Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 179

Why This Week in Sound

The newsletter I send out, This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet), works for me because it helps me process all the material I come across in a given week. I collect a dozen or so key items, each an instance of sound in one or another of various realms. I do so as I read, and listen, and watch, and go for walks, and talk with family, friends, and colleagues. Some of these instances are sound in the purest sense: a gadget for delivery, something about the physics of audio reception or production. Others are more musical: a feature iteration of a streaming service, an innovative record release, an ingenious instrument. Others are about music or sound in another media contexts: a TV score, a bit of user interface, a sound art installation. From there the search branches out further, and the further the better: a military-industrial weapon of sound, the role of sound in urban planning, some means by which sound connects us to the natural environment, or lets us understand civilization’s history. The further afield from sound the sound appears, the more it is of interest to me. I come across more of such information each week than I know how to manage, and sending out the newsletter — preparing the newsletter — is the best way I’ve found to handle it all. Taking an hour or so to sift through and cull all but the most interesting observations and news items, and then excerpting and commenting on them, is how I make sense of them, how I piece them into a whole, how I notice patterns connecting them, how I come to absorb them.

There is an irony to the newsletter: The more often I send it out, the more emails I get from readers with tips, with bits of sonic awareness from their own lives and professions, regions and interests, cultures and perspectives. A historian of engineering tells me something about an early telephony apparatus. An elementary school teacher has observed something about pedaodgy in the age of virtual conference calls. An architect has some details about a new noise dampening technique. It’s true that the more often I send out the email, the more information I receive, when all along I’m sending out the newsletter to deal with what is already an embarrassment of riches. However, the signal to noise ratio on the inbound information from readers is quite high, and I welcome it.

I go through spells of sending out my This Week in Sound email newsletter. I do it for a few weeks, then get overwhelmed, or distracted, and then the backlog of material becomes too great for me to get my head around it, and then time passes, and the process begins again. I got an issue out last week, and I have material prepped for Monday. We’ll see how it goes.

There are tons of newsletters these days, many on services designed with a commercial component. I do have a tip jar in mine, and the tips I get (financial, in addition to informational) are not so much an economic underpinning as a sign of life, a form of encouragement. The subscription model is, for the time being, less interesting to me. I got on the internet too early to have a natural inclination that involves a firewall, and firewalls are a key aspect of most newsletter subscription services. Some folks have helped me understand that subscriptions and firewalls aren’t intrinsically connected to each other, and I’m learning more as I compare services beyond Tinyletter’s bare-bones offering. I’m sorting it out as I go. It’s all an experiment, an ongoing one.

Disquiet Junto Project 0504: Transform Formula

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, August 30, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 26, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0504: Transform FormulaThe Assignment: Take a sound, change it, and contrast that with the original.

This week’s project was proposed by the musician Hainbach. It shares its theme, transformation, with his new album, Home Stories, on the Seil Records label.

Step 1: Listen to the world around you.

Step 2: Record a sound you find interesting. (In a situation where there is no notable sound, make your own sound without thinking. Just do something that will create noise.)

Step 3: Transform the sound by taking what interests you most about it and developing on it.

Step 4: Make it into a piece of music by contrasting the original and the transformation.

Here are some examples of transformations:

play the melody, rhythm, texture or the sound on an instrument

Convert the recording to MIDI and let it play

re-synthesise it into a new form

harmonize the overtones

notate and arrange the sound for more players

stretch it apart and filter until you find it’s secret

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0504” (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 “disquiet0504” (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-0504-tranform-formula/

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 per 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, August 30, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 26, 2021.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0504” 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 504th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Transform Formula (The Assignment: Take a sound, change it, and contrast that with the original) — at: https://disquiet.com/0504/

This week’s project was proposed by the musician Hainbach: https://www.hainbachmusik.com/

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-0504-tranform-formula/

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

The image associated with this project is by Hainbach.

Sound Ledger¹ (Quiet Parks, Australian Noise, Crowdsourced Audio)

260: The number of places around the world being considered for recognition by Quiet Parks International (more in the most recent issue of This Week in Sound).

362: The highest penalty, in Australian dollars, for noise pollution by motorists. That’s in Victoria. It’s cheapest in Western Australia ($100).

