I felt that writing about something didn’t satisfy my desire — my need — to fully address the given topic. Each time, having musicians respond to the topic was satisfying in a way that writing hadn’t alone fulfilled.

Up until 2011, each of these projects was what I think of as “select commission” mode, in that I selected the list of musicians I hoped might participate, and then invited them to respond. At the end of 2011, I took a different approach: I opened it up to anyone who wanted to join in. The idea at the end of 2011 was to get musicians to collaborate indirectly. This led to [Instgr/am/bient]: 25 musicians were given an Instagram image that another participant made, and then they were told: “Here’s the cover of your next single. Now go record it.”

The Eno/Byrne stem remix project in 2006 was a response to a communal sense of an idea that had fallen short: That the music was lacking because it was unmediated by any editorial perspective. Five years later, in 2011, Instagr/am/bient was founded on my then strong disinterest in Instagram. Some friends, notably Ted Laderas, made me think about it from another perspective. In particular, I came to realize that aesthetically speaking, a lot of Instagram images looked like the music I liked to listen to sounded. By that I mean that Instagram images were, at the time (long before “stories” loaded with people dancing in sync), pictures of everyday scenes, often taken amid nature, put through digital filters. Field recordings put through digital filters is, in essence, a solid chunk of my listening.

And so, to explore this parallel, we did Instagr/am/bient, to forge that connection between vision and sound, and to do so in a way that explored the aesthetic inherent (then) in a technology platform. It was also new because, as I mentioned above, I opened the invite wide. It wasn’t select anymore.

Instagr/am/bient, for reasons too detailed for an already long reminiscence, got a lot of attention. Hundreds of thousands of streams and downloads. And so I decided the open-call nature worked in 2011 in a way it hadn’t in 2006. I think this had to do with a sense of community. The result of it was: what if I opened it even wider, still. The Instagr/am/bient project required coordination. We had a beautiful PDF designed by my friend Brian Scott, of Boon Design. What if, instead, it was simply people uploading music themselves?

Like Instagram. SoundCloud has changed since 2012, and not entirely for the better. Part of what changed is what it no longer has: Groups. When it had Groups, people were able to communicate where they posted their music. Back in 2012, SoundCloud was, to put it succinctly, pretty freaking awesome. I’d been online almost 20 years at that point, since 1993 or 1994, and I’d loved the pre-blog days of nascent digital self-publishing, and, later, the rise of netlabels. Netlabels happened when internet connections were so slow you had to download music before you listened to it, whereas hosting was cheap enough that posting music was easy. That combination was magic. A glorious time.

OK, hosting wasn’t easy. The interface at the Internet Archive, for example, was finicky, but it worked. I do sometimes wonder if difficulty is a virtue: a filter on intent. If something is a little harder, if you have to wait a bit, both to post and to download, then you kinda need to mean it. SoundCloud, in any case, made posting and streaming easy, and that was meaningful. I don’t think there would have been a Junto without it.

And so, that sunny day in 2012, sitting in a cafe with a friend (Susan Blue) on Valencia Street here in San Francisco, I shared a concept, mostly on Twitter, but also on my website, which had just turned 15 years old the month prior. Come to think of it, Disquiet.com just turned 25 years old last month (on December 13, 2021), meaning it is now as old as Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was when I did the first communal (proto-Junto) Disquiet project back in 2006. (What’s the emoji for jeepers?)

The “Disquiet” in Disquiet Junto comes from The Book of Disquiet, written by that exquisite loner (a loner containing multitudes), Fernando Pessoa. The “Junto” comes from a club that Benjamin Franklin, the enthusiastic and prolific founder of organizations, formed in 1727. There were a lot of approaches I drew from. High on the list were sample-based groups, notably Iron Chef of Music and what was then called the Stones Throw Beat Battles. Also on my mind were art movements, notably Fluxus and Oulipo, and mail art, too.

I truly had no idea that first week if anyone would participate in the Disquiet Junto. The image in my head was being stuck with supplies for a party that no one attended. Instead, people did show up (in internet terms), and we’ve gathered every week since. There are way too many people to thank for their support, encouragement, and guidance. I’ve met so many amazing people since starting the Junto, made friends, collaborated on projects, and learned more than I could recount. I’ve given talks, and been interviewed for magazines like The Wire and Bloomberg Businessweek. We’ve done concerts, and a San Jose Museum of Art exhibit, and an Apex Art gallery installation (major thanks to Rob Walker for that invitation), among other escapades and satellite operations.

