Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 226
August 3, 2020
At a Planetary Scale
The acoustic guitar is so prominent, so closely mic’d, so emotionally present, that the sounds circumnavigating Nathan McLaughlin’s playing may only become fully apparent to the listener when the guitar pulls back. They’ve been there all along, small atmospheric bits, like echoes, like shadows, like lens flares. But perhaps they’re something more, like glitches in the fabric of reality, because when the guitar does go away, the backdrop becomes the foreground, and the sheer beauty of what’s been running below the radar becomes fully evident, a rich, subtle, plaintive airing of tonal spaciousness. It’s a revelation.
Such is the first track on Saturn, McLaughlin’s remarkable new two-part EP of music played based on “planetary scales” (he cites Joscelyn Godwin’s Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Mysticism in Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde in the liner note; the planetary scales are from work by Rudolf Steiner). Like the live performance of his I mentioned at the start of the U.S. response to the pandemic (“Minimalism and Its Echoes”), the music here sounds improvisatory, largely due to how it drifts from song form into something rangier and more free-flowing. But there’s no doubt, upon repeat listens, that this is deeply considered work, music in which the arrangement (notably the muted appearance, on the EP’s second track, of violin performed by Oliver McLaughlin) is paramount. Everything is in a keen balance with everything else. To listen to Saturn is to witness balance in action.
Album posted at planetarymusic.bandcamp.com. More from McLaughlin at nathanmclaughlin.zone.
August 2, 2020
Current Listens: Ugandan Synths, Eno/Anderson Chat
This is my 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. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)
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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ A standout track on Nika Son’s new album, To Eeyore, is “Fake News,” built from slowly diverging and coalescing wave forms, to which she then adds disturbingly emotionless vocals, processed to create a sonic uncanny valley. In an interview at kaput-mag.com, Son, also known as Nika Breithaupt, explained a bit about the piece: “I don’t normally work much with my own voice, but for this piece I used it deliberately. As with the computer voices I am interested in experimenting with real languages, with words that by manipulation become a fantasy language, an uncontrolled instrument.” There’s also a video for the track, directed by Helena Wittmann. The album is on one of my favorite labels, Entr’acte.
▰ Afrorack, aka Brian Bamanya, is a Uganda-based electronic musician who works primarily with DIY instruments. This live, 20-minute set ably traverses the common ground between noise and techno. It’s of a concert from the tail end of January 2020.
(Peter Kirn re-upped this recently at cdm.link.)
▰ This is a Zoom call we all wish we’d been on. In an online conversation, Simon McBurney hosts Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, and Nitin Sawhney on the broad topic of “ways of listening,” talking about sound and art during the pandemic. Anderson describes bird-watching as a social distancing sport, and Brian Eno extols a favorite smartphone app (Radio Garden, to which Sawhney immediately agrees with a big thumbs up). There’s even screen sharing, when Sawhney (experiencing some now universally familiar complications, including the stream eventually freezing) displays a work in progress. McBurney describes, following his experience staging The Magic Flute, his belief that Mozart felt that music can change people’s state of consciousness. And those are just a few of the subjects. It’s a wide-ranging and highly enjoyable conversation. (Hat tip to synthtopia.com.)
August 1, 2020
This Week in Sound: Wonky Skulls
These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the July 27, 2020, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet).
As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.
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THIS WEEK IN SOUND
▰ The big sound-studies story this week has been the fake (or “fake”) crowd noise at professional sports events being broadcast during Covid. How long these events will go on is unclear, what with Major League Baseball having postponed two games scheduled for this evening. Igor Bonifacic reports that the NBA will be using Teams, the Microsoft answer to Slack: “The displays will allow players to see and hear the people who are watching them via Teams.” How long that’ll last before people start making noise and doing things at home they wouldn’t do in person is also unclear. Joe Reedy notes: “Stadium sound engineers will have access to around 75 different effects and reactions.” These sounds originated in the video game series MLB The Show. (And since most of what I know about baseball originates either as scandal in the news pages or as fiction, this scenario has sent me back to reread Jonathan Lethem’s short story “Vanilla Dunk.”) “You’re still focused on the game but that noise is very helpful. I could tell the first few scrimmages with pure silence was tough for some guys,” Reedy quotes Eric Sogard of the Milwaukee Brewers.
