Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 171

Unspeakable

The perfect speaker for unspeakable sounds

Behind The White Door

I started playing The White Door because people recommended this puzzle of a mobile video game for its use of sound. I stayed for the visual depiction of the objects making some of those sounds.

Details at rustylake.com.

Track Changes

I particularly love indecipherable graffiti that looks like track changes on the urban document that is street life:

. . .

Not unimpressive:

twitter.com/disquiet: Skateboards, Hold Music, Ist’s

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.

▰ Trio for laptop fan, street cleaner, and microwave

▰ Reading the new John le Carré very slowly, thanks for asking. Hard to believe it’s the last one. I’m just over 40% through, taking it a step at a time. When it’s over it’s over.

▰ A lot of ist’s passed away, per the Deathsin2021 page on Wikipedia:

Italian aerodynamicist
Ukrainian sociologist
English music journalist
Italian germanist
Olympic silver medallist

▰ Not that it’s over, but at this juncture I’d say the sound of the pandemic for me is that of people skateboarding by my home in the depth of a silence previously unimaginable, even in our fairly quiet neighborhood. And even as the world has woken up, I still hear the skateboards.

▰ “Twitter removes the trust between writer and reader by flattening meaning to the single most offensive understanding and proliferating that version alone.”

I remain Twitter-ambivalent, and I mute/circumscribe my use diligently. Here’s a smart depiction of the tightrope walk by novelist Fonda Lee, whose Jade trilogy I recommend highly: “Twitter Is the Worst Reader.”

▰ “What will you do when you get lonely / No one waiting by your side?”

Hold music is trolling me again.

▰ Pretty interesting overview of the “hearing aid cartel,” which is not a Gen X indie-rock supergroup, but instead the power structure that helps explain why the common devices apparently cost so much in the United States: “Silencing the Competition: Inside the Fight Against the Hearing Aid Cartel.”

▰ The cognitive dissonance that you’ve elected to turn off your microphone in a given piece of software, and yet the software hears you well enough to tell you, essentially, “You seem to be making sound, so would you like to turn your microphone back on?”

▰ Been thinking about no longer tagging people’s music on disquiet.com as “freely downloadable” (which I only have done when it’s with the musician’s approval), ’cause in the age of streaming, it seems to mean far less than it did, once upon a pre-fiber, pre-DSL time.

▰ Been often using my own photos instead of Creative Commons shots for Junto projects, and I’m enjoying it. I may just stick with that. We’ll see. This week’s project is an example. And it just went live, though I need to now send out the email.

▰ My mode, generally speaking: one ebook, one physical book, one audiobook. Ever-shifting, never remotely in sync. (Doesn’t count graphic novels and poetry, which are read at sort of a different pace. Or at least are by me. Kind of faster, sometimes less so, but just different.)

▰ And on that note, have a good weekend:

Listen to a book you read a long time ago.

Take a walk while wearing noise-cancelling headphones, with no music, and embrace the dissociation.

Leave Shazam running during a TV show and check what songs you did and didn’t notice.

Musical Fun

I’m new to Gilmore Girls. It has serious musical fun. These are a bride’s choices for her wedding. Better yet, it’s being asked of a harpist (on the left: Alex Borstein!). Later, Sally Struthers’ character describes rapturously how “Thelonious” (Monk) puts her in a (seemingly erotic) trance.

Disquiet Junto Project 0514: Chord Channels

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, November 8, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 4, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0514: Chord ChannelsThe Assignment: Take two chords and connect them over time.

Step 1: The goal of this project is to produce a slow piece of music in which you move back and forth between two chords. Choose two chords that have at least one note in common.

Step 2: Map out the notes of each chord.

Step 3: Compose a piece of music in which the individual notes of each chord slowly appear and disappear, so that at any point in time part of one chord, or part of both chords, or perhaps even both chords in their entirety can be heard.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0514” (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 “disquiet0514” (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-0514-chord-channels/

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, November 8, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 4, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Longer may be better.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0514” 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 514th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Chord Channels (The Assignment: Take two chords and connect them over time) — at: https://disquiet.com/0514/

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-0514-chord-channels/

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

Paper Memories

I was cleaning out a drawer today and came upon some old flyers.