And while SoundCloud no longer has Groups, we’ve got the llllllll.co community and a Junto Slack, and plenty of communication in various other forms, including Twitter, which is where a lot of the early Junto momentum got rolling. Of course, all that communication takes a back seat to the weekly tracks uploaded by participants, because ultimately, the idea of the Junto is to communicate through music. That’s what we do every week. That’s the Disquiet Junto.

Tomorrow will be the start of the 523rd consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project. Every Thursday I send out a project assignment, and musicians post their tracks by the following Monday at 11:59pm (their local time). Ethan Hein summed up the process best, and I’ll paraphrase what he said here: I write record reviews of music that doesn’t exist yet, and then internet strangers make it real. You can become one of those strangers. Sign up at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto to receive the weekly instructions. Join in.

This Week in Sound: Swinton, Earworms, Spurious Noise

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the January 3, 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.

▰ As Christian Carrière noted to me in an email, there are an increasing number of films coming out in which audio is a driving part of the narrative. Upcoming are both La Boîte Noire, from director Yann Gozlan, which centers on an airline black box analyst, and Memoria, the new Tilda Swinton film, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in which a woman visiting a foreign country becomes fascinated by a strange sound.

La Boîte Noire: https://youtu.be/BI-zphxC0HM
Memoria: https://youtu.be/kMEb0cgyVww

I am excited to see both these movies (Memoria will be a bit difficult, as apparently it will be viewable only in theaters, not just upon release, but forever), but in the end I remain even more interested in the role sound plays in film in general than I am in the occasional film (like Berberian Sound Studio or Sound of Metal), where it is the focus of attention. Via the “Sounding Out!” blog, there’s a great new interview with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (author of Between the Headphones and The Auditory Setting: Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts) on how even this many decades after Walter Murch’s groundbreaking work in The Godfather, American Graffiti, and The Conversation, sound remains underutilized in film.
https://learningandcreativity.com/silhouette/aesthetic-potentials-of-sound-are-rarely-explored-budhaditya-chattopadhyay-on-the-use-of-sound-in-cinema/

▰ According to David Silbersweig, Harvard psychology professor, there is an evolutionary history to the phenomenon of the earworm: “[M]usic was used together with rhyming before the written word in many cultures to help people remember oral histories. Our brains evolved to remember these associations and these snippets.” The word dates back to 1979, coined by Cornelius Eckert from the German term “Ohrwurm,” or “musical itch.” (Via subtopes.)
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/12/harvard-scientist-on-why-that-song-is-stuck-in-your-head/

▰ The excellent computer.rip blog, by J.B. Crawford, started the year with a look back at the telephone. Particularly interesting, as Jason Wehmhoener pointed out (we were both alerted to the piece by our friend Tom Norris), is the role played by the selection of frequencies for command tones, like touching a button: “The consistent 200 Hz separation meant that certain tones were subject to harmonics and other intermodulation products from other tones, requiring high signal quality for reliable decoding. That wasn’t much of a problem on toll circuits which were already maintained to a high standard, but local loops were routinely expected to work despite very poor quality, and there was a huge variety of different equipment in use on local loops, some of which was very old and easily picked up spurious noise.” The post is an excellent deep dive.
https://computer.rip/2022-01-01-secret-military-telephone-buttons.html

▰ The New York Times closed out the year with a list of 41 “debates” that defined 2021, among them the Havana syndrome, which “started afflicting American diplomats in Cuba in 2016, after embassy workers reported hearing loud buzzing noises.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/21/opinion/2021-essays-opinion.html

Sound Ledger¹ (Tourism, Decibels, Havana)

3000: Total number of individual tourists allowed each year at Kronotsky Nature Reserve on the Russian coast

30.6: Decline, in decibels, of noise pollution in Mumbai, India, between 2015 and 2021

30: Rough estimate, in U.S. dollars, to treat “Havana syndrome,” out of a $768 billion defense spending bill signed into law by President Joe Biden

▰ ▰ ▰

¹Footnotes: Russia: thetravel.com. Mumbai: indiatimes.com. Havana: fastcompany.com.

Originally published in the January 3, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet).

Favorite Not Recent Listens

I utterly failed at making a “best of 2021” list this year, as is often the case. I just don’t make lists like I used to, and I was never much of a list maker to begin with. I really did try, but the list never came together. Instead, today, here are three strong favorites I kept going back to, all from before 2021:

▰ Ben Monder uploaded, early during the pandemic, on May 15, 202, this video of his elegant dissection of the classic song “Never Let Me Go”:

▰ The Michele Rabbia (drums, electronics), Gianluca Petrella (trombone, sounds), and Eivind Aarset (guitar, electronics) 2019 trio album, Lost River (ECM). Beautiful, hyperminimal ambient jazz. I love when music sounds like less than the sum of its parts: ecmrecords.com.

