Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 247

Yaz Lancaster’s “Intangible Landscapes”

This rapturous quartet, “Intangible Landscapes” by composer Yaz Lancaster, moves from stately restraint to operatic dramatics over the course of its meticulously plotted 12-plus minutes. At the composition’s opening, it might appear to be a latter-day Morton Feldman piece, a slow piano pulse (courtesy of Jixue Yang) under-girding crosshatched woodwinds (flute, Joshua A. Weinberg; bass clarinet, Tyler Neidermeyer) and Lancaster’s own violin.

But as it goes, it grows. The clarinet and piano gather steam, and collude to emphasize the emboldened pacing. The ensemble itself seems to double in size as the volume increases and the parts cease leaving generous space for each other. Particularly potent is the feedback-like noise emanating from one of the woodwinds around the 10-minute mark.

The three musicians joining composer Lancaster go by the name Apply Triangle, according to whose Facebook page “is an electroacoustic trio consisting of flutes, clarinets, piano, and electronics, performing works for any combination of these instruments that utilize pre-recorded sound, live processing, or electronic instruments.”

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/yazjanelle. More from Lancaseter, who is based in Brooklyn, New York, at yaz-lancaster.com. More from Apply Triangle at instagram.com/applytriangle.

Teaching “Sounds of Brands” (2020), Week 6 of 15

This post will be out of order when I catch up with recent weeks, but it’s timely, and I don’t want to delay. Countless educators around the planet are quickly needing to come up to speed with how to translate an in-person class to an online class. My case is fairly straightforward, as it’s lecture/discussion-based. I did find my “virtual chalkboard” to be very useful, and I hope that others do, too.

Remains of the day: The university where I teach in San Francisco moved classes online as of today, resulting from COVID-19 precautions. The students and I met at noon for Sounds of Brands, week 6 of 15, via video conference. I thought there would, as a result, be no chalkboard to share afterward. But then I realized, shortly before our first online session, that I might employ a shared Google doc as a virtual chalkboard. I found it worked quite well. For one thing, it gave students something to look at other than my (along with each other’s) face. For another, it kept things focused, allowing me to collate their input in real time. I think without this virtual chalkboard I would have ended up with less discussion, because their unrecorded responses would have felt fleeting. The approach worked great.

This week’s class was part of the second of the course’s three arcs. The first is Learning to Listen. The second is the arc from which the course takes its name: Sounds of Brands. Today we discussed the role of sound in product design. This isn’t a complete summary of the day’s session. I just want to unpack a bit, as a series of line items, what’s on the virtual board:

“Accessibility” is the department at the school where students can reach out if they need support, which I imagine might be the case right now.

The “$72.80” is from a story I told the students. I wanted to share, at the start of class, a disruption I had myself experienced during college. I mentioned how my first semester at school, much of the non-teaching staff went on strike. That $72.80 is what our tuition included for food. We got that amount back weekly to feed ourselves. I talked about the negatives (for example, having elected to spend most of the money on used records, I ended up quite ill by Thanksgiving), but also about how this bonded our class through the mutual support we provided each other.

The list on the left (“Sounds in Product Design”) is examples students shared. I talked through a variety of topics, including how Harley-Davidson once tried (and failed) to trademark its engine (the big on “reverse engineer” arose from this, as well), and how Brian Eno made a Windows start-up sound on a Mac. None of the students (this is toward a bachelor’s degree) had heard of Brian Eno, so there are some notes in there about who he is.

I then shared a bunch of R. Murray Schafer’s thoughts and writing on sound: first, a 1972 Canadian government document in which he defined “soundscape” (derived from “landscape”) and then language from Tuning of the World on the “soundmark” (from “landmark”). The “Soundmarks (of SF)” list is of sounds the students said they associated with San Francisco as among the city’s soundmarks. One neat aspect of this virtual chalkboard is that I could fix spelling and reorder material.

After the students listed their soundmarks, I then reordered the entries in what I thought of as ranging from sonically unique to the city (the Tuesday public warning system, currently on hiatus) to the non-unique yet still closely associated (seals). That quote under “Soundscape” is Schafer’s definition, and we discussed how the word “audience” might be added to it.

