Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 196

Physical Algorithm

The pandemic-period grocery deliveries are labeled with single words to ease the sorting of multiple-bag orders. Sometimes these words seem a little too close for comfort, the Algorithm surfacing in the physical world.

Guitar + Synth

One of the great things about the slipstream patchwork that is modern music listening — not Spotify, or full albums on Bandcamp, but the individual work-in-progress tracks that make up, particularly, so much of YouTube, SoundCloud, and, to a degree, Vimeo — is you can witness in something approximating realtime the changes that occur to favorite musicians’ approaches. For example, Orbital Patterns (aka Michigan-based Abdul Allums) has added electric guitar to the mix, resulting in a radical evolution of timbres and textures. The guitar is heard here running through the synthesizer he’s slowly accumulated and adjusted as the months and videos have passed. Three different guitar samples are processed by three very different modules, resulting in a dreamy track that varies its hush with a sense of slow-motion abandon.

Video originally posted at YouTube.

Volca + Brazil = Loki

Apparently if you live at the aesthetic intersection of Korg Volca music equipment and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (as I do), then the upcoming Loki TV series is for you. And, given the story line, there seems to be a bit of Time Bandits in the mix, for added Gilliam-ish goodness. And, how long until someone sorts out Volca firmware that supports video synthesis or some other visual output to make this image possible?

Soundbites: Halo Sound Design, Emotion Detection, Noisy Jobs

These are the sort of items I’d usually put in the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet), but I’ve been super busy, too busy for a new issue, and so at a friend’s suggestion I am initially noting some here.

▰ The team behind the audio for the Halo video games share process in an advance peek at Halo Infinite, due out later this year. It’s packed with interesting details, such as how the relative proximity of gunfire wasn’t a sufficient filter in earlier games, leading to innovation this time around: “The new Halo Infinite audio system detects all gun sounds frame by frame, and prioritizes them in a threat order to decide output sound volume for each gun.” To a degree this is a matter of noise and confusion reduction, and of audio as an informative aspect of user interface. It also maps to hearing’s role in self-preservation. Likewise, ambient noises are adjusted in-game to make them more lifelike: “A variety of factors feed into this system, combining gameplay states, time of day, location tracking, timers, and more, all working together to bring the environment to life. This gives us the ability to create a dynamic mix of ambient sounds that remains compelling and immersive the entire time you’re playing.”
https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/inside-infinite-march-2021

And you have to check out video of the destruction of an old piano done as part of the sound design effort:

▰ Molly Moser reports on how high-sped frame-by-frame records of hummingbirds flying helped sort out how they emit their trademark hum. The tiny birds yielded terabytes of data: “Higher harmonic content throughout the wing stroke, they explain in the paper, results in a ‘buzz,’ while equivalent first and second harmonic content makes hummingbirds ‘hum,’ and dominant first harmonic content results in the softer ‘whoosh’ of larger birds.”
https://www.osa-opn.org/home/newsroom/2021/

▰ The digital civil rights group Access Now expresses concern that Spotify’s reported “mood-recognition features” could lead to “misgendering” and “discrimination,” reports Lilia Dergacheva. This is based on a patent “to detect emotion, age and gender using speech recognition algorithms.”
https://sputniknews.com/science/202104021082522962-spotify-reportedly-asked-to-ditch-bid-to-predict-mood-gender-over-discrimination-privacy-concerns/

▰ People who require computers to speak for them deserve their own individualized voices that reflect “who they really are” — that’s the subject of a podcast episode from the Index Project featuring Rupal Patel, found of VocaliD.https://theindexproject.org/stories/podcast-restoring-lost-voices

▰ Grant Suneson of MSN Money’s 24/7 Wall Street lists the 25 jobs most likely to damage your hearing. Musicians rank at the bottom of the list. Higher up are surgeons, shoe and leather workers, gaming (aka gambling) service workers, and, at the top of the list, emergency medical technicians and paramedics.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/these-24-jobs-could-ruin-your-hearing/ss-BB1feUL4

Current Favorites: Guitar Samples, Instrumental Hip-Hop, Surround Keyboards

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ There’s one track up thus far from the self-titled Sweepsculp, the remainder due out on the Nous’klaer Audio label May 7 (I’ve seen it listed as late April elsewhere; May 7 is the date on the Bandcamp page). Sweepsculp is a pseudonym for Dutch musician Thessa Torsing, best known as Upsammy. Apparently the EP is “using only an acoustic guitar besides drums.” The first track, “Plaudable,” is laudable for its tight groove, its punchy, low-key beats, and its playful exploration of slight variations amid minimalist repetition.