1,500: The estimated number of crowdsourced audio elements in theatre maker Marike Splint’s immersive 32 Acres sound installation at Los Angeles State Historic Park

▰ ▰ ▰

¹Footnotes: Parks: cnn.com. Australia: au.news.yahoo.com. Crowdsource: dailybruin.com.

Originally published in the August 23, 2021, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet).

This Week in Sound: Deepfakes, Subways, NSFW

It’s been a while. Best way to dust off the This Week in Sound apparatus is to kick out a new issue, which I did last night (subscribe at tinyletter.com/disquiet). Things have been busy. A lot of writing, a lot of working, a lot of pandemic-era living. As always, tips on topics related to sound are always appreciated. Send them my way, please. They’re in no short supply, but the best examples often originate from sources deep into a seemingly non-sonic topic that ends up having unique sonic components.

▰ There’s a company called Pindrop that was created to pinpoint the presence of deepfakes. They think they’ve sorted out which bits of the recent Anthony Bourdain movie, Roadrunner, were created artificially. The director, Morgan Neville, had said they would be “undetectable,” writes Tom Simonite, when Neville elected to have machines impersonate Bourdain to record things the late author and television personality had written but never spoken. Pindrop (and various online commenters) now think otherwise. As for the filmmaker’s ethics, this section of Simonite’s Wired story is especially solid: “[I]t is still possible to inform listeners about the source of what they’re hearing. At one point in Roadrunner, a caption advises viewers they are hearing ‘VOICE OVER – OUTTAKE.’ It’s not clear why Neville didn’t use a ‘synthetic audio’ caption for his AI-generated clips — or if disclosing them in the film, not just interviews in which he boasted they were undetectable, would have softened the backlash.”
https://www.wired.com/story/these-hidden-deepfakes-anthony-bourdain-movie/

▰ I can’t remember the last time an article was shared with me more often than the recent New York Times online piece, complete with audio selections, about the sounds of subways around the world. It’s filled with choice details, such as how the “synthetic ‘doo-doo-doo'” of the Montreal system has its roots in a sound that was a byproduct of the circuitry. And with nuances regarding the employment of sound: “It seems to a layperson like a door chime is innocuous, but it’s a really critical part of keeping the capacity of the subway up,” reports a New York City Transit conductor. (Article by Sophie Haigney and Denise Lu, design by Gabriel Gianordoli and Umi Syam.)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/13/arts/subway-train-sounds.html

▰ Without quoting it directly, I will simply say there is a NSFW and highly satisfactory anecdote in Rebecca Mead’s profile of Jesse Armstrong, writer and creator of the HBO series Succession. I recommend reading the whole thing, but you can also just search for the word “slapping” and learn about the role of music in masking the sonic byproduct of certain group activities.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/the-real-ceo-of-succession

▰ R. Murray Schafer, to whom we owe the modern concept of the “soundscape,” has died at age 88. “In a way, the world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time, without a beginning and, presumably, without an ending,” he is quoted by Robert Rowat in this obituary. Schafer died a little under a month after his birthday, July 18, which has served, in his honor, as the date of the annual World Listening Day.
https://www.cbc.ca/music/r-murray-schafer-composer-writer-and-acoustic-ecologist-has-died-at-88-1.5404868

▰ Quiet Parks International (quietparks.org) is identifying the “last quiet places” on our planet, ranging from the rural, such as the remote Zabalo River in Ecuador, to urban ones, such as Hampstead Heath in London. According to Nell Lewis, the organization has identified “260 potential sites around the world.”
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/quiet-parks-quiet-places-noisy-planet-spc-intl/index.html

▰ Hans Zimmer has written music for numerous movies, and now he’s added a book to his resume, alongside providing sounds for everything from apps to cars. He hasn’t written a book. He’s written music to accompany a book, specifically a limited edition art book on Denis Villeneuve’s forthcoming adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel Dune. Zimmer also scored the film, of course. And don’t fret the “limited” situation. Abbey White reports that it will be available for streaming and download.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hans-zimmer-second-dune-score-film-companion-book-1234997876/

▰ Windows 11 is due make users less “jumpy” thanks to a new suite of sound cues produced by sound designer Matthew Bennett. “The new sounds have a much rounder wavelength, making them softer so that they can still alert/notify you, but without being overwhelming,” according to a company spokesperson. Bennett shared some examples, including default beeps and calendar notifications.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/22/microsoft-delivers-calm-system-sounds-in-windows-11.html

