Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 186
June 25, 2021
June 24, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0495: Protip Etude
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, June 28, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 24, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0495: Protip EtudeThe Assignment: Share a tip for making music or working with sound, and record a track that employs it.
This is a sort of project we do on occasion. Last time we did was back in mid-December of 2020. It’s a great way to share experiences: to teach at the same time you’re learning. A virtuous circle, if you will.
Step 1: Think of a musical/sonic tip or technique you want to share with others. It might be something newly acquired, or it might be an old habit.
Step 2: In sharing the tip selected in Step 1, record a short piece of music that employs it.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0495” (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 “disquiet0495” (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-0495-protip-etude/
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, June 28, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 24, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0495” 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 495th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Protip Etude (The Assignment: Share a tip for making music or working with sound, and record a track that employs it) — at: https://disquiet.com/0495/
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-0495-protip-etude/
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 AKT.UZ, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
June 23, 2021
Mount Brunswick Hike Footage
When I posted my two-minute footage of a recent redwood forest hike, I mentioned how YouTube is full of far longer journeys. I wanted to share another example of what I’m talking about. This video (not by me) is an hour straight (with a tiny bit of editing) of a walk at Mount Brunswick in British Columbia. The location is beautiful, and the footage fairly high resolution, as high as 1440, which isn’t 4K but will certainly do. Right from the start, the videographer’s footsteps are plainly evident. When walking, one isn’t quite aware of such sounds, because our brains largely blank them out, as they do any repetitive noise that should be ignored in favor of chance sounds that might provide evidence of danger or other reason for alert, if not alarm. That’s evolution for you. By 15 minutes in, the hiker’s breath makes itself heard, and by halfway through, that panting is almost as loud as the footsteps. While the footage remains breathtaking at times (take a look at the view at 50:01), we’re also plainly aware of the effort required to share it with us — it is breathtaking, quite literally, and anything but blissful. At times, the hiker pauses to look around, and in those moments birds might be heard cawing, but for the most part, the panting and foot stseps are our accompaniment. The video is titled “Mount Brunswick Virtual Hike No Music No Talking,” but of course humans can be present, can be heard, even when they’re not talking. I’m not posting this mention here as a critique of the video. Quite the contrary, it’s absolutely gorgeous, a generous act on the part of the individual who posted it. I am registering it as an interesting aspect of the culture of posting nature walks and, by extension, city hikes — that even when there is no talking, it is not as if the world beyond our own presence simply fills the sonic void.
Video originally posted at youtube.com.
June 22, 2021
Bark (2)
June 21, 2021
Environmental Industrial Music
Industrial music is generally all klang, and it is truly industrial more by association than by audio hallmarks. The sounds are sourced from what might very well be an active factory floor, but the dance floor is where they are intended to reside, and where they are most at home. Another kind of industrial music is more akin to environmental industrial music: the sound of an inactive factory floor, when the motors are humming but activity is on pause. Such is “Grave doubts – Decisioni difficili” by the Italian musician Marco Mascia, who lives in Cagliari. The gorgeous echoes of grating noise suggest an immeasurably cavernous space, one built to house vast human aspirations, and either temporarily unused, or perhaps left behind entirely. The spaciousness does have a space-ness, the more you listen into it. Because this is not merely music one listens to. It is music that asks you to step inside it, to explore it from the inside, from inside the geography it intimates. Perhaps this is interstellar industrial music, the room tone of a former robot-making facility on Mars, before civil war tore the planet apart, or an ice-processing plant in the asteroid belt, no longer in use since the stargates opened.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/progettosonoro. Found via a repost by Robert Knote.
June 20, 2021
Five Four
In fact, this is a double mesostic. I haven’t done one of these previously. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before, though I imagine they must exist. I have seen double acrostics.
June 19, 2021
I’ve Got Some Mesostics in The B0ardside
Stoked to have two pages of mesostics in the third issue of The B0ardside (tagline: “Art and Culture from the Edge of the World,” that being the ocean side of San Francisco). The invitation came from Thorsten Sideb0ard, the B0ardside cofounder who put together the Alorithmic Art Assembly, at which I gave a talk back in 2018. Here’s the cover (atop the two previous issues) and the spread.
More at theb0ardside.com.
twitter.com/disquiet: UFO, Cage, Soundmark
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.
