Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 264
August 4, 2019
The Experimental Organ
Lauren Redhead’s “Phosphorescent” is a composition for organ (herself) in combination with violin and electronics (her collaborator, Alistair Zaldua). This recording was made at the Canterbury Festival last October, and uploaded to Redhead’s account a couple months back. There’s been an explosion in experimental work for organs in recent years, thanks to folks like Anna Von Hausswolff, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Claire M Singer, among others. In Redhead’s piece, the organ and violin congeal to form a treble-rich, soaring-in-slow-motion backdrop of vast spaciousness. Amid this all, Zaldua’s bow is heard to trace an exploratory path, like a satellite zigzagging across the heavens.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/laurenredhead. More from Lauren Redhead, who is based in the United Kingdom, at laurenredhead.eu.
August 3, 2019
Dave Seidel’s “Black Star Study”
“Black Star Study” is a dense, lengthy, tumultuous drone, one occasionally fleshed out with jittery synthesizer fluctuations and the stuttered grunts of something more akin to an unloved catalytic converter. Which is to say, in drone/noise terms, it is fantastic. Dave Seidel perpetrates the live performance in full view, his synthesizers narrowing into the distance on his desk, the bleak intensity of the music only slightly undermined by the sewing machine seen toward the rear of the room. As you listen, pay attention to the layers of grit, the mesh of crunchy distortions that makes your speakers vibrate and your imagination soar.
Video originally posted at Seidel’s YouTube channel. More from Seidel, who is based in New Hampshire, at mysterybear.net and mysterybear.bandcamp.com.
August 2, 2019
This Week in Sound: Quantum Microphones + Whispering Whales + …
/ / [CLAXON SOUNDING]
This is an unusually long issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Why? Because I took off a week. Why? Because of jet lag. So, think of this as a double issue. Because it is. To reduce the impact of so much sound news, I’ve divided this issue in half. There’s a brief intermission in the form of a beautiful excerpt from a bleak novel from 1946. Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound like much of a respite.
/ / THIS WEEK IN SOUND (PART 1)
A lightly annotated clipping service
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.
Speak Now: There are ebooks and there are audiobooks, and if you purchase “DRM-free” ebooks you can run them through software that reads them to you, but if you purchase “non-DRM-free” ebooks then you can’t, because audiobooks are a big business, and the publishing industry is generally set up to make you buy the book twice. However, Audible appears to be reversing the process, with a new program: “The program, called Captions, which requires the company to transcribe audio to text, was highlighted in a story in USA Today with a headline touting that Audible is looking to let customers ‘”read” an audiobook while [they] listen.’ While the company disputes that description, saying Captions is not at all akin to the act of reading, publishers, literary agents, and organizations representing authors are skeptical. … While Audible said in a statement that Captions ‘does not replicate or replace the print or eBook reading experience,’ publishers are unconvinced.”
Hum Dinger: “The hum” is the term given to a constant sound heard by many people, a sound once written off as tinnitus, but increasingly considered to possibly be something else. The Atlantic highlights a video on the topic, part conspiracy theorizing, part fringe research, part obsessive inquiry.
App Amplitude: “Google has introduced Sound Amplifier which is a new communication mobile app that helps people hear more clearly. What it does is customize frequencies to augment any sound you need to hear.”
Ruido Awakening: The saga of the purported Havana, Cuba, sonic weapon that reportedly led to America diplomats suffering a range of maladies had an update this week, when the New York Times reported that brain analysis of the diplomats indeed evidences “something” happened. Slate followed up with “A Comprehensive List of All the Potential Causes of the Cuban ‘Sonic’ Attacks.” Note that sonic is still in quotes there. (via subtopes)
Shark Tank: The concept of a “sonic weapon” sounds sorta futuristic, but often it’s pretty mundane, like playing annoying songs on repeat to keep people away. In West Palm Beach, Florida, this means children’s music, like the “Baby Shark” song, is now the front line of an effort to disperse the homeless. It seems like a lullaby would be more humane.
Cop to It: “Amazon’s home security company Ring has enlisted local police departments around the country to advertise its surveillance cameras in exchange for free Ring products and a “portal” that allows police to request footage from these cameras, a secret agreement obtained by Motherboard shows.” While we’re busy worrying about the unintended consequences of modern technology, it can be helpful to remember sometimes the intended consequences can also be troublesome.
Vocal Opponent: NPR ran a story about how U.S. technology is helping the surveillance state in China grow stronger. The details about voice surveillance are especially chilling. For the radio spot, NPR had to use a voice actor to read the part of a Chinese interviewee named Alim, and this editorial decision became part of the story itself: “MIT is collaborating with a Chinese company called iFlytek, which supplied voice recognition technology to Xinjiang. By the way, this is why we’re using a voice actor for Alim. China has his voice now. And engineers at NPR told us, even if we tried distorting Alim’s voice to protect his identity, it could be reverse-engineered.”