▰ The “quiet” of the title locale in journalist Stephen Kurczy’s new book, The Quiet Zone, is not literal. The town is Green Banks, West Virginia, and the “quiet” involves restrictions on “devices emanating electromagnetic emissions,” writes Don Oldenburg. This is all so as to not interfere with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. And as it turns out, this town is in many ways the opposite of quiet.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/08/04/stephen-kurczys-the-quiet-zone-explores-town-without-cell-phones/5471413001/

Immersive Cinema and Ghost Ship Anniversary

Recombinant Festival
Various venues, San Francisco, US

Like many major cities, San Francisco is haunted by numerous defunct cinemas, left behind by technological and cultural shifts. These buildings linger as decrepit shells, occasionally refurbished as anything from batting cages to video game arcades and non-profit offices. Hollywood has fully divested; all that remain are the marquees.

One such theater, the former Grand in the city’s Mission District, was revived in 2014 as the latest home to Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. It has since become a key location at the contested intersection of tech and the arts by hosting concerts, coding workshops, and occasionally actual films.

Rrose is the center of attention.

Gray Area coordinates with two neighborhood galleries for the week-long Recombinant festival, founded by longtime immersive-cinema impresario Naut Humon, co-founder of Asphodel Records. Events range from sonic abstraction to trenchant dance music, the one constant a massive six by 12 meter screen in Gray Area’s seatless main hall. The satellite installations are expressly audiovisual: Ulf Langheinrich’s NIL, a stroboscopic barrage at the Ohio gallery, coaxes retinas toward altered states with vibrant color fields, while Earthworks, a multiscreen sprawl at the Lab, quivers and gurgles with amoeboid correlations to seismic data, a creation of Superconductor, aka the duo of Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt.

Each performer at Recombinant either embraces or evades the massive screen’s presence. Aïsha Devi bled images onto adjacent walls, challenging the surface’s dominion, her music a joyous torrent of cyber-spiritual extroversion. When musicians such as Hiro Kone, pushing out downtempo beats, and Marcus Schmickler, emanating artful noise, treat the screen as an afterthought, the relative absence feels intentionally spartan.

Most acts employ the vast canvas as a synchronized backdrop to sonic activities, like Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS on opening night, his cyclopean industrial momentum a score to journeys through environmental footage reminiscent of his color-coded album covers. Electric Indigo make a strong impression with what might be called sound-design techno, the screen occasionally reorienting to a dramatic beat. In the lobby, additional installations explored color-sound alignment, including therapeutic simulations from Li Alin and Craig Dorety.

Herman Kolgen mid-flight

The festival highlight is Herman Kolgen, who for two nights took over the hall, moving from large screen to stage to intimate set-ups. He commands the room, shifting attention as he roams from station to station. The show opened with accompaniment by William Winant and Antonio Gennaro on percussion, performing a sleek rendering of Steve Reich’s “Different Trains” to video of tragic locomotives (some damaged miniatures, others exploded CGI renderings). Kolgen’s “Isotopp” is a showstopping marvel, as he coaxes a corona-like glass circle into states of electrostatic ecstasy, and the audience along with it. Another highlight is Rrose, who the night before, courtesy of heavily protected floor cabling, performed a set of fierce, terse techno.

Drew McDowall and Florence To in their time machine

Recombinant’s final night coincides with the second anniversary of the Ghost Ship fire, which killed 36 people at a warehouse concert in nearby Oakland. Early in the evening, two acts — ichael Gendreau and the aptly named Infrasound — pay homage by pushing low-frequency audio to ceiling-rattling effect. Drew McDowall and Florence To closed the festival with Coil’s waveform-maximalist work Time Machines. To’s low-res images providing limited illumination, the dense and shuddering music served as a proper memorial, alternately numbing and euphoric.

There’s some additional context in a post I made when I first announced the article’s publication. This was my first article published in The Wire. I took all the above photos. None of them accompanied the article. I’m just fond of them, and while the one of Rrose isn’t great, it really captures for me my experience of the highly memorable moment.

This article I wrote originally appeared in the March 2019 issue (number 421) of The Wire.