The last bit is in the lower right. We discussed the difference between “explicit” and “implicit” sounds relating to products and services. The idea is to apply Schafer’s concept of the soundscape (and related concepts that didn’t make it to the chalkboard) to things and the environment in which those things are utilized. (For example, the sound of a kickstand, the rumble of tires on pavement, and the noise of wind are all part of the Harley-Davidson experience.) Those three examples on the chalkboard were ones students contributed to the discussion.

Anyhow, with about 40 or so hours’ notice to prepare the transition, that’s my first video-conference teaching summary. Class met for three hours. It went OK. I’m used to pacing, and I had to sit still. I’m used to drawing and writing on the chalkboard, and had instead to just type. I’m used to lots of things, but it went OK, and it’ll go better next week. One student showed up in our video conference about 15 minutes early for class, when I had the chalkboard on default: black type on a white background. Spur of the moment, I reversed the colors, so it began to resemble an actual chalkboard. The student agreed it was an improvement, so I stuck with it.

Blue Sky Alert

Life’s kinda intense. I walked to the ocean and took pictures of some Outdoor Public Warning System sirens.

Guitar Thoughts

I started taking weekly guitar lessons a couple years ago, despite which I haven’t been good about tracking my experience much here, even though I spend a chunk of my time sending my guitar through my synthesizer.

Some recent guitar-related thoughts:

Thing that came out of my mouth in guitar class: “The fretboard is a conspiracy, but I’m figuring it out.”

Sorting out the means to name a chord I just happen to have played on my guitar makes me feel like an amateur lepidopterist identifying butterflies out in the wild.

Due to guitar practice, the main earworms in my life are whatever brief public-domain melodies in my textbook I’ve been playing for a half hour or hour straight recently.

Generally I can’t use my synthesizer late in the evening, because it ratchets up my brain, making it difficult for me to sleep. Guitar, in contrast, I’ve been able to play right up until bedtime, and then nonetheless done fine falling asleep. The recently added complexity is I’ve begun studying modes, and (1) modes are really enjoyable to work through and learn, but (2) for some reason they get my brain going like my synthesizer does.

Quelled Chaos

The first of two tracks from Dave Wesley released with the title “Tons de Quarto,” the music comes across like some fierce collage mix of zigzagging field recordings and rampantly droning organ. It’s all about fleetingly quelled chaos — the volume lowered, and yet the action raised in inverse proportion. The organ-like sound comes in waves, wide hands pushing out arrhythmic patterns that ebb and flow in an expression of unrest and pent-up power. The other sounds are foreground and background, rough noises tossed about, and rapid patterning, the wind in motion. It’s a potent combination.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/davewesley. Wesley is based in Porto, Portugal. More at arcticdub.bandcamp.com and YouTube.

You Should Be Listening to Youarelistening.to

I’ve been listening to youarelistening.to for a long time. How long, I’m not sure. The earliest mention I can find here on the outboard brain I call Disquiet.com dates back to the middle of March 2011. A project of Eric Eberhardt, youarelistening.to layers ambient music with emergency-services audio. It’s that simple, and yet the result is way more than the sum of its binary parts. The music and locations rotate through with each new outing. The youarelistening.to release posted today, an hour in full, on the YouTube channel of NTS combines recordings by Loscil, Signals Bulletin, and others with the voices of New York Fire Department dispatchers as they call out alerts from around the city.

There’s a deep, unsettling, filmic resonance to the work. The music is all synthy drones and Quaalude pulsings. The voices, rarely manifesting an alteration in intonation, drone on in their own manner, devoid of the tension implicit in the events they are narrating. More often than not, what they say is unintelligible, as if the repetition of violence has sanded the emotional import off the incidents. Occasionally a phrase does pierce the mumble.

“Female down in the street.”

“Electrical fire in the attic.”

“Trying to track down an order.”

It’s arguable that a major part of the art of youarelistening.to is dependent on the carefully regulated relative volume levels of the two channels of audio: The voices are just quiet enough to get lost in the music, signals succumbing to the tonal equivalent of entropy. Also essential to the experience is how the squelch and interference on the dispatchers’ lines sound very much like sonic effects that the electronic music itself might employ — which is to say, the spoken part of youarelistening.to merges with the musical part exactly when the spoken part begins to fall apart.

