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Disquiet Junto Project 0399: Edges & Echoes

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 26, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 22, 2019.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0399: Edges & Echoes
The Assignment: Make sonic art for a space with the sounds of that space.

This project is the second of three that are 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: Provided are several recordings capturing the sounds of the empty performance space for the festival. Access them at the following URL and listen to them:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jy7ou2ssdvl8til/Bern%20Audio.zip

Step 3: Create a piece of sonic art intended to be played back in the festival performance space utilizing only the source audio.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0399” (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 “disquiet0399” (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-0399-edges-echoes/

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, August 26, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 22, 2019.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0399” 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 399th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Edges & Echoes / The Assignment: Make sonic art for a space with the sounds of that space — at:

https://disquiet.com/0399/

This week’s project is the second of three 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/

Action as Atmosphere in Thief

Jessie turns to Frank, the titular thief played by James Caan, and asks, “What does this mean?”

Frank replies, “It means heat.” What Frank means by “heat” is “attention from formidable adversaries on both sides of the law who were my dowry when you and I became a couple,” but he might as well have said, “It means Heat and Manhunter and The Insider and Collateral.”

That is from a short essay I just had published at the excellent hilobrow.com website. The subject is Michael Mann’s first theatrical-release film, Thief, which came out in 1981. (And, yes, there is a brief mention of Tangerine Dream’s score.)

The essay is part of the Convoy Your Enthusiasm series “analyzing and celebrating some of our favorite action movies from the Seventies (1974-1983).” There are 25 entries in the series. Other contributors include Madeline Ashby on Blade Runner, Jonathan Lethem on Straight Time, Erik Davis on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and Luc Sante on Black Sunday.

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Published on August 21, 2019 22:13

This Week in Sound: Mice v. Deep Fakes + Hackers v. Smart Speakers + …

This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the August 18, 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.

If you’re a whale, audio surveillance has your (hump)back: A system deployed in the Santa Barbara Channel “could capture whale calls as far as 30 miles away. Cables connected the listening station — about 600 feet below sea level — to a buoy floating on the surface.” The goal is to warn ships away from cetacean hangouts.

Mice may be the canaries in the deep-fake coal mine: “A research team is working on training mice to understand irregularities within speech, a task the animals can do with remarkable accuracy.” Bonus points for distinction drawn between “deep fakes” and “cheap fakes.” (via subtopes)

More mice news, this time relating to repairing human hearing: “Using genetic tools in mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have identified a pair of proteins that precisely control when sound-detecting cells, known as hair cells, are born in the mammalian inner ear. The proteins, described in a report published June 12 in eLife, may hold a key to future therapies to restore hearing in people with irreversible deafness.” (via Tom Whitwell)

No one apparently wants to be left out of the recent speech-to-surveillance bingo matrix: Facebook reportedly “paid contractors to transcribe users’ audio chats.” Thus the service’s Messenger has joined Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s more anthropomorphism-neutral Assistant in sounding alarms about consumer voice privacy.

More positive news about voice recognition, from Google’s Project Euphonia: Euphonia is an “attempt to make speech recognition capable of understanding people with non-standard speaking voices or impediments. The company has just published a post and its paper explaining some of the AI work enabling the new capability.”

And a positive spin on deep fakes, as artistic pursuit: For some, the technique is a propaganda tool. “For others, this nascent technology holds great promise, offering realistic vocal models for people with speech impairments, more convincing voice assistants, intimate chatbots, and myriad uses in the entertainment industry. Motivated more by artistic interests than commercial applications, musicians in particular envision different possibilities for the future of human and machine collaboration.”

The room tone of the planet is hell on earth for some: Infrasound is sound at the floor of human perception, but some humans perceive better than others, sometimes to their detriment. “It’s like as if someone is driving needles through me. … It’s not a noise so much as you’re hearing with your ears, it’s a vibration,” says one sufferer.

The city of Malibu is exploring an outdoor public warning system for fires: “The city is asking consultants/consulting firms to identify the optimum placement of multiple sirens along the 21-mile length of the city that could be heard everywhere in an emergency and provide an overall detailed and comprehensive plan for an outdoor siren warning system.”