Kenneth Goldsmith by way of PDQ Bach, and More

Happy Valley Band + Erin Demastes + Repairer of ReputationsVarious locations/Twitch

The valley in the name of Happy Valley Band is for Silicon Valley. The happy today, April 18, 2020, is nominal, due to widespread Covid induced seclusion. Happy Valley Band, an AI-arbitered experiment, is headlining a live stream that features noises from Erin Demastes and synth flashbacks from Ryan Page, the latter performing as Repairer of Reputations. The live stream phenomenon, like the coronavirus itself, is still novel.

The concert, held by the experimental promoter Indexical, occurs on Twitch, a platform for watching other people play video games. The Twitch website is correspondingly colorful and antic. For those less engaged in gamer culture, it can also be confusing. Like a waiter missing the hint that you have no interest beyond the club’s minimum drink requirement, Twitch often pesters you about ways to level up, mystifyingly so.

Demastes’ opening set is brightly illuminated, and otherwise a stark contrast to the manic framing of Twitch’s interface. On screen, color fields shift slightly and meaningfully. She is patiently engaged in microsound, in closely miking textiles and other materials. Her audio is at first quiet, so much so that latecomers keep entering the Twitch chat room to ask if the sound is even on. It is. (One good thing about Twitch concerts is that musicians and audience can silence crowd chatter with a click.)

As the volume rises, more sounds are heard as she probes and amplifies things seen through a microscope. These are as curiosity-invoking as they are abrasive. An after-show interview sheds additional light. Demastes lists her tools. These include beads, Styrofoam, and corkboard (that “gross brown stuff,” she reminds us), as well as a Slinky, a lobster fork, and a doorstop.

Happy Valley Band go second. Like the audience, the group’s members have assembled, far and wide, from the comfort of private spaces. They appear in the all too familiar virtual-conference grid of torsos. David Kant, the band’s leader, sets a self-mocking tone: “We’re going to be here for the next … too long, destroying your favorite songs.” What Happy Valley do is play music as heard through artificial intelligence. The musicians — including Kant on tenor sax, Mustafa Walker on bass, Alexander Dupuis on guitar, and Pauline Kim on violin, among too many members to list here — play notation produced by software that listens to pop classics and spits out what the algorithms observe. The Happy Valley Band are Kenneth Goldsmith by way of PDQ Bach: cultural plundering in the service of joking forensic dismemberment. They churn through hits like Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” Much as synthesizers have an easier time inferring pitch from woodwinds than from multi-timbral instruments, the barebones nature of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” yields the least frantic results of the show: the chords are anything but standard, but do leave space for the ear to focus on individual elements. The bombast of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” however, yields frenzied mush.

Like Demastes, Page performs work where visuals and sounds are inseparable. Throughout his set, the screen fills with ancient cathode-ray images, snatches of what seems like a VHS tape of a forgotten Roger Corman horror flick. The occasional narration reads like the script to a text adventure (“You open the door. … As you enter, you are sure this is your house”). The eeriest thing, nonetheless, is just how period-perfect are the synth-score cues that Page plays to accompany the footage.

There’s some additional context in a post I made when I first announced the article’s publication (“This is the first freelance concert review I have ever written on the same device on which I witnessed the concert”).

This article I wrote originally appeared in the July 2020 issue (number 437) of The Wire.

twitter.com/disquiet: Jacks, PKD 2.0, Thunder

I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made 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.

▰ I’ve come to so associate high-pitched whines with the aftereffects of combat as portrayed in TV and film, that when one emanated from the supermarket’s public address system I briefly wondered which of my fellow shoppers had just barely survived a mortar round.

▰ I’ve apparently adjusted to the reappearance of the bus that goes up and down our block a bit more quickly and less vociferously than have the neighborhood’s canine residents.

▰ Hard won

▰ Private rail

▰ “It was — and for me, at least, remains — a truly strange thing: an audio jack that leads nowhere. … The jack had the so-called ‘male’ end, and then it dead-ended. It was, I learned later, called a dummy jack.”

Happy to see my little essay reprinted at semiovox.com.

▰ What ongoing (i.e., currently still in progress) science fiction (or spy) series should I read? Thank you. I’m up to date on The Expanse novels, and Fonda Lee’s Jade books, and Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, and the latest William Gibson trilogy, and Murderbot.

▰ PKD 2.0:

We Can Remember It for You Freemium

Flow My Tears, the Surveillance Capitalist Said

The Man in the High Stack

▰ The new Disquiet Junto project, going live asks participants to do something the projects rarely do: to sing. In the end, though, it won’t sound vocal. (Via tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto, though I’m thinking of switching to Buttondown or another tool, if anyone has thoughts.)