https://www.engadget.com/nba-microsoft-teams-192426876.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/ballparks-crowd-noise-video-game-season-71833283
▰ Before getting to all those stories about how quiet the world is getting, first note that noise complaints in New York City are up nearly 300 percent. Shaye Weaver attributes the uptick to “more people crammed together at the same time,” as well as to protests and the fireworks running up to the Fourth of July.
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/noise-complaints-in-nyc-have-increased-almost-300-percent-since-february-072720
▰ “We can safely say that in modern seismology, we’ve never seen such a long period of human quiet,” according to seismologist Raphael De Plaen. Tanya Basu writes on how Covid has quieted the planet: “Everyday urban activities like commutes, or stadiums full of fans simultaneously going wild in ‘football quakes,’ are strong enough to register on seismometers.” (Thanks, Rob Walker!)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/23/1005574/lockdown-was-the-longest-period-of-quiet-in-human-history/
▰ Michael Le Page reports on “optical cochlear implants that use light to stimulate the nerve cells.” Note that the nerve cells must be genetically modified for this to take effect.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2249633-hearing-restored-in-rats-by-modifying-ear-cells-to-respond-to-light/
▰ “The two major tools to promote deaf accessibility in video games are (1) subtitles/captions and (2) visual cues.” Morgan Baker provides a detailed primer.
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MorganBaker/20200720/366615/Deaf_Accessibility_in_Video_Games.php
▰ “In most toothed whales, the internal organs in the skull are squashed into the left side to make way for soft tissues which help them to echolocate”: Katie Pavid explores the science of why whales look that way. Apparently such skulls are called “wonky.” The article uses variations on the word “wonky” eight times. (Via Cheryl Tipp)
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2020/july/echolocation-gives-whales-lopsided-heads.html
▰ “A team from the Systems Engineering Department at the University of Lagos in Akoka, Lagos, Nigeria, have discovered that people can identify other people by the matchless nature of their laughter because, unlike voice and manner of speech, laughter almost cannot be mimicked,” writes Anton Shilov. In other words, your next password may be your laugh, no kidding.
https://www.techradar.com/news/your-next-banking-password-could-be-based-on-laughter
▰ “Half a century later and visual and voice deepfake technology can give a glimpse at an alternate reality where the landing failed”: The landing is the U.S. arrival on the moon. The deepfake is of Richard Nixon announcing the death of the astronauts. There are 98 days until the next U.S. presidential election, and the concept of audio deepfakes isn’t quite keeping me up at night, but it sure is heavy on my mind. Read Eric Hal Schwartz on the topic. And if your middle name is Hal, it’s sort of inevitable you end up on the artificial intelligence beat, right? (This isn’t the first time I’ve quoted Schwartz in the newsletter, but I think it’s the first time I’ve made that joke.)
https://voicebot.ai/2020/07/20/rewriting-the-moon-landing-with-a-deepfake-built-on-synthetic-speech/
▰ “Hackers use machine learning to clone someone’s voice and then combine that voice clone with social engineering techniques to convince people to move money where it shouldn’t be,” writes James Vincent of the “audio deepfake scam.”
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/27/21339898/deepfake-audio-voice-clone-scam-attempt-nisos
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GRACE NOTES
▰ The trailer for the upcoming TV series Biohackers features an amazing urban doorbell and a homebrew “biopiano” using plants. I’m in. (And a silent rave, too, which Beth Elderkin of io9 pointed out.) The Netflix algorithms have my number.
▰ The narration of this audiobook I’ve been listening to while going for walks is so stilted, I bet if I found a printed copy I could confirm pauses align with pages being turned. Also, though it’s from the library’s online service, it includes spoken instruction to change CDs.
▰ I don’t miss concerts half as much as I miss running into people at concerts.