Leak Siri: A whistleblower opens up about the confidential material overheard when Apple users think they’re just talking to their personal-assistant robot service: “There have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on. These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data.”
Animal Rites: The July 17 issue of New Scientist has reports on both goat and whale sounds. Apparently goats’ bleating actually discloses a range of emotional states, and whales “whisper” to their calves to avoid detection by predators.
Human V. Nature: It’s a core concept in sound studies that human hearing is an evolutionary trait that assists us in sensing danger. As it turns out, much as our ears keep danger at bay, our voices do as well: Researchers have found that “even the gentlest of human speech can make wild animals–even top predators–unnerved and watchful, in ways that shake entire food webs. It’s the clearest demonstration yet that we are among the scariest of animals–a super-predator that terrifies even the carnivores that themselves incite terror.”
/ / THIS WEEK IN SOUND (PART 2)
A lightly annotated clipping service (continued)
Tiny Tunes: “Stanford physicists have developed a ‘quantum microphone’ so sensitive that it can measure individual particles of sound, called phonons. … The quantum microphone the group developed consists of a series of supercooled nanomechanical resonators, so small that they are visible only through an electron microscope. The resonators are coupled to a superconducting circuit that contains electron pairs that move around without resistance. The circuit forms a quantum bit, or qubit, that can exist in two states at once and has a natural frequency, which can be read electronically. When the mechanical resonators vibrate like a drumhead, they generate phonons in different states.” (via Micah Stupak-Hahn)
Word Play: It’s a bit ironic, for me at least, that this story about the increasing use of captions by people who aren’t hearing-impaired appears in The Guardian, since the primary reason I started using captions was to understand what British people were mumbling on my TV. And then it became something of a norm at home, yielding benefits like the identity of songs that are playing in the background, and unintended humor, like when particular soundtrack cues are identified for their narrative purpose (“solemn music,” “upbeat music,” etc.). Interestingly, this apparently isn’t a particularly recent trend. A study in 2006 found that “of the 7.5 million UK TV viewers using subtitles, only 1.5 million had a hearing impairment.”
I Like Mic: The New York Times Sunday Magazine has this excellent ongoing series where people write in favor of something. It’s titled Letter of Recommendation, and two weeks ago David Rees, best known for the Get Your War On comics, wrote in favor of piezo microphones: “They look unassuming, but once they’re plugged into an amplifier, piezo discs become psychedelic microscopes for your ears, completely changing your sense of sonic scale. I taped one to the bottom of a water bottle on a hot afternoon and ran the signal through a reverb pedal; the ice cubes banging around sounded like gongs from distant planets. Rubbing a piezo mic against a felt cowboy hat sent me down a sound-dappled path of contemplation, musing on the subtleties of surface texture and how difficult it would be to play croquet on a felt cowboy hat if you were, say, 10 molecules tall. My dumb guitar never led me to such insights.“
Pillow Talk: Amanda Hess, in the New York Times, surveys the range of sleep aids in the form of meditation and related apps. Helpfully, she provides beneficial context: “Internet culture is often described as hyper-visual, but it has also cracked open new relationships to sound. The rise of podcasts — designed to be listened to alone, in interstitial moments — has forged new aural pathways, and carved out its own aesthetic category: the ‘podcast voice,’ that wry, stammering, cool-nerd cadence. YouTube’s A.S.M.R. practitioners work their whispers and breaths and mouth noises to evoke physical sensations. Even the sounds of jogging geese and crackling ice are preserved for their #oddlysatisfying effects.” Her main focus is the Calm app. (I’d also recommend Insight Timer.)
Good Sex (Writing): And at the New Yorker, Sarah Larson on a subset of post-podcast erotica: “audio details that enhance a sense of pleasure, safety, and calm.”
Material Whirl: The latest edition of the Journal of Sound Studies was edited by Caleb Kelly (author of the excellent book Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year). I’m still working my way through it, but it’s packed with interesting material, which makes sense, since its subject is “materials of sound.”
Re: Recount: WNYC recorded what an election recount sounds like, and shared a nicely edited collection of those sounds in a short broadcast segment. (via Mike Rhode)
Semi Annual: The cicada family has some 2,000 species around the world, and, according to Japan Times, some 35 in Japan (where “cicada” translates as “semi”). As with much life here on Earth, the cicada’s sounds correlate with mating. “The distinctive sound, appearance and short lifespan of cicadas have earned them a special place in Japanese culture, and the insects have appeared in numerous pieces of art and literature over the years.”
Elementary, or Not: This is both utterly inconsequential and, yet, for pure curiosity’s sake, worth noting. IBM’s Watson Marketing is now owned by Centerbridge Partners, and that Watson business has been renamed … “Acoustic.” Even though it seems to have nothing in particular to do with, well, sound.