Sweepsculp by Sweepsculp

▰ On Bandcamp Day, Los Angeles producer Jansport J uploaded the instrumental tracks to rapper Quadry’s mid-2020 album Don’t You Weep. It’s seven soulful cuts, the tidy beats rich with backing vocals, old-school electric keyboard, dubby percussive effects, and occasional double-speed samples.

DON'T YOU WEEP (Instrumentals.) by Quadry, Jansport J

▰ Vancouver, B.C.-based musician Scott Morgan, aka Loscil, has a new record, Clara, due out on May 28. The production process is fascinating: “[It was] sourced from a single three-minute composition performed by a 22-piece string orchestra in Budapest. The subsequent recording was lathe-cut on to a 7-inch, then ‘scratched and abused to add texture and color,’ from which the entirety of Clara was sampled, shape-shifted, and sculpted.” The first track is all glimmering grainy heavens above a scratchy rhythm.

Clara by loscil

▰ If you dig Nils Frahms’ live setup, an indie-studio reimgaining of Rick Wakeman’s surround-keyboard mode, then this video of Hania Rani may appeal, especially when, at 7:15, she puts a stone on her Prophet sythesizer to hold a note.

▰ The dental drill wind tunnel noise of “Exhalation” and the lost, dubbed-out spaciousness of “Lost Race” were our first two tastes of the 13 tracks that will comprise End of Trilogy, before it was released this past Friday. Now out on the excellent Room40 label, it collects pummeling sounds from Yuko Araki. She’s a force to be reckoned with.

End Of Trilogy by Yuko Araki

twitter.com/disquiet: Avril Fools, Redesign, Alias

I do this manually each week, collating tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet (which I think of as my public notebook) that I want to keep track of. For the most part, this means ones I initiated, not ones in which I directly responded to someone. I sometimes tweak them a bit here. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form) on Disquiet.com sooner than I get around to collating them, so I leave them out of the weekly round-up. It’s usually personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. They’re here pretty much in chronological order. Looking back at the tweets makes the previous week seem both longer and shorter than it was. The cadence is a way to map how time progressed. The subjects are another map of the same territory.

▰ Pretty much the only good thing about April Fools’ Day is it means we’re 13 days from “Avril 14th” Day.

▰ 2020: Hell is a message board debate

2021: Hell is a Discord debate about a Slack channel debate about a message board debate

▰ Guitar pedal manufacturers need to send more of their demo pedals to people who don’t actually play guitar. Case in point, Emily Hopkins. (For the record, I am taking guitar lessons, so in no way am I suggesting myself as a recipient.)

▰ It shouldn’t go without saying how different each platform is. A valuable exercise, even a creative pursuit: post one slightly involved item to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and as a blog post and a podcast bit. Different formats, requiring platform-specific approaches. I regularly use Twitter as a public notebook. My disquiet.com posts and podcast essays and longer pieces often first take root here. Not only here. Much of it is the result of a good walk, but here, too.

▰ It’s fine, though disappointing, if there’s no Alias reunion for the show’s 20th anniversary, but could we at least get a remix EP of Michael Giacchino’s main title music? (Or maybe it was JJ Abrams who composed the theme, as a friend reminded me. In any case, yes, a remix collection, please.)

▰ Oh, cool. There is going to be a second season of Gentefied.

▰ “Waiting for cache”

▰ Redesign of Disquiet.com underway with help from some friends. Cleaner read, less cluttered, better organization.

▰ Watching a friend’s new picture book for kids (and adults with excellent taste) take shape, and wondering if people who make colored pencils sometimes look at a book and recognize their tools in the mix the way someone who makes a synthesizer module might hear it in a track.

▰ Finally watched Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering With You last night, and (1) I liked it a lot a lot a lot, and (2) this morning I learned that the two main characters from Your Name have cameos in it, and (3) I haven’t committed Makoto Shinkai’s name to memory so I cut and pasted it.

▰ Progression:

:)
LOL
ALOL
AALOL
AAALOL
AAAALOL
AAAAALOL

A = “actually”

▰ Honk if you’ve been listening to a lot of Karen Dalton since this week’s episode of Mayans M.C.

▰ My main pandemic food observation is cayenne is good on everything, especially vanilla ice cream, especially if you toss in some roasted peanuts. That is my final statement of this week. Have a wonderful weekend, or best you can. Complicated times, so don’t set the bar too high.

Disquietude Podcast Process

I’m really digging doing this podcast, Disquietude. A few monthly episodes in, the structure feels good: intro, then half an hour or so of music uninterrupted (multiple artists, all with their approval), then track-by-track commentary, including audio interview elements, plus an essay. I want to play with the format more as I proceed. Main thing I was reminded of this time around was to do the work over time, not try to do it all in one day. Keeps it simpler, and leaves room to fine-tune. Also: record my voice at night, when the world is quieter and I’m calmer. I really enjoy the transitional audio elements, 12 seconds each, during the track commentary, reminding the listener about the individual tracks as they’re described. Main thing I want to do next is make the audio essay at the end more audio-ish, using sound as part of the story, not overkill, but as light additions.