▰ The unique internet pleasure of observing a musician you admire purchase a used piece of music equipment in which you are interested, and then awaiting a release that features the result.
▰ My next sequencer is MIDI data of people nodding in agreement on Zoom conferences posted to YouTube where folks are in sync, so to speak, with what the speaker is saying.
▰ Ableton Quantum Entanglement Link
July 31, 2020
The Music Beneath Music for Airports
Be prepared to turn the volume up loud, very loud, because the sound is quiet, very quiet. The sound is surface noise from a vinyl record, and nothing else beyond that. Specifically, it is the surface noise — in the recording artist’s words, the “isolated crackle and surface noise” — of one of the classics in ambient music: the first track, “1/1,” off Brian Eno’s 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (“the original vinyl release,” we’re told).
What this is is the ambient beneath the ambient, the hidden sonic curriculum of a modern classic, all almost 17 minutes of it. It’s a piece titled “Vestigial Ambient 1” by the musician Ben Ponton. Listening to the sounds of the album provides not even a just-hovering-above-subaural hint of the source. There are simply clicks, tiny little pops, bits of aural dust, the sonic signature of vinyl, as the needle makes its circular course.
Filling the near void are thoughts about ambient music, its origins in the mid-1970s, and what “silence” meant then, both literally and metaphorically, versus what it does now, more than four full decades hence. I’ve long been of the mind that the arrival of the CD contributed greatly to the rise of ambient music, because the technology provided ready access to a silence that other formats, such as tape and vinyl, couldn’t dependably provide. Eno noted this himself, from a different angle, opting to put Thursday Afternoon out only on CD, so as not to interrupt its 61-minute runtime.
There is ambient music today that is sonically of a piece with the detritus that Ponton has unearthed. Music by Steve Roden and Alva Noto, among others, has aspired to this atmospsheric, pointillist mix of rhythmic precision and ambiguity, generally under the label of “microsound” or “lowercase” music. It’s helpful to remember, however, that when ambient was young, these sounds Ponton has shared were the backdrop. Ambient music eventually brought these sounds to the foreground, as subsequent generations of music explored the artistic potential, but first these sounds had to be relegated to the background.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ben_ponton. Track found via a repost by Jimmy Kpple.
July 30, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0448: Seamless Bridge
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 Monday, August 3, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 30, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0448: Seamless Bridge
The Assignment: Create a 20-second piece of music to connect two preexisting 20-second pieces of music.
Major thanks to 20×20’s Neil Stringfellow for proposing this project.
Since January 20, 2020, the 20×20 project has released an album every 20 days. They have just released the 10th album, and so are thus halfway through the series, which will run until February 2021. Each album released contains 20 tracks, and each track is 20 seconds long. To celebrate the halfway point, we’ll be producing the musical equivalent of halfway points: tracks that connect two pre-existing tracks.
Step 1: Select any two tracks from the 20×20 Bandcamp page, either by ear or at random. Each track should be by a different artist in the 20×20 series. One track selected will open the piece and one will close the piece. This is where to find the tracks. They’re downloadable for free.
https://20x20project.bandcamp.com/
Step 2: Consider which of the two tracks you’ve selected in Step 1 should be used at the start (the opening 20 seconds) and which at the end (the final 20 seconds).
Step 3: Create a piece of music that is 60 seconds long. It should have one track at the start (the first 20 seconds) and one at the end (the last 20 seconds).
Create a third original piece of music for the middle section of 20 seconds that acts as a seamless bridge between the two pieces.
Note: The bridge you create between the two pieces you’re using will need to cover at least the middle 20 seconds. However, you can introduce the sounds and elements from your middle piece before the first 20 seconds ends and continue these a bit into the last 20 seconds of the track.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0448” (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 “disquiet0448” (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-0448-seamless-bridge/
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 Monday, August 3, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 30, 2020.