Kitchen Aid: In Puerto Rico, a metal food receptacle, known as the cacerola, has a history as an instrument of protest. (via Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog)
Social Studies: A study finds that people laugh more at televised jokes that are accompanied by laugh tracks. I don’t watch much comedy, so I’ll trust the science on this: “we’re just naturally more receptive to jokes when we already hear people laughing at them.” One additional interesting aspect of the study: autistic individuals made up a third of the people whose reactions were observed. (via NextDraft)
Bone Spur: You know how in every slightly scifi spy show someone puts a finger near their ear and they can tech-magically communicate with someone else on their highly trained squad? Well, bone conduction may yet make that real, thanks to a Kickstarter. (via IFTF)
Game On: The excellent A Closer Listen website singles out the best video-game scores of the year thus far.
Casual FX: A lot of writing about sound in video games comes back to the moment-specificity of sound in massive games that distinguishes them from the fixed recordings that accompany movies. At the Gamasutra website, Pavel Shylenok talks about the other end of the spectrum: casual games.
/ / A GOOGOL OF BLOGS
Reading the web
I’ve had this separate section for a few issues now where I highlight recent blog entries. The fact is, what is and isn’t a blog is a bit hazy, and has been for a long time. In any case, these are interesting, recent items from the blogs of sizable American institutions. If you have a sound/music blog or if there’s a sound/music blog you love, lemme know.
Minnesota Ranger: Andrew Fenchel, who runs the excellent Chicago-based concert series and arts organization Lampo, wrote at the blog of the Walker Art Center about a day-long “marathon” of sound art performances. It’s a great piece, with highlights of work by Christine Sun Kim, Walter Kitundu, Haroon Mirza, and other artists.
Summer Schooled: A summer intern at the Library of Congress writes about his dive into the institution’s resources: “I was able to find a few news articles about why music gets stuck in your head, and using the Library’s database resources, I located quite a few journal articles relating to the topic of earworms, or, to use the more scientific terminology, involuntary musical imagery (INMI). Interestingly, these journal articles dated back to the mid-2000s at the earliest–for some reason it was not a topic that was studied very extensively until the 21st century, and there still is no definitive answer as to why earworms happen. However, most studies I looked at found that longer note lengths and smaller intervals between notes made songs more likely to appear as INMI.” (via Mike Rhode)
This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the July 28, 2019, issue of the free weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound.
Homeward Bound
There was no This Week in Sound email July 21 because I’d returned shortly after 1:00am Sunday from a 16-day trip to New York to visit family, mostly on Long Island, where I’m from, and also upstate for a brief spell. It was a family-first trip (that’s me speaking to friends who read this and wonder why I didn’t get in touch), but I did manage one very hot day in Manhattan, getting to the Whitney Biennial and a few neighboring art galleries. More on all that if time allows in the coming week.
Happiness, I will note, is overhearing your mid-octogenarian father on the phone explaining/translating your interest in sound to a friend and, in the midst of this attempted explication, the microwave beeps throatily, and then having just tried to clarify why sound is an important topic, he has to explain to his friend what that beeping noise just now was.
I left Brooklyn for California in 1989, a year out of college, to work at Tower Records’ home office in West Sacramento, where I was an editor on its music magazines. Whenever I go back to visit New York, I count the minutes after arrival until I hear either Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen, and then I note which I heard first. I heard each of them just once on this lengthy recent trip, and the Springsteen occurrence barely counts. His tunes appeared in the trailer for the upcoming movie Blinded by the Light (which seems to have been green-lit so people could write think pieces about it and Danny Boyle’s Yesterday); it showed before the screening I caught of Spider-Man: Far From Home. As for Billy Joel, I heard him in between tracks from Yes and the Decemberists at a Mexican restaurant at JFK just before I flew home to San Francisco. And in fact, I heard San Francisco’s own Journey, Huey Lewis, Metallica, and Santana on this trip before I heard either Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen. Being that I was visiting from San Francisco, it was as if real life were acting like a hyper-personal Spotify algorithm.
This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the July 28, 2019, issue of the free weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound.
The Bells of Simenon
I had a few hours to kill last Saturday night before going to see the band This Is Not This Heat at the Chapel here in San Francisco, so I did what you do in such cases, which is to go to a library and take out a slim Georges Simenon novel. I picked up The Mahé Circle, which isn’t one of Simenon’s Maigret detective novels, but one of his even darker, detective-less books, the so-called romans durs (“hard novels,” as in hard on the reader). As a die-hard backpack-wearer who feels like he’s missing a limb on the rare occasion when he leaves the house with nothing over his shoulder, I prize books that fit in a jacket pocket (I also wanted a break from Neal Stephenson’s recent novel, Fall, which I started reading the day it came out, and I’ve been stuck at about 92% for weeks). Anyhow, chapter five of The Mahé Circle opens with this absolutely gorgeous bit of description:
Bells. Masses of bells plunging into a sky like the sea, making trembling circles there. The circles widened, collided, merged with each other, and then the bells, with the elegance of dolphins, began to plunge again.