▰ I started listening to this instrumental version of the classic Grace Jones track “Slave to the Rhythm,” produced by Trevor Horn, when Robbie Shakespeare, the great bass player, died. There is no official instrumental version, but this one was constructed by a YouTuber who goes by Pacalo, and who appears to construct instrumentals for tracks that don’t have them (also check out INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” and Pet Shop Boys’ “Suburbia”).

twitter.com/disquiet: Thiebaud, Dickinson, Clang.gg

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.

▰ RIP, Wayne Thiebaud, who died on Christmas at age 101 after bringing so much pleasure to so many eyes. I only got to speak with him once, on the phone while writing a profile of painter Mel Ramos, his lifelong friend, for sactownmag.com.

▰ If IMDB indexed furniture, the entry for Emeco chairs would be the longest page on the internet

▰ Dishwasher (two rooms over) to the left of me, rainstorm (outside living room window) to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle again

▰ I am totally down for Mos Espa parkour.

▰ I’m 67% (45% when I first tweeted this) of the way through Fonda Lee’s third Jade novel, Jade Legacy, and it’s truly thrilling. It never takes the easy way out. On the one hand, I’m sad to see the series come to a close. On the other, I’m so glad to see how compelling and transportive it is, how far it goes.

▰ There’s a lot I love about Dickinson, the TV series, and right now everything else takes second place after the jazz that plays every time Walt Whitman speaks.

▰ Excited to spend more time in Bogdan Raczynski’s new https://clang.gg community in the coming year. For fun, here’s an email interview I did with Bogdan 22 and a half years ago: “Turning Japanese.” (In response, Raczynski likened decades-old interviews to high school yearbook photos.)

▰ My day began with @’s related to poetry (via Rachael Nevins) and to livecoding (via Bogdan Raczynski), which is alright by me.

▰ So glad Bruce Levenstein is digging the trio of Michele Rabbia, Gianluca Petrella, and Eivind Aarset on the 2019 album Lost River. One of my favorite albums of the past few years. The guitarist Eivind (autocorrects to Divine) Aarset is great as a leader and often at his best as a collaborator and supporting player.

▰ Mornings sounds, last day of the year: external drive beeps and whirs as it reboots; a bus’ breaks bring it to a stop briefly (clearly no one was waiting to board, nor did anyone disembark); a car speeds west on the wet street at pedestrian-defying clip; house creaks as it warms.

▰ This week in the annual end-of-year project, Disquiet Junto music community participants are stitching together year-end retroactive sonic diaries by concatenating brief snippets from existing tracks to represent the past year. Playlist in progress at soundcloud.com.

▰ Only three episodes left of our Dickinson holiday spree*. :(

*née binge

▰ Only two now. :( :( On the bright side, when they’re over there are exceptional leftover Salvadoran tamales for lunch.

▰ Wow, Dickinson is a treat. TV has no shortage when it comes to flights of fancy, genre blending, hi/low mashups, public-domain spelunking, self-aware reboots, and professional-grade fan fiction. Dickinson is all of those, and it makes good on its source material and its conceit.

▰ Best receipt font of 2021

Side note: The “little spicy” following “medium spicy” is apparently how the kitchen is signaled to find the zone between medium spicy and very spicy.

Ring Out the Old

And it’s a wrap. 2020 was the first year since I founded Disquiet.com in 1996 — this month having been its 25th anniversary — that I posted at least once each day. Today, the last day of 2021, marks the first time I’ve done so two years in a row. I imagine evolving priorities may change things at some point, but the habit got me through these two tough years. This year the activity came to a total of 434 posts, including this one. (I may be counting a couple of unpublished drafts in there, but they’ll see the light of day eventually.) And on that note, have a great evening and a great start to 2022.

Sonic Infrastructure

I’ve learned that the publication Art Practical is no more. I used to read it regularly, but only contributed once, back in April 2012. I’m posting the full text of my piece, “Sonic Infrastructure,” here for archival purposes. The essay was part of an issue devoted to sound. The issue included an introduction by Tess Thackara (who invited me to contribute), an interview with Paul DeMarinis by Renny Pritikin, a discussion between artists Joshua Churchill and Chris Duncan, Matt Sussman on Infrasound, Liz Glass on the Tape Music Center, an interview with Jacqueline Gordon by Ellen Tani, a profile of Ethan Rose by Bean Gilsdorf, a discussion about the Invisible Relics exhibit at Park Life (a gallery in the San Francisco neighborhood I have long called home, the Richmond District), and an essay by Aaron Harbour drawing from his experience as a curator and DJ.