Length: The finished piece should be 60 seconds long.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0448” 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 448th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Seamless Bridge (The Assignment: Create a 20-second piece of music to connect two preexisting 20-second pieces of music), at:
Major thanks to 20×20’s Neil Stringfellow for proposing this project. More on 20×20 at:
https://20x20project.bandcamp.com/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0448-seamless-bridge/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
The image background for this project is the logo design for the 20×20 series. The logo is by David Barrington.
July 29, 2020
An Elegy for the Foghorn
Jennifer Lucy Allan recently completed a PhD focused on the social and cultural history of the foghorn. A new BBC Radio 4 piece this week gives us glimpses into both what she’s learned along the way, and how she learned it. “Life, Death and the Foghorn” take us through the real life consequences of fog, as well as the poetry the horns inspire, how a generation raised in the horns’ growing absence copes with their faded glory, and how a composer can employ them as an instrument.
A lot is packed into the half hour, and we’re left with the clear impression there is far more in store. I’m hopeful Allan’s dissertation will make it to book form. One highlight of the BBC broadcast is hearing her converse with a former seaman who can’t quite comprehend the nostalgia and affection that we landlubbers associate with the foghorns. To him, they are an indelible reminder of the majority of his nearest career-ending (and, one imagines, life-threatening) experiences at sea.
Listen at bbc.co.uk. The piece was uploaded yesterday, Tuesday, June 28. It’s unclear for how long it will be available in streaming form. If the foghorns have taught us anything, it’s that nothing lasts forever. More from Allan at jenniferlucyallan.co.uk.
July 28, 2020
Tennis for the Blind
The always inventive Håkan Lidbo has conjured up a proposed tennis “game concept” for the blind and vision-impaired. The game, called Invisiball (note the double l), is played in a highly prepared physical space, one in which sounds simulate the presence of a physical ball. That is, the sounds don’t help locate a ball in physical space. The sounds are the ball, simulating travel within three-dimensional space.
Lidbo explains in detail:
InvisiBall is a game concept for two persons. It’s a game played in a dark room, on a court with loudspeakers in the 4 corners, blindfolded or by blind people. The ball is represented by a tone, mimicking earthly gravity. If the racket, that plays a tone depending on it’s position in height, hit the ball at the right pitch, depth and left/right-orientation, it will fly back to the other player. The referee is a musical robot voice that also keep track of the score – and the whole game is built around music that change with the score between the players. With some training the players can serve, return, smash or lob the “ball” – and even bounce it on the ground. As the ball is invisible the game has a 3d visual interface for the audience. The game serves a training tool for those who have to adapt to a life without eye sight, due to illness or accident – and for us who can see, better understanding the challenges and possibilities of training our hearing sense.
Sound and sports are on people’s minds right now due to the attempts by various professional leagues, including Major League Baseball, to provide some verisimilutude of live, in-person events when the pandemic has required severe restrictions. Baseball is going cross-platform by employing sounds from an official, long-running video game series, MLB The Show. (The game’s title is interesting in this context, suggesting an awareness that baseball is, in fact, a show, long before it was, aside from some cardboard cut-out audience members, only a show.) A player on the Milwaukee Brewers has commented that “pure silence was tough for some guys” before sounds were added.
In Lidbo’s Invisiball, however, sound isn’t merely a backdrop that serves a utility purpose. Sound is the game, the framing conceit, the underlying structure, and the focus of the players’ attention. Lidbo collaborated with Magnus Frenning and Jonatan Liljedahl, who developed and programmed Invisiball, and by “young blind swedes.” It was supported by the PTS Innovation Prize (which aims “to promote digital inclusion”).
Video published to Lidbo’s YouTube channel. More from him and about Invisiball at hakanlidbo.com. Last month I wrote about his “hat for social distancing.”
July 27, 2020
The Wall Behind My Synthesizer
There’s heaps more old paperbacks on other shelves: Le Guin, Heinlein, Egan, Bear, Butler, Disch, (Spider) Robinson, Vonnegut.