While on the topic, should any of you be Simenon scholars, I have a question: The Mahé Circle was first published in 1946, but the English translation didn’t come out until 2014. Any explanation for the delay, besides the fact, of course, that Simenon wrote hundreds upon hundreds of books?
. . .
And while I spelled “Maigret” correctly up above, I hadn’t in the email edition of the This Week in Sound newsletter in which the piece first appeared. As penance, here is a handy reminder:
Magritte: Surrealist
Maigret: Realist
Magritte: favored and painted hats
Maigret: favored hats
Magritte: Belgian, born to Belgians
Maigret: French, created by a Belgian
Magritte: René
Maigret: Jules
August 1, 2019
Disquiet Junto Project 0396: Hum a Few Bars
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 5, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the evening, California time, on Thursday, August 1, 2019.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0396: Hum a Few Bars
The Assignment: Make music with by humming a song and then processing the humming.
Step 1: Record yourself humming an original tune.
Step 2: Edit that recording, using only the hum as source audio (adding effects/processing as you see fit), to create a completed track.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0396” (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 “disquiet0396” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation 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-0396-hum-a-few-bars/
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 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 5, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the evening, California time, on Thursday, August 1, 2019.
Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0396” 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 396th weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Assignment: Make music with by humming a song and then processing the humming — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0396-hum-a-few-bars/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project adapted (cropped, colors changed, text added, cut’n’paste) thanks to a Creative Commons license from a photo credited to Xavier Lacot:
July 25, 2019
Disquiet Junto Project 0395: Acoustic Expanse
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, July 29, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, July 25, 2019.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0395: Acoustic Expanse
The Assignment: Make music with (samples of) the biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere.
This project was proposed by Jason Richarson. There’s just one step:
Step 1: The biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere is in Narrandera, Australia. Junto member Jason Richardson recorded a wide range of samples of the guitar and made them available under a Creative Commons license. Now it’s time for you to play this guitar. Get the samples at big-guitar.com/download.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0395” (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 “disquiet0395” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation 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-0395-acoustic-expanse/
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 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, July 29, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, July 25, 2019.
Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0395” 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 395th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Acoustic Expanse / The Assignment: Make music with (samples of) the biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere — at:
Thanks to Jason Richardson for having proposed this project.
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0395-acoustic-expanse/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
July 21, 2019
Ain’t That Grand
Bionic piano
Augmented piano
Cyborg piano
Extended piano
What Sound Looks Like: An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
July 18, 2019
Disquiet Junto Project 0394: You & Me
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, July 22, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the evening, California time, on Thursday, July 18, 2019.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0394: You & Me
The Assignment: Accompany the music made by a species other than your own.
This is a project for World Listening Day.
Step 1: Think of an animal you would like to accompany. It may be one in your possession, like a household cat, dog, or bird, or perhaps it might be one for which you’ll need to locate a recorded example.
Step 2: Acquire audio of the animal you selected in Step 1, either by making a recording or locating one.
Step 3: Create a new piece of music by playing along with the audio acquired in Step 2. In the final mix, you and the animal you accompany should be heard at equal levels of prominence (of course, you may also trade off).
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0394” (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 “disquiet0394” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation 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-0394-you-me//
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 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, July 22, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the evening, California time, on Thursday, July 18, 2019.
Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0394” 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 394th weekly Disquiet Junto project — You & Me / The Assignment: Accompany the music made by a species other than your own — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0394-you-me//
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project adapted (cropped, colors changed, text added, cut’n’paste) thanks to a Creative Commons license from a photo credited to Nehama Verter:
Celebrate World Listening Day
Wondering how to celebrate World Listening Day, which occurs today, July 18, as it has every July 18th since 2010? Try this listening exercise:
Step 1: Prepare to sit still for 10 minutes, preferably outside.
Step 2: For the 10 minutes, listen intently. Also record the sound (with, for example, a phone).
Step 3: When the time is up, make a detailed list of every sound you can recall.
Step 4: Having made the list, then listen back to the recording. Note divergences from your list. Write down your observations about those differences.
World Listening Day has its roots in environmentalism and the field of audio ecology. The date July 18 was chosen because it is the birthday of the famed composer and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer, who turns 86 this year. However, don’t ignore, avoid, or devalue machinery, urban ambience, and other human-made sound. And if you do the listening exercise, please consider sharing your notes and observations. Thanks.
More on World Listening Day at worldlisteningproject.org.
