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Disquiet Junto Project 0401: Noise Pacing

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, September 2, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 29, 2019.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0401: Noise Pacing
The Assignment: Use background noise as a beat, as a rhythm.

This project is the third and final of a series being done in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 11 through 15. 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. Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played publicly as part of the Rauschlabor Schützenmatte (musikfestivalbern.ch) or broadcast on the festival’s radio show, Radio Antenne (radioantenne.ch). If you don’t want your recording to be used in this way, please note so wherever you post it.

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the German word “rauschen,” the theme for this year’s festival. Understand that “rauschen” is noise in the sense of white noise, waterfall noise, background noise, static, wind in trees, rain, etc. The blurred, diffuse, continuous kind of noise, not short individual non-tonal sounds.

Step 2: You are going to make music in which one or more “rauschen” noise(s) will be used as the beat or rhythm for a track. Record and listen back to such “rauschen.”

Step 3: Select one or more noise elements from Step 2.

Step 4: Create a track using the elements from Step 3 as beats or rhythmic material, and then layer something melodic atop it.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0401” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0401” (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 track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0401-noise-pacing/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtags #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 Monday, September 9, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 5, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0401” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 401st weekly Disquiet Junto project — Noise Pacing / Use background noise as a beat, as a rhythm — at:

https://disquiet.com/0401/

This project is the third and final of a series being done in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern, which runs in Switzerland from September 11 – 15, 2019. The source audio was provided by the Tobias Reber. More details at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/

Red Means Recording

I was interviewed yesterday morning for something related to the Disquiet Junto, and the interviewer began, appropriately, by doing that standard interview thing where they ask if it’s OK that they record your voice. I’ve done this countless times myself, and I’m still getting used to it, to being on the other side of the proverbial and literal microphone. It turns out (and this was news to me, hence my making note of it) Skype now has a recording feature built in, so there’s no need for a handheld recorder, or for using a second app (though I would still recommend a backup). For privacy’s sake, when your Skype interlocutor elects to employ this in-app recorder, a little alert pops up in your window. The image shown here is from the upper left corner of my screen (in this case an iPad) as it appeared when the interviewer hit the record button. (I had, in turn, asked my interviewer if I could take this screenshot.) The message is a little reminder. The color red here is a standard “currently recording” tell, but in our global moment of heightened surveillance awareness it feels, as well, like a warning. Which is to say, there might be a nicer way for Skype to frame such an interaction.

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Published on September 05, 2019 09:05

Sticker

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Published on September 04, 2019 18:39

I Keep the Subtitles On at Night

I keep the subtitles on at night. I do this to keep the house quiet, and I do this because, often as not, I’m watching some British show in which everything sounds to my American ears like an erudite mumble. In the case of Mindhunter, the Netflix serial-killer show now enjoying a second season, it’s the former. Everything stated in these East Coast accented voices is distinct and clear to my (natively) East Coast hearing — and the Southern voices, too, perhaps because the Southern accents are being spoken generally by people who want their utterances to be heard (whether they are beleaguered law enforcement, concerned bystanders, or vain convicts).

Late at night, the captions keep the living room’s televised noises from traveling too far around the house, and as a result I get glimpses at the way the hearing-impaired captioning is framing the on-screen action, the encapsulation of the sonic mise-en-scène.

This particular shot (from midway through season 2, episode 6) is a rare instance of dual caption cues. It’s far more the norm for a single sound — “footsteps,” “eerie music,” “fan rattling” — to be selected set the tone for a given moment, but here two distinct elements (“dogs barking in the distance,” “indistinct radio chatter”) combine to achieve the desired effect, the desired summary of effects, the desired way to read the scene. On TV, it’s generally the case that more than one sound is at work at a given time: score plus multiple bits of diegetic ambience, as well as dialog. (Jason Hill’s score to Mindhunter is the show’s main nod to contemporary aesthetics: all warped slivers of sound, synthesized haze, and other such meticulously designed treats.) In the moments when dialog is absent, such as here, the background sounds edge toward the foreground.