July 26, 2020
Current Listens: Total Hassell, Davachi’s Organs
This is my 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. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)
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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ Much of my week’s listening involved playing the new Jon Hassell on repeat, enjoying the pre-release privacy a bit before meaning accrues around it after the set reaches a broader audience. Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) was released on Friday to an audience awaiting its portal-like function, how it opens a window into the Fourth World, and it is everything they might hope for, filled with glitchy atmospherics, futurist fusion, and field recordings from alternate realms.
Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) by Jon Hassell
▰ The minimalist setup of Russian musician Pavel Milyakov derives transcendent techno from live manipulation of held guitar drones. It’s part of the excellent Patch Notes video series from Fact magazine, and this time it in fact does include patch notes, if you want details of what Milyakov is up to.
▰ Sarah Davachi’s next album, Cantus, Descant, isn’t due out unil mid-September, but the first track, with an accompanying video, is already online. The album appears to be a collection of music for organs, and was recorded on a variety of them in Amsterdam, Chicago, Vancouver, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles. The initial track, “Station II,” is a series of slowly evolving chords that overlap, layer, and transition with an eerie grace.
▰ As the name suggests, the exp[MTL] EP from Vigi Beats is experimental: brief sketches of how beat music could be. All but one is under two minutes in length. The five tracks, labeled A through E, pursue alternately frantic and loungy beatcraft, breaking pre-existing recordings in the service of forging artfully erratic new ones.
July 25, 2020
This Week in Sound: Windows on the World
These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the July 20, 2020, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet).
As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.
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THIS WEEK IN SOUND
▰ “Sonic aesthetic moralism has been taken up by NIMBYs opposing affordable development, suburbanites in defense of their decision to live far from the city core, urban planners rallying around pedestrian-friendly street design, public-health officials citing the physiological effects of noise, and environmentalists advocating for sustainable building practices”: Kate Wagner takes admirable issue with the perceived concepts of “good” and “bad” noise. (Thanks, George Kelly!)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/the-struggle-for-the-urban-soundscape/614044/
▰ “The absence of noises, replaced in parks by the sounds of leaves crunching under shoes or birds creating their own symphonies, is what draws so many of us to them,” says a director of the National Parks Conservation Association, in an article by Jenny Morber, referring to natural silences “values” that are “under threat.”
https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-is-noisy-these-groups-want-to-restore-the-quiet/
▰ “Sound studies experts say that while LRADs and flash-bangs are worrisome tactical escalations that can permanently injure people by rupturing eardrums, they are rooted in the long, uncontested tradition of the state utilizing sound as a means of social, cultural and political control”: Luke Ottenhof on the use of sonic weapons by law enforcement.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/us-police-sound-weapon-protests
▰ “The game in Anaheim might well have had the loudest pregame boos in modern baseball history”: Sam Miller on what sports fan will miss beyond sports itself. (Via Dave Pell’s Next Draft)
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29417320/what-mlb-fans-lose-boo-houston-astros-opening-day
▰ “When chickadees see a pygmy owl, they increase the number of “dee” notes and call “chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee.” Here, the number of sounds serves as an active anti-predation strategy.” Nice details in this piece by Andreas Nieder on the power of numbers among animals. (Thanks, Fari Bradley!)
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/animal-kingdom-power-of-the-number-instinct/
▰ “State Supreme Court Chief Justice Donald Beatty late Friday afternoon ordered state judges and magistrates to stop issuing ‘no-knock’ search warrants to police.” You must knock, or ring, before entering.
https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article244152347.html
▰ Geoff Manaugh picked up that story about noise-cancelling windows, and ran with it, exhibiting characteristic extrapolative aplomb: “combine luxury frequency-reduction techniques with seismic wave-mitigation and perhaps you’ve just designed the future of architecture in global earthquake zones.” (Thanks, Thorsten Sideb0ard!)
http://www.bldgblog.com/2020/07/structural-audio/
▰ “A recent Stanford University study found the speech-to-text services used by Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and Apple for batch transcriptions misidentified the words of Black speakers at nearly double the rate of white speakers”: Jeff Link on racial bias in voice recognition. (I don’t know much about this website, which has a modest Facebook and Twitter following, but the piece is well-researched.)
https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/racial-bias-speech-recognition-systems