▰ Morning sounds:
bird singing outside open windowrefrigerator humming
car ignoring stop sign at corner
cabinet closing
distant motor rumbling
drawer opening
elderly person talking (unintelligibly aside from emotional content) to their dog on the street below
▰ UFO in the hallway toward the ceiling
▰ “If John Cage Rode a Horse”
Third in a short series
▰ A subtly differentiated soundmark of the neighborhood, north side of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, is the occasional appearance of what seems like the buzz of an approaching swarm of especially slow-moving bees but is in fact duckling-like Segways transporting tourists.
▰ Two of my favorite words with which to start the day are “gatefold essay.”
▰ Misplaced my earbuds so I played Fugazi really loud from my phone and heard them on a shelf across the room.
▰ Listening to old Monolake records and tidying the week’s notes. Have a great weekend, folks.
☑ Commemorate Juneteenth
☑ Support some local businesses
☑ Catch up on science news
☑ Re-watch a favorite movie with the sound off
☑ Get some rest
See you Monday, or maybe Tuesday.
June 18, 2021
Redwoods Trail (June 2021)
This is an experiment that occurred to me to undertake as I walked through a forest three hours north of San Francisco. I was in the redwoods the week before this one, staying in a small cabin to mark the start of summer, or something close to the start of summer. Clearly marked hiking trails behind and all around the cabin made for easy ventures out. The lines of these trails crisscrossed each other at junctures useful to gauging and adjusting one’s itinerary. It was hard not to photograph things, so striking was every direction and every stage of one’s depth of field, from the densely layered beauty of the widely varying greenery, to the markings of horseshoes in the dusty trail, to sudden glimpses of the broad ocean, to the occasional bird, though these were more heard than seen.
I am not frequently in the wilderness. When I am at my desk, I frequently have running on a second screen footage from one or another YouTube account, generally someone’s point-of-view wandering through a city, and sometimes amid a more rural environment. This is adjacent viewing, something that provides a vantage on another place, something that feeds the imagination.
While I stood there in the forest looking ahead at the trail, it occurred to me to do the same. I just had my phone with me, and an old one at that. I set it to video mode and took one step after another forward. I was not about to endeavor to document the hour-long meanderings that my favorite YouTube accounts feature. I just wanted a sliver of the moment, a few minutes. Each step took me further along. The sounds of my feet became more evident to me, because I was aware they were being recorded. The forest ahead brought details into focus out of what, moments before, was just a thicket. Eventually, after two and a half minutes, I stopped mid-trail, did a sweep of the area, and stopped recording. And eventually I returned home, home to the city.
The whistle-like presence of a bird, the rough noise of the microphone responding to a slight breeze, the crackle of a dry twig — each element came into greater focus when I had returned to my desk and was viewing the moving image on the same screen where I normally have YouTube running. I confirmed my own wandering as akin to the ones I so often appreciate vicariously. And so I uploaded it, and jotted down these notes. I don’t foresee myself making many of these — there is only so much time for so many pursuits — but it was useful to share my walk, to experience the layering of memory and moment, to put myself in the footsteps of those who do, to aim my lens in a similar direction, to hear my own footsteps as I have heard theirs.
Video originally posted to YouTube.
June 17, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0494: Insect Menagerie
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, June 21, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 17, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0494: Insect MenagerieThe Assignment: Record a 20-second clip of the sounds of an insect that you yourself have invented.
This project is the first of three that are being done over the course of as many months in collaboration with the 2021 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 1 through 5 under the motto “schwärme” (“swarm”). For this reason, a German translation is provided below. We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the third year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played and displayed throughout the festival.
There is just one step for this week’s project: Compose the sound of a single imaginary insect. The duration of the recording should be 20 seconds.
Background: There will be public display cases at the festival, and we may set up motion triggers that cause an insect sound to occur when people pass by. We will do so with signage explaining that it documents experimental insect life. The participants whose work is included will be listed by name.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0494” (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 “disquiet0494” (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-0494-insect-menagerie/
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 and #musikfestivalbern 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, June 21, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 17, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track should be 20 seconds.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0494” 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 494th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Insect Menagerie (The Assignment: Record a 20-second clip of the sounds of an insect that you yourself have invented) — at: https://disquiet.com/0494/
Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:
https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern
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-0494-insect-menagerie/
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 dr_relling, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
. . .
Disquiet Junto Projekt 0494: Insect Menagerie
Die Aufgabe: Nimm einen 20-Sekunden-Clip mit den Geräuschen eines selbst erfundenen Insekts auf.