I’ve been listening to youarelistening.to for a long time. (Also recommended is watching it on NTS, where it’s combined with surveillance-chic graphics and aerial footage of the city.) How long, I’m not sure. Once you’ve listened to it a few times, it’s like you never really turned it off. It’s just lingering in the background of your life until you choose to turn it up again.

Teaching During COVID-19

It looks as though my Sounds of Brands course as of this coming Wednesday — March 11, week 6 of 15 — will become an online course. That’s real-time online (aka a video conference), not an asynchronous online course. This is, of course, due to efforts in San Francisco to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. I had a guest speaker scheduled, but I think we’ll hold off on guest speakers until we’ve put the conference technology to the test.

And, yes, this means no chalkboard photos.

Garbage Rock

And thus ended a hyper-brief era during which street-corner garbage pails doubled as amplifiers for buskers.

Robot Beacon

Toward the southern tip of Manhattan stands an antiquated beacon of security. In ramrod posture and bright red coloration, not to mention old-fashioned charm, it brings to mind one of the Queen’s Guard: stoic, efficient, resolute in its dedication to duty. There are identical models across the city. This location, near Battery Park, is walking distance from Ground Zero of the 9/11 attacks.

The device is an alert system for the twinned fire and police departments of New York City. The two departments are represented with red and blue buttons, though the light shade of the police one, combined with the fact almost the entire thing is otherwise red, tells you this is first and foremost Fire Department property. That’s even before you might notice the vertical FDNY initials toward its base — and, in a more subtle treatment, horizontally just below what might be characterized as the device’s head.

That slight bulge at the top, an anthropomorphic gesture, seems like a premonition of robot beacons from the future. Should the streets of New York be served and protected by the city’s bravest androids decades from now, the automatons might bear some distant resemblance to this ancestral stationary signal box. The result would be a Buckingham Palace guard through the lens of an Osamu Tezuka manga.

Today, beneath the brim of what would be the beacon’s hat, there sits a puncture grid: seven stark horizontal rows of eleven holes each. Across town in some file cabinet there’s likely a rejected design in which the Fire/Police buttons sit like eyes above the grid. The grid, here a combination of eyes, nose, and mouth, signals the presence of an audio system — a hybrid speaker/microphone, allowing the bystander to “report an emergency,” as the beacon’s limited textual information instructs.

There are two other puncture grids on the Battery Park beacon, one midway down its torso, and the other at its very base (presumably for someone who hits the pavement after triggering one of the communication channels). Both are in the unmistakable shape of the classic sheriff badge. While the beacon is the figure of law-enforcement authority, the badges are likely both microphone and speaker. The message seems to be that once you engage with the beacon to send an alert, you have yourself, in effect, been deputized.

Concerts in the Time of COVID-19

City governments and health departments are calling for the postponement of “non-essential” public gatherings. Festivals are being cancelled left and right. Even if the current COVID-19 health alerts come to an end along one of the less dire projected timelines, the toll has already begun to hit numerous musicians. And not just musicians, but those who work in their proximity — promoters, publicists, roadies, techs, vendors, venue employees, and on and on. To discuss the arts isn’t to look askance at the death, grief, and discomfort of those directly affected by this year’s coronavirus. It’s simply to consider and brace for broader consequences.

Buying an album here and there will be a nice gesture, but even if you spend the equivalent of a festival pass on Bandcamp or Bleep, you won’t — short of some unprecedented groundswell of mass communal action — begin to have the same economic impact you’d have had were the cancelled events to occur. Festivals and concerts are scaled in a way that digital media, online merchandise, and, of course, streaming can’t begin to compare with financially. This is a calamity a decade or more in the making; as the perceived monetary value of recorded music has dropped, the importance of live performances has become all the more central not just to musicians’ income but to their promotional efforts. There is, it’s worth noting, a particular irony here for electronic music, which was born of the idea of the studio as a musical instrument — for as deep and rewarding as that may be as an artistic pursuit, you generally have to leave the studio these days to afford it in the first place.

All of which is to say, this is a good time to pay attention to the musicians whose work you admire and want to support. Check out the Patreon and equivalent of the ones who have such accounts, and keep an eye out for what others do to try to fill the void left by diminishing concert performance opportunities. I’m hopeful that the moment’s necessity will mother innovative alternatives. A suite of pay-per-view variants feels more than a little dystopian, so if you do come across creative means by which musicians reach across enforced “social distance,” please do let me know.