▰ I love Thursdays. An idea goes out, and then music starts flowing in. I have some idea what will come of it, but often that idea is nothing in comparison with what arrives.

▰ The teacher from Stranger Things as a teacher on Stargirl in a setting like Breakfast Club quoting Ferris Bueller’s Day Off made my Tuesday night. Stranger Things has now been around long enough to be a source in addition to a recipient of references.

▰ When you’re thinking, “Oh, why have a white noise app running when I can just listen to someone walking in a rainstorm around Manhattan,” and then … BOOM 🌩️ there’s massive thunder. Massive.

▰ Computer 5000! There’s a longtime computer store in the neighborhood called Computer 5000, which I always assumed was, like, Tron-era scifi hyperbole. Today I recognized that 5000 is its street address.

Not Song but World, Not Composition but Soundscape

Material Interstices by HEXA

My favorite atmospheric music is often produced by people who have a pronounced and longerm dedication to environmental field recordings. These individuals bring to their synthesized sounds the immersive experience of real world recordings. The scale of their work is not song but world, not composition but soundscape. Such is the gloriously harrowing “Elastic Body,” the first preview track from Material Interstices, a forthcoming album from HEXA, the duo of Lawrence English and Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart. It is a droning turmoil of white noise and shuddering dread, of voices straining against unseen forces to be heard and pipes echoing as they’re pulled long distances against rough surfaces.

It is neither a surprise that the sounds were inspired by dreams, nor that those dreams are deeply personal ones for the musicians, nor that the dreams have surfaced for them during the extended period of the pandemic. English describes it, in part, as follows: “The dream usually started with me playing on the lunar dirt and gradually a sound would emerge from a large concrete pit that was in the centre of the space. The sound would get louder and eventually I would have to go and inspect it. It called me in, there’s no other way to describe it.”

More on the album at lawrenceenglish.bandcamp.com. It is due out October 15, 2021.

Disquiet Junto Project 0503: Sing Song

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, August 23, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 19, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0503: Sing SongThe Assignment: Record a song using only your voice transformed beyond recognition.

Step 1: Prepare to record a piece of music using primarily your voice, albeit transformed beyond recognition. Disquiet Junto projects rarely involve singing. This one is an exception. All Junto projects are experiments, this one in particular.

Step 2: Your recording should consist of several layered tracks. Record one, perhaps a rhythmic one, to set the beat, first. Then layer two or three more. Keep each layer isolated, so you can process it later in the process. In the case of each layer, you might improvise your singing, or you might plan in advance with notation. Certainly you might need to do several takes of each track layer in order to get it right. Don’t think of your singing as the final audio. Instead, think of your voice as a sketchbook for a work-in-progress. You sing a bass drum, you sing a guitar line, you sing a synth bed, and so forth.

Step 3: For each of the the three or four layers you created in Step 2, process them drastically so the vocal elements no longer sound like the human voice.

Step 4: Mix the processed layers from Step 3 into a final track.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0503” (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 “disquiet0503” (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-0503-sing-song/

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 per 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, August 23, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 19, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you, with or without the Martian time-slip.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0503” 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 503rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Sing Song (The Assignment: Record a song using only your voice transformed beyond recognition) — at: https://disquiet.com/0503/

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-0503-sing-song/

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

The image associated with this project is by John, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/2hMq7fw

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

The Radio as Musical Instrument

In 2011, six decades to the year after John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No 4 instructed two dozen performers at Columbia University to use radios as instruments, a small Swedish company named Teenage Engineering released a portable music-making device. With the OP-1, radio went from being used as an instrument to being part of an instrument. An FM receiver was among the OP-1’s feature set, alongside a keyboard, synthesizer engines, sequencers and a digital record mode that borrowed its user interface from old-school cassette tapes. (Which wasn’t entirely unprecedented. In the 1980s, Casio released a piece of Frankengear called the CK-500, which combined two cassette decks and a radio with a four-octave keyboard. It went precisely nowhere.)