I took this one initially to be a flyer, but then realized the “void” stamps meant it was, in fact, a ticket. There’s no year listed, but it was 1989. This was at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut at the southwest edge of Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan. I lived a half a block from Tompkins Square Park during the riot that occurred to August prior. By the time this show happened, I was either living a few blocks from the Knitting Factory, or I’d moved to Brooklyn. I’m pretty sure this concert was part of a series of events that John Zorn was curating, long before he founded his own club, the Stone. I learned today that there’s now a King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, Scotland, named after this long defunct New York haunt. Hank Roberts, the evening’s cellist, was the subject of one of the first two or three articles I ever wrote professionally, right around the time of this show. The article was timed to the release of his Black Pastels album. Just five dollars for the ticket. That’s a dollar per jazz genius.

. . .

This was a phenomenal show at the Knitting Factory, where I saw more concerts at that time than all other venues in New York combined.

. . .

This was about a year after I moved to California (to Sacramento, to work on the music magazine, Pulse!, that Tower Records published). Ray Anderson, the great trombonist, played with a bunch of musicians who were key to the Knitting Factory scene, and catching him in California was very centering.

. . .

This was a few years later. I was still living in Sacramento (I wouldn’t move to San Francisco proper until midway through 1996). My vague recollection is the hall was so large you could walk away from the stage to the point where you could barely hear the band, and yet somehow still be inside the space.

The Everyday Musicality of Autumn de Wilde’s Emma

I really dug the recent(ish) Jane Austen adaptation, Emma (2020), with Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role and Johnny Flynn as (I’m about to risk a 170-year-old spoiler) her belatedly betrothed. What I only realized during the end credits is that’s the same Johnny Flynn who did the great theme song for the great TV series The Detectorists (for which he also co-wrote the score).

Emma itself did right by music, too, start to finish. There’s plenty of pop culture out there, from Riverdale to Downton Abbey, where everyday (“amateur,” horrid* word) musicianship is part of how communities gather around each other, with the roles of performer and audience ever in flux. In Emma, this topic is particularly well handled, how we witness the title character, plus Flynn’s George Knightley (in a duo with Jane Fairfax), performing in front of friends, frenemies, and family. Bonus points for how centuries are bridged with covers by Maddy Prior and June Tabor, and by the Watersons.

And yow, how the playfully genteel score by David Schweitzer and Isobel Waller-Bridge fills each moment that the film’s director, Autumn de Wilde, leaves for them. The music choreographs the internal reactions of characters, to always affectionately comic ends. It’s like emotional ballet.

Coincidentally, I’ve been re-reading a lot of Dennis Potter lately, and it’s no surprise Emma’s director came from pop music (via videos and photography). Like Potter, de Wilde gets (and gets at) how singing other people’s music is form of self-expression.

* “amateur” having become a near-synonym for “dilettante,” both words having lost association with their origins (love and delight, respectfully)

This Week in Sound: Dishware, Aliens, Speech Recognition

I haven’t had time for a proper issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter in some time, but here are a few recent stories of interest:

▰ This Kickstarter is like the flip of Erik Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement, dishware designed to make as little noise as possible: kickstarter.com.

▰ To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the aliens and they are us: “The Most Promising Signal of Alien Intelligence Just Went Bust” by George Dvorsky (gizmodo.com).

▰ How travel companies from airlines to hotels are shaping the sounds their customers experience, by Max Brearley: theguardian.com.

▰ Obituary by Tony Herrington for Ian Rawes (1965-2021), the sound recordist and archivist who founded the London Sound Survey website, soundsurvey.org.uk, “a web project which collected over 2,000 recordings of everyday life in London between 2008 and 2020”: thewire.co.uk.

▰ A history of the development of speech recognition, by Graeme John Cole: techradar.com.

Reorganized Some Shelves