. . .

“Sonic Infrastructure”

So, a sound artist walks into a chamber …

This joke-without-a-punch-line likely brings to mind the archetypal sound-exploration incident in which composer John Cage famously entered the confines of an anechoic chamber in pursuit of pure silence. As the oft-told (and, some have argued, perhaps apocryphal) story goes, Cage did not experience the silence he had led himself to expect. Instead, he heard something—two things, in fact: his heartbeat and his nervous system.

But there’s another chamber worth talking about, one with increasing prominence in the sonic arts: it’s called the ambisonic chamber. In contrast with the sonic exclusion one finds in an anechoic chamber, an ambisonic chamber produces absolute sonic immersion. It employs numerous speakers to reproduce not mere stereo sound or even 5.1-surround sound, but 360-degree sound. For example, a stationary ambisonic recording made in San Francisco’s Union Square at noon on the last shopping day before Christmas would reproduce the fully immersive experience of sound: the distant rattling of the Salvation Army bells, the “ho-ho-ho” of the Macy’s Santa, the multilingual voices of shoppers passing from and in every direction, the whir of news helicopters hovering overhead, and the rumble of skateboards passing underfoot.

Should you have the opportunity to enter an ambisonic chamber and happen to hear your heart pounding, it’s simply the result of an emotional response to the sheer imaginary promise inherent in such an installation. And, perhaps, the momentary desire to install such a thing in your living room.

Global Network of SoundLabs

A fully functioning ambisonic chamber is the heart of the SoundLab at Arup, an engineering consultancy with offices in San Francisco and dozens of other cities around the planet. Arup describes its ambisonic room as “a controlled auralization environment that allows clients to experience and compare the acoustic performance of various design options.” The SoundLab doesn’t merely reproduce ambisonic recordings; it allows for computer systems to manipulate them, adjusting the recordings based on hypothetical physical environments. It is essentially the CAD of sound.

There are such ambisonic labs in more than half a dozen different Arup city offices, including not only San Francisco but also Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, and Hong Kong. The rooms serve consulting acoustic engineers in a wide variety of endeavors, from confirming that a proposed physical sound barrier will limit the noise produced by nearby mass transportation to tweaking the architectural design of retrofitted concert auditoriums.

Such traditional engineering applications are, however, merely the beginning. As with the SoundLabs in its peer cities, the San Francisco Arup SoundLab, located in the company’s offices in the JPMorgan Chase Building on Mission near Second Street, is increasingly a source of sonic infrastructure for the arts. Shane Myrbeck, a musician, sound artist, and Arup employee, recently gave me a tour of the lab and a thorough overview of its implications for the arts. By way of example, he played me a piece of classical music as it would sound in a half dozen different venues from Vienna to Boston; the system flipped seamlessly from one to the next and back again. When I mentioned that the ambisonic chamber is like some sonic version of the Star Trek holodeck, Myrbeck said that an Arup colleague of his routinely refers to the room as such.

Bill Fontana’s Sonic Shadows (2010), installed on the catwalk atop SFMOMA’s atrium, was developed utilizing virtual, computer-design test runs in the Arup lab. The work takes sounds from inside the museum’s physical plant and reproduces them as sound art. The San Francisco office also assisted Arup’s New York office in several projects, including an ambisonic recording of a live 2009 performance by Lou Reed with guest saxophonist John Zorn of Reed’s Metal Machine Music (1975), as well as preparation for a Marina Rosenfeld performance at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. (They helped her plan how to best make use of the space for a performance of her Teenage Lontano [2008] as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial.) An Arup office also documented the ill-fated Ai Weiwei installation Sunflower Seeds (2010) at the Tate Modern in London with the intent to have visitors step on the one-hundred-million hand-crafted seeds, but that interactive element was cancelled after concerns arose about noxious porcelain dust.

Bill Fontana. Inside Sonic Shadows (2010). Courtesy of the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art.

The San Francisco Arup office is also working to build connections directly to the local arts community. Arup’s acoustic and lighting departments collaborated with blacksmith Jefferson Mack Metal to create Sent Forth (2011), an imaginary sonic time machine currently on display at Fort Mason. In late 2011, Arup allowed the ambisonic SoundLab to serve as a performance venue for a concert production by the arts organization ME’DI.ATE. The event featured the musician Greg Kowalsky and the duo Myrmyr, among others; Arup’s Myrbeck also performed.