Dieses Projekt ist das erste von drei, die im Laufe von ebenso vielen Monaten in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Musikfestival Bern 2021 durchgeführt werden, welches vom 1. bis 5. September in der Schweiz unter dem Motto “schwärme” stattfinden wird. Wir arbeiten auf Einladung von Tobias Reber, einem frühen Junto-Teilnehmer, der für die pädagogischen Aktivitäten des Festivals verantwortlich ist. Dies ist das dritte Jahr in Folge, in dem die Junto mit dem Musikfestival Bern zusammenarbeitet. Ausgewählte Aufnahmen, die aus diesen drei Disquiet Junto-Projekten entstehen, werden im Rahmen des Festivals gespielt und ausgestellt.
Für dieses erste Projekt gibt es nur einen Schritt: Komponiere den Klang eines einzigen imaginären Insekts. Die Dauer der Aufnahme sollte 20 Sekunden betragen.
Ein paar Hintergrundinformationen dazu: Das Festival wird öffentliche Schaukästen bespielen, und wir werden nach Möglichkeit Bewegungsauslöser aufstellen, die einen Ton auslösen wenn Leute vorbeigehen. Wir werden eine Beschilderung hinzufügen, die erklärt, dass hier experimentelle Insekten dokumentiert werden. Die Teilnehmer, deren Arbeit gezeigt wird, werden namentlich aufgeführt.
Sieben weitere wichtige Schritte wenn deine Komposition fertig ist:
Schritt 1: Verwende „disquiet0494“ (ohne Leerschläge und Anführungszeichen) im Namen deines Tracks.
Schritt 2: Falls deine Audio-Plattform Tags zulässt: stelle sicher dass du den Projekt-Tag „disquiet0450“ (ohne Leerschläge und Anführungszeichen) verwendest. Vor allem auf SoundCloud ist dies hilfreich um anschliessend eine Projekt-Playlist erstellen zu können.
Schritt 3: Lade deinen Track hoch. Es ist hilfreich, aber nicht zwingend, wenn du dazu SoundCloud verwendest.
Schritt 4: Poste deinen Track im folgenden Diskussions-Thread auf llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0494-insect-menagerie/
Schritt 5: Füge deinem Track eine kurze Erklärung zu deiner Herangehensweise bei.
Schritt 6: Falls du den Track auf den sozialen Medien erwähnst, verwende gerne die Hashtags #disquietjunto #musikfestivalbern so dass andere Teilnehmer deinen Hinweis besser finden können.
Schritt 7: Höre und kommentiere die Stücke deiner Junto-Kolleg*innen.
Weitere Details:
Deadline: Die Abgabefrist für dieses Projekt ist der Montag, 21. Juni 2021 um 23.59 Uhr wo immer du bist. Das Projekt wurde am Donnerstag, 17. Juni 2021 gepostet.
Dauer: Die Dauer des Stückes ist dir überlassen.
Titel/Tag: Wenn du das Stück postest, verwende bitte „disquiet0494“ im Titel des Tracks und, wo möglich (beispielsweise auf SoundCloud) als Tag.
Upload: Wenn du bei diesem Projekt mitmachst, dann füge deinem Post eine Beschreibung deiner Vorgehensweise bei – Planung, Komposition und Aufnahme. Diese Beschreibung ist ein zentrales Element im Kommunikationsprozess der Disquiet Junto. Fotos, Video und eine Auflistung der verwendeten Instrumente und Werkzeuge sind immer willkommen.
Download: Ermögliche gerne das Herunterladen deiner Komposition und erlaube attribuiertes Remixing (z.B. eine Creative Commons-Lizenz welche nicht-kommerzielles Teilen mit Attribution erlaubt und Remixes zulässt).
Wenn du den Track online postest, füge ihm als Kontext die folgende Information bei:
Mehr über dieses 494. wöchentliche Disquiet Junto-Projekt (Texture Analysis – Die Aufgabe: Komponiere ein Musikstück mit Klängen aus der Arbeit mit Steinen) unter:
Dies ist das dritte von drei Projekten in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Musikfestival Bern 2021, welches vom 1.-5. September stattfindet. Weitere Informationen unter:
https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern
Mehr zur Disquiet Junto unter:https://disquiet.com/junto/
Abonniere die wöchentlichen Projekt-Ankündigungen hier:http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Die Diskussion des Projekts findet statt auf llllllll.co unter:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0494-insect-menagerie/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
