Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 184

Speech-to-Text as the New Cut-up

Judging by this recent interaction with my phone, speech-to-text (STT) still has a long ways to go. Consider that the message being transcribed here was, with the exception of my name (Marc Weidenbaum, apparently aka “Mark we D Bond”), a rote automated robocall script that thousands of people have no doubt received. (That is “Mark we D Bond,” aka “Mark, we didn’t bun,” aka “Mark, we did one.) You’d think that after that many attempts by a system to transcribe the same audio over and over and over, the system would have accomplished a closer approximation.

A friend who saw me post this on social media, when it was a slightly more inchoate thought, pointed out that this STT incident was like the machine had written lyrics for the band the Minutemen (an especially ironic observation, since the band’s singer was D Boon and the Minutemen recorded for a label called SST). That idea made me think about the cut-up work of William S. Burroughs, and how with STT you could write rough-draft lyrics for a song by saying words along with the melody, and then have the transcription service make mincemeat gibberish of the rough draft, and then you could sing the resulting mincemeat gibberish with full conviction.

Oh, and the “Prima Newman” sentence was in Spanish, as was part of the preceding sentence. “Newman on the way day” is “número nueve” (number nine, number nine, number nine …). It is fascinating, and revealing, that the automated STT service can’t switch gears particularly well when the speaker, even an automated one, changes language so quickly. For individuals in situations (protests, authoritarian regimes, etc.) where they are trying to avoid STT surveillance (scenario: audio > STT > algorithmic filter > legal/police action), this multilingual approach seems like a potential tactic (along the lines of playing copyrighted material to avoid footage being archived publicly on YouTube, TikTok, etc.).

“I’m On”

Time and again I’ve learned that the surest way for people to interact with technology is for them to experience the technology as not just a useful tool, but as a presence that is eager to help. I saw a fascinating presentation a few years back by a researcher who showed that simply adding a pair of stick-on googly eyes to a device would significantly increase the likelihood that people would interact with it.

There is a lot of discussion about matters of gender in the roles of today’s personal digital assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, though less so about the tone of those interactions, the balance they strike between authoritative resource and obsequious servant. The intelligences that animate our phones and “smart home” devices walk a tightrope that is suspended across the deep chasm we have come to call the Uncanny Valley (the scenario in which certain approximations of the human by the digital have the opposite effect of the googly eyes: repelling us rather than enchanting us).

As time passes, these digital assistants will serve as interpersonal middleware, along the lines of the Google Duplex service, which can initiate and make a call on your behalf, communicating a request to someone on the other end — and perhaps at some future date, to a digital assistant serving your intended interlocutor. The two parties’ mutual assistants might have numerous communications before their human guardians ever might speak to each other directly.

The humble doorbell, a device that serves as a technological messaging tool, is a model of such interaction. The tradition intercom, by extension, facilitates communication without itself participating, to varying degrees. In the case of this apartment building’s aftermarket solution, one takes for granted that the “I” in “I’m on” is not one of the human inhabitants, but the device itself. This intercom’s screen may have gone dead, but its purpose, its utility, lives on, and someone sorted out that by telling the visitor so in an enthusiastic tone would improve the intended interaction.

Also: Note the nose-like protuberance that is the exposed lock mechanism, a bit of chance anthropomorphism. Also: Note that one doesn’t “just” push the apartment number; one also pushes the hashtag (né pound, as in one must pound the button to make certain it has its desired effect).

Freeze-Dried Musique Concrète

As it nears its 250th episode, the Patzr Radio podcast continues to traffic in musique concrète with a distinctly contemporary flair. The latest track, its 229th, is by no means pop music, and yet somehow it can feel like pop, at least after the first dozen or so listens on repeat. Perhaps pop crumpled up and freeze-dried and then pulled apart with pliers, but pop nonetheless. There is something to the track’s shifty, beat-like rhythmic material, and to the pause two thirds of the way through, and to the redacted quality of the source audio, that feels as if it is responding to pop, creaking in pop’s shadow, sort of the inverse to how OG musique concrète was almost inseparable from the symphonic and chamber music it sought to occlude. The impression is fed by the opening snatch of voice, a woman in a slightly superior tone saying, “Exactly, and then they lose their function.” Lost its function, perhaps, but not its DNA. Excellent, as always.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/patzr-radio.

Not in the Forest

I spent an hour in the park and took a half dozen pictures. Then on the walk home I took more than five dozen. If you can’t identify any forest in these images, it’s not because you’re a robot.

twitter.com/disquiet: Sonic Thump, Bibimbap Sizzle

I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet, 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.

▰ Replacing the sonic boom with a “sonic thump,” a new supersonic airplane gets even more streamlined. NASA is due to begin “acoustic validation” tests in two years: cnet.com.

▰ I love the sound of the city digging up the neighbor’s sidewalk with something aggressively pneumatic this early in the morning. It sounds like infrastructure.

▰ Tried to record the sizzle of the bibimbap at lunch, but too much chatter. And that’s OK. Chatter is itself a nice return to reality.