As watchers of mysteries, we, the audience, are the dogs in this picture, sniffing out (or, in this case, keeping an eye out for) clues. When two sonic cues appear, our eyes and ears are alerted simultaneously to the seriousness of the moment.

This is of course a David Fincher production, which is to say a hyper-detailed one in which the most mundane physical objects — a period vehicle, an abandoned warehouse, a small forest — is likely to be the result of hours of CGI transformation. At a moment like this, it’s not hard to imagine Fincher himself, the model of a Hollywood perfectionist, having made the call: “No, neither the dogs nor the radio alone is sufficient. We need both.”

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Published on September 04, 2019 09:26

Daredevil Is in the Details

Whatever comics commentary I may have is generally going to be lagging behind fresh releases. In particular, my Marvel Comics reading is almost always off by six months or so, since that’s about how long it takes, I believe, for a comic to make it from the newsstand to Marvel Unlimited’s digital subscription service. A new Daredevil series just popped up, story by Chip Zdarsky, art by Marco Checchetto, and color by Sunny Cho. Any time there’s a new Daredevil creative team, there’s the opportunity for a new take on this rare blind superhero (with heightened hearing, among other senses).

In this early scene from the first issue, just two pages in, Zdarsky gives us a glimpse of Daredevil’s own perception of his super-senses. (Origin story in brief: as a kid, Matt Murdock “lost his sight in an accident involving radioactive chemicals,” and rather than dying of cancer like the rest of us would, he became an infamous New York City vigilante and, by day, a crusading lawyer). The pills depicted are pain medication for a recent injury. (I don’t know if there’s an addiction plot line coming, like the classic Iron Man alcoholism one, “Demon in a Bottle.” I’ve only read this first issue.) His comment gets at the diminished role that listening plays in dark, loud places (he’s in a dive bar at this moment, perhaps the last dive bar in the Epcot for aesthetes that is modern Manhattan), how it levels the sensory playing field. I especially like how other senses are of particular use in such situations, how “the smells fill in the cracks.”

Now, when he says, “Places like this are a picture,” he’s saying one thing to the woman he’s in the process of picking up, and something else entirely to the true-believer reader. To the woman, it’s an artful observation. To the reader, it’s a consideration of how echolocation gives Daredevil a sense of whatever space he’s in, a detailed sense, a “picture” as it were, due to his superpowers.

While the “picture” is largely inside Daredevil’s head in the comic, it becomes fairly literal in a tasty little treat in the back of the book, where there’s a four-page comic, both art and story by Zdarsky.

For example, spend a moment with these three panels:

And then compare that sequence with this one:

See how the first is a sound/echolocation depiction of the “visual” sequence? See how the tiny, lowercase (i.e., quiet) sound effects in the second sequence are dwarfed by the larger, all-caps effects in the first sequence? This back-section, four-page comic in Daredevil is actually two pages repeated twice: once as visual, and once as sonic. Interestingly, all four pages are not depicted from Daredevil’s point of view. The depiction is omniscient, with Daredevil in the frame. There are two standard pages, which is to say: two pages drawn as a sight-normative narrator/reader would experience the activity. Those pages then alternate with the same sequence as if the narrator/reader were viewing it in Daredevil’s blind-yet-enhanced state.

These distinct reproductions of the same sequence bring to mind Matt Madden’s excellent book 99 Ways to Tell a Story, while the focus on disability, as always, stirs memories of the great “deaf Hawkeye” work by Matt Fraction and David Aja, not to mention such characters as Alicia Masters, the blind secondary figure in the Fantastic Four comics, and Black Bolt, the nuclear-voiced Inhumans leader, and … well, the list goes on and on. Sound and comics, it’s a thing.

Anyhow, that’s just a peek into the way sound is depicted and employed in this new(ish) Daredevil series. I’m looking forward to the next issue.

. . .