The design of the tidily integrated OP-1 earned a spot in the permanent holdings of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, meaning it’s in the same collection as various Cage drawings, including the graphic notation Score Without Parts (40 Drawings By Thoreau). “It felt natural,” says Teenage Engineering co-founder Jens Rudberg via Zoom. “Because to make music it helps to have inspiration, so you can sample from the OP-1’s microphone, or what you’re playing, or you can tune into whatever radio stations are around you.”

Something must have been in the air in 2011. Two other notable instruments with radios debuted that same year. San Francisco Bay Area synth legend Don Buchla debuted the 272e Polyphonic Tuner in 2011 at NAMM, the massive Southern California trade fair. The 272e module, released commercially the following year, includes four separately tunable FM receivers. Also in 2011, ADDAC Systems, based in Lisbon, Portugal, launched the ADDAC102 module, which, like Buchla’s, provided the ability to alter FM tuning via control voltage, the electrical impulses by which synthesizers send and receive instructions for things like volume, pitch and pace.

Joel Davel, who worked on the 272e with Buchla, says the device took half a decade to complete: “In particular, Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No 4 was motivation to have at least a quad radio module.” Davel himself uses the module: “It was while playing with Don in 2011 in Mexico City that I learned of Steve Jobs’s death over Mexican radio through the 272e.”

Among 272e enthusiasts is San Francisco electronic musician Thomas Dimuzio, who tells a funny story about radio’s adoption by synthesizer designers. In spring 2007, two years after Bob Moog’s death, his namesake company announced the MoogerFooger MF/FM. Its advertising read: “Actually captures radio signals, routes them through electronic wizardry.” Dimuzio and a friend excitedly called the Moog offices, only for the receptionist to reminded them it was April Fool’s Day.

Four years later, come 2011, a radio instrument was no longer a joke. And a decade on, there are still more gadgets purpose-built for adding radio to musicians’ kits. Even as conventional broadcast radio is on the decline with the rise of streaming services, it is experiencing unprecedented utility as a tool for making music, rekindling a legacy of radio experimentation that runs through Cage, Keith Rowe, Holger Czukay, Christina Kubisch, John Duncan and many others. Polyend’s Tracker instrument, a grid device with a generous screen, includes an FM radio, which company founder Piotr Raczyński used in late 2019 on vacation: “I went to Egypt with my preproduction unit, and I grabbed samples from religious radio. I love those samples. They opened a totally new window for my music.”

Teenage Engineering’s co-founder Rudberg agrees: “When you’re somewhere else, it’s easy to find something to sample because it’s different. It’s easier to do something new.”

Several recent radio devices are, like ADDAC’s, in the Eurorack format. These include the ST Modular Radio and the Tesseract Modular’s Low Coast, the latter of which looks like it was yanked from a car dashboard. Another, the KOMA Field Kit – Electro Acoustic Workstation, was initially funded on Kickstarter by nearly a third of a million euros in 2017, and includes not just FM but AM and the enduringly popular zone of shortwave, too. KOMA was founded in 2011 (there’s that year again) by Christian Zollner and Wouter Jaspers. Speaking from its Berlin office, Zollner talks about the personal influence of the annual event Klangwolke, which translates as Sound Cloud, in his native Linz, Austria: “Ever since I was a kid, every civilian is supposed to put their radio in their window. Pieces play, and as you go around the city, you go through this sound cloud.”

Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner is synonymous with radio music thanks to his sampling efforts in the early 1990s, and credits the tool with maintaining tension in his performances. As part of a lengthy email correspondence, he writes: “I enjoy letting these sources take me in a direction I might never expect, using indiscriminate signals that I just pull down in real time and improvise around.” Rimbaud’s sense of chance aligns with the indeterminacy Cage sought in composition, much as the employment of control voltages connects with the role of process in his work.

American musician King Britt in turn credits Scanner with having opened his ears to the textural qualities of radio. Britt identifies the KOMA as his instrument of choice. Speaking after teaching a UC San Diego course, he tells me about recording his 2005 album Sister Gertrude Morgan. “Tim Motzer and I were in the studio. His guitar was super loud and his amp started picking up radio signals, including this organ part that was in the same key we were playing in. I immediately hit record, and we worked it into the song.”

The lesson being: you don’t even need a radio in your instrument for radio to get in your instrument.

This article I wrote originally appeared in the July 2021 issue (number 449) of The Wire. It was titled “Received Wisdom” and had the subhead “The mercurial sound of the radio dial has led a new generation of instrument makers to tap into the airwaves.”