Arup San Francisco’s SoundLab is slowly making its name alongside other long-running local institutions, most notably the music program at Mills and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) department at Stanford. There’s an interesting distinction, though—San Francisco is expanding from being a sonic-arts center to being a sonic-arts-infrastructure center. Mills and CCRMA routinely produce graduates who carry elsewhere the cultural DNA of the Bay Area’s indigenous sound explorations. Arup joins a growing number of local individuals and organizations that are attracting client artists from around the globe to San Francisco to help them realize their ideas.

The Codification of Glitch

Barry Threw is one such an individual. Speaking over a dinner of Sichuan food in the Richmond District, Threw talked about the work he does at Obscura Digital. From its office in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, Obscura, not unlike Arup, manages the technological realizations of design ideas for an international client base.

Threw also discussed his own development projects, among which are a Bluetooth-enabled “sensor bow” for Berkeley-based Keith McMillen Instruments and sampler software for an orchestral work by the Oakland-based composer Mason Bates. Threw discussed in detail his latest venture: bringing to fruition a long-planned piece of general-use sound software designed by Markus Popp. Popp, who resides in Berlin, is best known as Oval, the electronic musician whose albums, such as 94 Diskont (1995), helped bring the word “glitch” to both media studies departments and the international club scene.

Sent Forth, a collaboration between Arup and Jefferson Mack Metal, sound by Shane Myrbeck

Currently, Berlin has more than its share of programming brainpower. It’s home to both the music production software company Ableton and the data-sharing service SoundCloud—and as a sign of the city’s increasing prominence, the journalist and musician Peter Kirn recently relocated his CreateDigitalMusic.com there from New York. Nonetheless, Popp selected Threw to implement his software idea. The two were introduced by Naut Humon, whose surround-video/sound Recombinant Media Lab employed Threw as an engineer and developer between 2006 and 2008. OvalDNA, the Popp/Threw sound-manipulation software, will be made available online for free in conjunction with a recent Oval album by that name. The tool will allow users to rework thousands of existing audio files, free of copyright restrictions.

Threw agrees that there’s a wealth of digital engineering resources in the Bay Area supporting international artists. He also suggests that one reason local technologists enjoy collaborating with people from elsewhere is the wanting state of the major-league Bay Area arts institutions. For a region that is home to Google, Twitter, Apple, and Facebook, the artistic seasons at the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera, as well as Cal Performances in Berkeley, are decidedly retrograde.

Icelandic iOSphilia

Back in 2008, Threw worked with Scott Snibbe on a media installation for the Beijing Olympics. And thanks to a growing suite of mobile apps and other bespoke innovations, Snibbe has become a key example of a Bay Area technologist who has helped secure the region’s reputation for providing next-generation implementation resources. His Snibbe Interactive, based on Howard Street near Seventh Street in SOMA, counts among its clients science and history museums from Mexico to France to Thailand.

As at Arup and Obscura Digital, much of Snibbe’s work involves providing somewhat behind-the-scenes support to institutions; yet sometimes credit is given where it is due. He has had perhaps his most public success this past year with the release of Björk’s Biopholia. The Icelandic techno-chanteuse engaged Snibbe not only to develop the images projected during her concert tour, but also to code a groundbreaking app for Apple’s iOS platform. The app was no mere interactive advertisement for the full-length recording. It was itself a kind of “full-length app,” as it were, with different mini-apps extrapolating interactive experiences from each of the album’s individual songs. The video-game reviewer for the New York Times called it “among the most creative, innovative and important new projects in popular culture,” and he didn’t even like the music that much.

Arup, Threw, and Snibbe are simply three examples in which San Francisco technology is the engine on which the global sonic arts increasingly run. There is plenty of precedent for the Bay Area providing sonic infrastructure to the world; the region is home to the leading sound technology firms Dolby and THX. Instruments from Don Buchla’s debut analog synthesizer (1963) to the contemporary virtual tools of Cycling 74—most notably Max/MSP—originated here. San Francisco’s current generation of innovators can easily take a drive down memory lane: along Highway 101 in Redwood City is the roadside logo of the legendary audio-storage firm Ampex, founded by Russian immigrant Alexander Michael Poniatoff back in 1944.

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This article originally appeared in April 2012 as part of the online publication Art Practical, which is now archived at archive.org.

More on the Myrbeck at shanemyrbeck.com, the Fontana at sfmoma.org, and Biophilia at snibbe.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0522: Just Backdated

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 3, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 30, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0522: Just BackdatedThe Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

As is the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s project is a sound journal, a selective audio history of your past twelve months.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2021 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.

Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0522” (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 “disquiet0522” (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-0522-just-backdated/

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.

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 3, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 30, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0522” 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 522nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Just Backdated (The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments) — at: https://disquiet.com/0522/

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-0522-just-backdated/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.