After posting this initially on Twitter and then to my This Week in Sound email list, I was reminded of some earlier, related posts I’ve made in to Instagram, from two other first issues of Daredevil runs. This panel is from a 2014 issue of a different Daredevil #1, written by Mark Waid, drawn by Chris Samnee:

And panel this is from the 2016 Daredevil #1 issue from writer Charles Soule and artist Ron Garney:

This post is lightly adapted and expanded from a version first published in the August 26, 2019, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet).

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Published on September 01, 2019 08:16

Before and After Language

The above image is a detail from a contemporary piece of calligraphy by artist Kim Jongweon, who is working toward a new visual vocabulary born of ancient and modern Korean writing. Until dissuaded, I’m going to believe this character (in both the sense of a written character, and of an image depicting a human face) is playing some sort of woodwind, or perhaps is singing. Note the smaller, inset figure. It appears to be dancing. Also shown, below, for context is a photo of the full Jongweon piece, currently displayed as part of Beyond Line: The Art of Korean Writing, a large-scale exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That one little dancer is but a filigree amid this expanse of orderly, buoyant drawings:

The exhibit is phenomenal, massive walls given over to single characters the size of a human body, glass cabinets with fine ancient texts, and rubbings of even older examples of Koreans expressing themselves with lines, lines that some day would evolve into writing, into an expression of voice as much as of thought. Try, for example, returning the gaze of a 7,000-year old face as seen in this petroglyph. I’m fascinated by the absence of ears. Is this how someone saw themselves? Is it a drawing of a mask? Stare back in time and time stares back at you:

A focus of the exhibit is hangeul, a modernized and simplified Korean lettering, or “phonetic script,” that dates back to the 15th century. It was developed in order to replace the classical Chinese that had long been the region’s lingua franca. (That’s not actually an accurate description. As a This Week in Sound reader, Anne Bell, helpfully clarified for me, via email: “The Korean language has always been distinct from Chinese but the elite used classical Chinese characters as the writing system for centuries. What hangeul did was mimic the actual sounds of spoken Korean, making it a true phonetic alphabet. The hangeul alphabet has 28 letters. Compare this to Chinese where basic literacy requires learning between 2500 to 3000 characters. This was huge in terms of democratizing the written word.”) I’ve always marveled at the pleasing geometry of the Korean language, and this exhibit brings it alive in a way I had long dreamed of. Look at these bold letter forms and ponder that this was published in 1446.

At times in the exhibit the connection between line and tongue is made explicit, as in this 1947 document (almost exactly 600 years later than the above book), which explains how “mouth movements” match various aspects of hangeul:

More on the exhibit at the museum’s website, which explains that due to how rare many of the displayed pieces are, the show will not be touring: lacma.org.

This is lightly adapted and expanded from an edition first published in the August 26, 2019, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet).

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Published on August 31, 2019 10:00

Corporate Blogs and Social Media

Sometimes I think the decline of blogging coincided with the rise of the corporate blog, and with that the sense if you couldn’t blog under a paying banner it was perceived as a vanity plate, as less than serious, as even embarrassing, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

I don’t think it’s that complex, though. I’ve come to think the decline of the blog is, indeed, simply a matter of social media, on which you can say far less and receive far more of a response. The ratio is disproportionate, and blogging against that tide is tough going.

Hasn’t deterred me. Been at it since 1996, before “blog” was a recognized word. I continue to recommend blogging (in essence: writing a public journal), and have been happy to see activism in favor of blogging on the upswing lately.

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Published on August 29, 2019 14:04

Disquiet Junto Project 0400: Sub Divided

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, September 2, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 29, 2019.

Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0400: Sub Divided
The Assignment: Create a score to a Malka Older story using the author’s own voice as source audio.

Step 1: The author Malka Older (Infomocracy, Ninth Step Station, Orphan Black: The Next Chapter) has generously recorded herself reading her own short story, “The Divided,” and made that recording available to the Disquiet Junto community for this project. Acquire the nine (roughly) one-minute segments of the recording in this zip file:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mgwx9fa9bwz76ll/0400-stems.zip

Step 2: Select one of the nine tracks at random.