▰ I wonder if the neighbor yelling at the city employee working on the other neighbor’s sidewalk is aware the yelling is in many ways just as disturbing if not more so in the morning.

▰ Have a good weekend, folks. At this rate I’ll have 4,000 photos to cull through by Monday. And I haven’t even started shooting at night yet. Perhaps I’ll have written that many words by then, too.

Distant

A large Dog meekly barkIng, carS on FulTon speeding, A souped-up moped oNe block away orso, air Traffic unseen

Disquiet Junto Project 0497: Benjamin’s Glass

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, July 12, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 8, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0497: Benjamin’s GlassThe Assignment: Pay tribute to Benjamin Franklin and his armonica

As the 500th Disquiet Junto project approaches, we’re revisiting some of the earliest projects. This was the third project, back in January 2012. Note that unlike later projects, it wasn’t listed as a series of steps:

This project is in honor of Benjamin Franklin, after whose Junto Society our little group was named. In an effort to expand and refine the glass harp, Franklin developed his own lathe-like glass harmonica, which he called the “armonica.” Marie Antoinette took lessons on it and Beethoven composed for it, but Franklin’s invention proved expensive and fragile, and it had a limited lifetime. And it may have given its frequent users lead poisoning.

You are not being asked to build a Franklin armonica. But like Franklin, we are going to expand on the glass harp. In our case, we are going to do so digitally.

You’re being asked to use the more common instrument, the glass harp. That involves the familiar “rubbing the top of a wine glass that has water in it” approach:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_harp

The Junto assignment is to record a live performance on the glass harp, and to employ live processing in the performance. There should be no post-production. And there is no length limit for the piece, though I would suggest that anything over 15 minutes may limit the size of your potential audience.

There is additional information in the project’s original post, which is from January 30, 2021:

http://disquiet.com/0003

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0497” (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 “disquiet0497” (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 tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0497-benjamins-glass/

Step 5: Annotate your tracks 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.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, July 12, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 8, 2021.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0497” 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 497th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Benjamin’s Glass (The Assignment: Pay tribute to Benjamin Franklin and his armonica) — at: https://disquiet.com/0497/

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-0497-benjamins-glass/

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

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

https://flic.kr/p/bgtGiv

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

Ping

The Plumber heard lIttle, ears focused, poNdered the steel trails,the Galvanized voids

July 6 Golden Gate Bridge Singing

Today’s the loudest/clearest I’ve heard the Golden Gate Bridge singing. I heard it inside the house so I stepped outside to record. The wind, of course, is prominent, but through that wind is something like the theremin of the gods. I recorded 30 seconds.

Video originally posted to youtube.com/disquiet.

芽菜 Glitch

I’m not entirely sure how or when precisely this glitch occurred. It was sometime yesterday shortly after I uploaded a series of camera shots of the dan dan noodles I made for dinner. This resulting image just popped up in my camera’s photos, and I noticed it this morning, though I do now have some vague memory of it having appeared briefly on my screen yesterday. It’s a mystery.

I think of this as “happenstance glitch,” because it happened by accident and isn’t (to my knowledge) repeatable. I would have said “true glitch,” but the word “true” would get me into trouble The idea of “true” plays into matters of authenticity and purity, and that’s not my intention. I just mean to distinguish, not prioritize, actual accident from the aesthetic impression of accident. Then again, perhaps what happened here is, somehow, reverse-engineerable, and if someone knows how to accomplish this, that’d be cool (not the end result specifically, but in the “what happened on my phone when I uploaded to Instagram” sorta way). Like, could I do this regularly if I chose to?

I watch a lot of YouTube videos in which expert video game players traverse unmarked borders beyond the game designers’ intention and explore artifact territories not in the official game. No doubt this glitch image of my bowl of noodles is simply a glitch, an error from which I happen to derive pleasure, though I do like the idea that perhaps there is a nascent or discarded-experiment glitch filter in Instagram that I somehow accessed by accident. I don’t have difficulty imagining that Instagram might, someday, add a “glitch filter” to its toolkit. Maybe they’ll title it Akihabara or Darmstadt.

There is an additional layer of irony here. Making dan dan noodles at home was a big deal for me. It’s one of my favorite dishes, Chinese or otherwise, and being able to prepare it at home from (relative) scratch by following a recipe was a remarkable feeling, not just how the end result tasted, but also how the various phases of preparation, especially in terms of smell, registered. (By “relative” scratch I mean that I didn’t, you know, actually pickle my own mustard greens. I just bought pickled mustard greens, which I now know are called ya cai, or 芽菜.) It is ironic that while I was documenting one favorite flavor, the glitch — another favorite flavor — surfaced, and it has a recipe I do not know how to access.

PS: Odder still, there is now a second glitch of the same image on my phone, and even though they appear in reverse order chronologically, I believe this one is a glitch of the one up top, resulting from when I posted the “original” (humorous word in this case) to Instagram.