Your kitchen-counter smart speaker is being recruited as a weapon of sonic terror: “Matt Wixey, cybersecurity research lead at the technology consulting firm PWC UK, says that it’s surprisingly easy to write custom malware that can induce all sorts of embedded speakers to emit inaudible frequencies at high intensity, or blast out audible sounds at high volume. Those aural barrages can potentially harm human hearing, cause tinnitus, or even possibly have psychological effects.”

Movie theaters in Maryland are working to serve their hearing-impaired audiences: Via the Twitter of Sean Zdenek, who notes: “Hawaii is the only U.S. state with open captioning laws.”

Composer Geoff Barrow (of Portishead) agrees that people are using movie soundtracks to score their own lives: “It’s amazing to see just how many people are getting into the idea of listening to film scores, outside of just listening to a band’s album with 10 tracks. It’s because they want a new musical experience. It’s like reading a book, they want to be taken on a musical journey. It’s basically the modern classical.” (This via Jason Richardson, who made similar comments in his blog the week prior.)

In a surprise move, a horror-film director may have exaggerated scientific evidence, in this case of fish noises: The director of 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, Johannes Roberts, says of the movie’s screaming fish, “I wouldn’t want to necessarily swear to it, that that’s a very accurate thing that fish do.”

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Published on August 21, 2019 19:32

“epiano, timeline, processed”

SoundCloud is different things to different people. It may be where your favorite bands host their tracks. It may be where your favorite record label stores its catalog. It may be the home for podcasts you follow, or for media related to a favorite news service, or museum, or consumer product company, for that matter. SoundCloud has grown and changed as time has passed. But for many early adopters, it remains a window on their laboratory, a glass held, welcomingly, to the thin wall of a home studio.

For many musicians, SoundCloud remains a place for sketches, for works in progress. How can one tell? Well, for such musicians, the sketches are often distinguished by their titles, which tend to take the form of a list of ingredients and techniques, as much a reminder for the recording artist as a clue to the listener.

Case in point: “epiano, timeline, processed,” which is Dance Robot Dance, aka Brian Biggs, running bits of a virtual electric piano, an emulation of a stately Rhodes, through a variety of effects. This is all laid out in the brief liner note and handful of tags accompanying the track. What it is to the ear, however, is a splendidly glitchy, syrupy, artfully broken, nearly seven-minute procession of warped samples. It’s the beautiful sound of a music box melting under the summer sun.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dance-robot-dance. More from Biggs, who is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at dance-robot-dance.bandcamp.com.

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Published on August 19, 2019 21:04

Disquiet Junto Project 0398: Rauschen Bern

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 19, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 15, 2019.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0398: Rauschen Bern
The Assignment: Make music by making a collage of noises.

This project is the first of three that are 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 with 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.” 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: Consider that the word “rauschen” is half of the family name of the late artist Robert Rauschenberg, who was famed for his collages.

Step 3: Record several “rauschen” noises and make a sonic collage of them.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0398” (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 “disquiet0398” (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-0398-rauschen-bern/

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, August 19, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 15, 2019.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0398” 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 398th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Rauschen Bern / The Assignment: Make music by making a collage of noises — at:

https://disquiet.com/0398/

This week’s project is the first of three being done in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern, which runs in Switzerland from September 11 – 15, 2019. More details at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/

The Foghorn and the Marine Layer

To appreciate the foghorns of the San Francisco Bay, it helps to first appreciate the fog. In particular, it helps to wrap your head around what’s called the marine layer.

The foghorns can ring out on the sunniest of days, such as today, the archaic bellowing incongruous with, seemingly ignorant (to much of the city) of, how clear the sky may be. But as shown here, a dense cloud can run below the radar, as it were: a thick funnel from the ocean, into the bay, and under the Golden Gate Bridge.

My photography doesn’t do the enormity of the marine layer justice. The sheer scale of this mass is evident in person in a way my phone cannot reproduce, at least not in my hands. So, I include this visualization to show where one’s spatial-atmospheric imagination should focus. (The National Geographic vibe of that yellow border was unintentional, but I do want to acknowledge its presence.)

It’s helpful to understand something about the perspective here. The stretch of buildings visible in the center of these photos ends where it appears to end: excepting some descending hills and a narrow beach, that is a northern edge of San Francisco. Then comes the marine layer of fog, and then come the hills known as the Marin Headlands. Those hills are across the bay from the buildings. In between is simply the bay, a bay filled with fog. This is roughly the line of sight, via Google Maps’ satellite view:

As for the foghorns, they resound through parts of the city that the fog itself may never touch.