Soundbites: Audio Branding Audio, Ikea Podcast, De-gendered Siri

These are the sort of items I’d usually put in the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet), but I’ve been super busy, too busy for a new issue, and so at a friend’s suggestion I am initially noting some here.

▰ The serial-fiction audio/text hybrid company Serial Box has changed names. It’s never a particularly good idea to make such an announcement on April 1, as Realm (né Serial Box) elected to do, but there was nothing inherently funny in the company’s blog post, so no reason to doubt it. The name change arrives with other changes, like the availability of some Realm shows as podcasts. Next up: “some fancy brand sounds,” de rigueur for many companies these days, and virtually essential for a company whose product line is largely sonic itself. The key thing isn’t the name. The key thing is how complicated it is to characterize Realm, because it was never just audiobooks, or just a publisher of original fiction, and now it’s that plus podcasts. It’s all those things, wrapped in a new subscription service, with a la carte fees retained for some titles. A new name for the company is a step forward. But what Realm may really need is a name for what it is. (And if you’ve read this far, I recommend the series Ninth Step Station.)
https://www.realm.fm/blog/serial-box-is-now-realm

▰ Also not an April Fools joke (and announced in March, anyhow) is that Ikea has rendered its catalog as a podcast, having previously done so, two years ago, in Swedish for the hometown audience. In a piece for Quartz, Anne Quito connects the move to phenomena like lockdown acculturation to podcasts and a rise in “the voice shopping feature on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.” (Via Rob Walker)
https://qz.com/1982468/ikea-replaced-its-print-catalog-with-an-audiobook/

▰ It’s said that you can judge a culture by how it treats its most vulnerable. So, too, its AI. To wit, Apple’s Siri now has more voices than ever, but more newsworthy is the removal of a female voice as the default. No less than the U.N. has called out Siri and Alexa for what could be called, quite literally, codified sexism. The default of the subservient role in many countries to a female voice was one among a larger set of symptoms. From an earlier New York Times piece by Megan Specia on the topic: “The [U.N.] report borrows its title — ‘I’d Blush if I Could’ — from a standard response from Siri, the Apple voice assistant, when a user hurled a gendered expletive at it. When a user tells Alexa, ‘You’re hot,’ her typical response has been a cheery, ‘That’s nice of you to say!'”
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/31/apple-adds-two-siri-voices/

▰ “In 1878, Thomas Edison recorded — on a piece of tinfoil — 78 seconds that may be the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the earliest known recording of a musical performance.” That’s from a Library of Congress announcement of new audio added to the National Recording Registry. (Via Lowell Goss)
https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-21-015/

Early-Morning Rumble

A soundmark of this neighborhood is a steady, stationary, early-morning rumble of what I take to be a motorcycle somewhere far enough away to be difficult to triangulate, and sometimes initially mistaken for anything from construction work to rattly fridge to passing seaplane. This morning, “early” meant right after 7am.

I love this helpful guide: “Top 6 Strange Motorcycle Noises and What They May Mean.” The author breaks such sounds into six types:

Tick, tick tick
Bump & grind
Creepy krink
Boo hiss
Ring, ding, ping boom
Snap, crackle, pop

And no, I don’t ride a motorcycle, myself. Vehicle noises were simply, in deep retrospect, an early entry point for me into sound as a subject, and into onomatopoeia as a means of exploration (beginning, for me, with my mom striving to communicate with a mechanic).

Here’s a related panel on the topic from a comic (“Mentors”) I did with Hannes Pasqualini a year ago this month. If you click through to the final of its four panels, the intent is to show these were examples from my childhood.

RIP, Gregory Kondos (1923-2021)

RIP, painter Gregory Kondos, known for his blue-skies depiction of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. (I heard the news via Scott Gilbert, a friend and artist.) I had the pleasure of interviewing Kondos at his Sacramento home shortly before he turned 90. He has died at 97.

I’d spoken with Kondos previously, while researching a story on his old friend, painter Mel Ramos, and I then mentioned to my excellent editor at the magazine Sactown that I wanted, when appropriate, to interview Kondos again, because he had been so outspoken. It was, as expected, a blast.

I love this childhood memory Kondos shared about his early years in Northern California, after moving at age 3 from Massachusetts, where he was born to Greek immigrants who, as he told me, didn’t speak a lick of English: “I fished all the time. But my dad had to catch a fish, I didn’t. If I caught a fish, fine. But if I didn’t, fine, didn’t matter. I just sat there and looked at the river and the trees.”

The full piece is at sactownmag.com.