Step 3: Listen to the entire story, which is about nine and a half minutes long. Consider the narrative sensibility of your assigned subset of that story.

Step 4: Create a score and sound design to accompany Older’s reading of her own short story in the track that you selected in Step 2. Primarily use Older’s own voice as the source material for your score — bend it, shape it, extract from it, and burnish it to your creative ends. Additional sonic elements, both musical and foley, are welcome, but a substantial percentage of the sound should be from Older’s own voice. Also: keep Older’s own reading audible and inteligible; don’t slow or speed or otherwise edit it. Your score should accompany the reading, not supplant it.

Step 5: This is important. Please title your track “Malka Older – The Divided – Part X/9 disquiet0400” where “X” is the segment number you were assigned. (Don’t include the quotation marks.)

Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0400” (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 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 3: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0400-sub-divided/

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 5: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, September 2, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 29, 2019.

Length: The length of your finished track should be the same length as the source audio for your track.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0400” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 400th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Sub Divided / The Assignment: Create a score to a Malka Older story using the author’s own voice as source audio — at:

https://disquiet.com/0400/

Thanks to Malka Older for providing the audio and collaborating on this. Thanks to Alex Hawthorn for audio technical assistance.

This Week in Sound: Death of a Field Recording Artist + …

This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the August 26, 2019, 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.

Field recording is not for wimps. Remember the scene in Grizzly Man, the Werner Herzog documentary, in which we watch the director’s slowly contorting face as he listens, in a mix of fear and astonishment, to the audio of a dying Timothy Treadwell, the film’s title character, as Treadwell (an unfortunate name in this circumstance) is mauled by a bear? Keep that in mind as you read about the reported death of Julien Gaulthier, a “French artist who used sounds of nature in his music.” Gaulthier had been traveling in a remote stretch of Canada with a biologist, Camille Toscani, “recording new sounds for his work.” Toscani reports a “bear entered their camp at night and dragged Gauthier away.” (via Daniel C and Tobias Reber)

Sarah Jeong, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, writes about Facebook and audio surveillance as part of The Privacy Project. It’s a limited-run email newsletter. The crux: “insistence that Facebook is not listening to you is, predictably, undermined by Facebook, which sometimes is secretly listening to you.” Jeong is distinguishing a widespread perception (that Facebook or some other service is serving something up to you in an ad or other content based on something you have said) from a reality (that Facebook, for example, is using humans to transcribe audio you may believe to be entirely private). This is the difference between a deep-seated anxiety and a practical, uncomfortable reality.

Consider sonic warfare as a subset of “hostile architecture“: that is, as an audio parallel to uncomfortable benches, skateboard-resistant ledges, and spiked window ledges.

“The harvesting of biometric data from sometimes vulnerable populations has raised concerns about the potential for mass surveillance.” Madhumita Murgia, European technology correspondent for the Financial Times, ties audio surveillance together with eye, face, and other technologies into a concern about biometric data.

That hyperviolent fighting video game is actually vegan food-violence porn. Or at least its sound effects are. (via NextDraft)

“Last month alone, Americans received an estimated 4.7 billion illegal spam calls.” Apparently a dozen major telecom providers are teaming up to fight this. The name of the underlying technological fix is STIR/SHAKEN, which sounds like a James Bond reference, apparently stands for “Secure Telephony Identity Revisited and Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs.”

The only thing worse than receiving a call from a spam number may be inadvertently asking your voice assistant to dial one. Your robo-assistant may be doing you a disservice that has nothing to do with invading your privacy. At least not in the manner you’ve come to be concerned about.

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Published on August 28, 2019 19:33

Ancient Visage

Start the day by returning the gaze of a 7,000-year old face: a petroglyph rubbing from the excellent LACMA exhibit Beyond Line: The Art of Korean Writing. I’m fascinated by the absence of ears. Is this how someone saw themselves? Is it a drawing of a mask? Stare back in time.