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Published on August 14, 2019 10:27

This Week in Sound: Nuromuscular Signals + AI Drummer +

This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the August 11, 2019, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound.

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.

Head Gear: A device called AlterEgo can hear when you talk to yourself. “The technology involves a system of sensors that detect the minuscule neuromuscular signals sent by the brain to the vocal cords and muscles of the throat and tongue. These signals are sent out whenever we speak to ourselves silently, even if we make no sounds. The device feeds the signals through an A.I., which ‘reads’ them and turns them into words. The user hears the A.I.’s responses through a microphone that conducts sound through the bones of the skull and ear, making them silent to others. Users can also respond out loud using artificial voice technology.” (via subtopes)

Intelligent Drum Music: “Sony is the latest company to dip its toes into AI-powered music. The company revealed this week that its researchers have created a machine learning model that can create kick-drum tracking.” Fun fact: “In order to train the AI system, Sony’s researchers compiled data from 665 different songs from a wide range of genres including pop, rock and electronica.” If they’d only gone for one more, they coulda given Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward a run for the heavy-metal money. More at google.com.

Virtual Hassle: “In scripted media like a pre-rendered 2D video, you always know where sound should come from — the audio levels for each channel never change from one viewing to the next. Even a 3D game has a workable level of complexity thanks to the predetermined parameters of the environment. With VR, there are simply too many variables to create perfect, realistic sound from every perspective.” And how a new algorithm from Stanford researchers may fix that. (via the Institute for the Future)

Earworm Autopsy: “I like the sound of instruments when they’re not perfectly in tune. It’s more interesting, this feeling of humanness that comes through when things aren’t perfect, or when a sound has a subtle sourness to it.” That’s composer Nicholas Britell in a great Vulture interview about his theme for HBO’s TV series Succession.

Et Tu, Skype?: Reportedly: “Microsoft contractors are listening to conversations between users on Skype who use its translation feature, according to Motherboard. This is done only if users are performing a translation function in Skype and not during any other typical Skype voice or video call.” More at windowscentral.com.

Smarter Phone: How do you hide where you are? Funny you should ask: “sophisticated products have started to emerge that add noise near a device’s microphones to mask sound in vicinity of the device.” (via subtopes)

TV Talk: Kalev Leetaru, a Forbes contributor, visualizes the consistency of the number of words per minute spoken on TV news: “The timeline below shows the average number of words spoken per second on CNN by day from July 2, 2009 to June 30, 2019, looking only at its captioned airtime. Over the past decade this rate has remained remarkably steady, decreasing ever so slightly through early 2015 and slowly edging back up ever since.” (via Sean Zdenek)

Secret Hideout: “After selecting the way I’d like to feel in an app (I believe I chose ‘energize’), I lie down on a leather pad, don headphones, and close my eyes, listening to a soothing world beat with a strong Om undercurrent. Ross is a big believer in the healing power of color and sound. (Her team went so far as to develop an installation at Milan that demonstrated how just sitting in different rooms can affect your core physiology.) For 15 minutes I wonder what I’m doing, wasting time on this silly bed. Then I stand up, eyes suddenly alert with a skip in my step.” Mark Wilson of Fast Company describes a visit to Google’s “top-secret design lab.” (The Ross is Ivy Ross, “vice president and head of hardware design.”)

Going Quiet: “I knew I had a problem when I started wearing headphones around my apartment,” begins Joel Pavelski’s GQ story about taking a “month-long sound fast.” First he had to hit rock bottom, which happened when his shower speaker broke: “I stopped and listened while my breathing went slowly back to normal. The shaky, queasy feeling went away. And, after a moment or two, my own thoughts rushed into the void. For a few brief, blissful minutes I re-acquainted myself with my internal monologue. It felt like a phone conversation with a friend that I hadn’t talked to in years.” Of course, once you stop using headphones, you don’t stop listening. Some might say that’s when you actually start.

/ / A GOOGOL OF BLOGS
Reading the web

As always, if you have a blog related to sound or music, let me know. Both this week’s entries are from Australia, per chance.

Reel Life: Jason Richardson picks up the story (from last week’s This Week in Sound issue) of Sony’s purchase of the Milan Records movie-soundtrack label, with observations about fellow students in TV production, specifically their habit of “adding soundtrack-style music to their own lives for feeling of being part of a movie.”

Sound Flâneur: The sound artist Tristan Louth-Robins has renewed his blogging vows with a lengthy update on his creative pursuits, including his great Fleurieu Sound Map, shown above.

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Published on August 13, 2019 10:58

Did Someone Say Circuit Bent Smoke Alarms?

Dylan Sheridan recognizes that the ubiquitous line of defense against residential fires is, in fact, a low-grade computer chip that sounds like a (very) early arcade video game. In Sheridan’s capable and purposeful mishandling, the generic smoke detector is transformed into a device for stuttering, glitchy, gloriously broken noise. The shrill sound of the alarm, designed to be annoying so as to cut through all other noises and alert the human ear to the presence of danger, is here rendered raw material for playful, ebullient noodling. As John Zorn is to the duck call, Diamanda Galás to the human throat, and Adrian Belew to the guitar, so is Dylan Sheridan to the smoke alarm.

This all was accomplished through circuit bending, the trial and error process of getting the inner guts of devices to do things they weren’t intended to through experimental rewiring and other techniques. As for the results of Sheridan’s fiddling, they sound alternately like anxious geese (“call_6”), cartoon geese (“call_7”), Morse code (“call_13”), a balloon losing air post-singularity (“call_17”), the world’s most shrill grindcore singer (“msg_9”), and actual video games (“call_8,” “call_14,” and numerous others).

No doubt aware that these sounds might not be all that enjoyable at length, Sheridan has limited them to the dimensions of ringtones. The meatiest of the 26 tracks on the album Circuit Bent Smoke Alarms – Ringtone Collection is just 22 seconds long. The majority are under 10 seconds. And many are so brief that the Bandcamp website registers them at a length of 0.

Circuit Bent Smoke Alarms – Ringtone Collection by Dylan Sheridan

The album is available for whatever price the user chooses at dylansheridan.bandcamp.com. The above image accompanied the release on Bandcamp. More from Sheridan at dylansheridan.com. (And many thanks to Danny Clay for recommending this album to me.)

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Published on August 12, 2019 20:48

The Festival’s Metronome

“We played a show I think in Kansas City with him a long time ago, and the audiences were weirdly friendly with each other. There was a sense of nobody’s making a huge compromise to attend. So that’s something, right? Also, I think that there are musical similarities, but not too many. It’s horrible going to these rock festivals sometimes with the skateboards and the tattoos, and it’s like the same beat for hours and hours and hours. I don’t think that happens at all with a Ben Folds-Cake evening. That’s something I feel strongly about. Whether it’s electronic music or any kind of genre, I just want there to be different beats. My brain sort of shuts down a little bit if it’s duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh the whole time. That’s something a lot of rock bands are guilty of not changing up enough.”

That’s John McCrea of the band Cake in a new interview I did for sactownmag.com. The question was “For the second summer in a row, Cake is touring with singer-songwriter Ben Folds. How did the idea of co-headlining concerts with him come to be?”

“My brain sort of shuts down a little bit if it’s duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh the whole time.” I enjoyed transcribing that bit.

The version online of the Q&A is slightly expanded from the one in the print edition. (Illustration from the article by Jason Malmberg.)

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Published on August 12, 2019 15:04

Disquiet Junto in Bern, Switzerland

I’m excited to announce that the Disquiet Junto music community is teaming up with the Musikfestival Bern, which runs from September 11 through 15 in Switzerland. We’ll be doing a sequence of weekly projects exploring the theme of this year’s festival, which is “rauschen.” From the festival’s program:

It could be the rustling of leaves, the sighing of the wind, the buzz of traffic, the burbling of streams, the susurration of a forest… And it could be the sound of Bern… Most likely the whole world. Only in music do we suppress the idea of “rauschen”, a word that can only be inadequately translated as noise – it’s not welcome, most of the time. The Musikfestival Bern in 2019 places it and many other acoustic phenomena on the concert hall stage with songs, installations, microtones and electronics, allowing for all kinds of unexpected sonic exhilaration.

Also from the program:

More on the festival at musikfestivalbern.ch.

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Published on August 12, 2019 07:40