Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 28

Four Takes on Three Arvo Pärt Pieces

I just sent this out to paid subscribers of my This Week in Sound email newsletter. There was also a bonus Steve Reich piece.

Disquiet Junto Project 0688: Sign Up

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0688: Sign Up
The Assignment: Interpret a routine public sign as a musical instruction.

Step 1: Think about signs you see near where you live or work, the sort of routine public signage one generally takes for granted. Consider in particular signs that, unintentionally, are open to broader interpretation than might have been intended.

Step 2: Choose a sign from Step 1.

Step 3: Willfully interpret the sign you selected in Step 2 as a musical instruction of some sort.

Step 4: Record a track in which you follow the musical instruction you inferred in Step 3.

Note: When posting the track, please, if possible, include a photograph or other rendering of the sign you employed.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0688” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0688-sign-up/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, March 10, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 688th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Sign Up — The Assignment: Interpret a routine public sign as a musical instruction — at https://disquiet.com/0688/

Sound Ledger: Ice Cream, Dementia, Deepfakes

15: Number of minutes an ice cream truck is allowed to be in one place (unless there is a line) in Coral Gables, Florida, if rules currently under discussion are enacted

55: Years of age after which, in a recent study, individuals with hearing loss who didn’t employ hearing aids had a measurable decline in cognitive function

26: Percent of UK residents who have reported receiving deepfake phone calls in the past 12 months

Sources: ice cream (miamiherald.com), cognitive (nature.com), and deepfake (msn.com).

On the Line: Stephenson, Brand, Moore

▰ Coach Class:

The train's whistle, which twenty-four hours ago had lulled her to sleep, took on a new, urgent keening: repeated triple blasts radiating across the infinite prairie like smoke signals in the dark. It was, she well knew, a way of summoning medical help to the next whistle-stop. ... Those who lived in such places were accustomed to rolling over and going back to sleep after being wakened by the long blasts of the Empire Builder's whistle, and some could even identify the engineer by his signature. The triple blast, however, would visit their sleep as a nightmare and draw them toward the station in an unsettled frame of mind.

That is from Polostan, the recent novel from Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon), and the first in a trilogy, though it reads more like he turned a characteristically monolith-size book, and someone finally convinced him to break it into thirds. And just as a side note, if you read Stephenson’s 2019 novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, then this moment serves as a conscious chronological premonition of the brutal futuristic road trip in that book: “This was the bad side of the high plains: communities so remote that people could get away with anything, and, lacking contact with settled places, could wander far down strange thoughtways from which there was no route back to sanity.”

. . .

▰ On Brand:

I wanted a day when the enemy would be so overwhelmed by the sound of my ancestors dragging their chains that they would be killed by the clamour.

That is Canadian poet and novelist Dionne Brand, as excerpted in an appreciation by Andrea Brady in the London Review of Books. The same issue has Anne Carson writing about, in part, a friend “who wanted to compose an entire symphony out of the sound of people sighing,” and Frances Morgan surveying the work of Yoko Ono (“The liberating conceptual shift proposed by the Fluxus movement, which made a flushing toilet or a struck match a performance, is not unrelated to the process that puts an audiotape in a vitrine or transforms a dead musician’s clothes into an auction lot”). It’s quite the issue.

. . .

▰ By the Numbers:

So, then, silence it is, Cage's 4'33" on infinite repeat, which, basically, has been this place's playlist for the last year and a half, a soundtrack ambient in its absence.

That is Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta) on the penultimate page of his recent novel, The Great When, which like the Stephenson one mentioned above is the first in a new series — and also like the Stephenson, is uncharacteristically brief for this author. Thanks to my friend Darko Macan, who read the book before I could get around to it, pointed out this but to me, and says “this epilogue is mostly about the coming attractions.”

The CarPlay App I’ve Been Waiting For

I don’t drive much, though these days I drive more than I had for a couple decades. This recent driving has, as I mentioned in a blog post here two years ago (“Message to Self: Lessons, conundrums and opportunities in voice-first EV interfaces”), helped me catch up on the role of audio interfaces in a mode of life that had become unfamiliar to me. As a result of the gap, I leapfrogged right into fairly mature CarPlay, which is Apple’s system that lets your phone become the car’s interface. The experience has been interesting, informative, and sometimes even useful. I’ve managed to come up to speed on various ways that sounds, including voice commands, have gained utility in digitally mediated vehicular activity.

I’ve touched on numerous aspects of this topic in blog posts and my This Week in Sound email newsletter. Throughout, the one thing that really seemed (note the past tense) to be missing, at least for me, was an easy, dependable way to record a voice memo. I won’t go into the details of the benefits of recording voice memos here; if you don’t find voice memos useful, more power to you, and if you do find voice memos useful, then you know what I’m talking about. I will add that with the recent rise of affordable excellent voice-to-text transcriptions (my primary app for this is MacWhisper, though I use the rev.com service on occasion), voice memos are more useful than ever.

As it turned out, CarPlay was (again, note the past tense) really lacking when it came to voice memos. Apple’s iOS operating system even comes with an app literally called Voice Memos (and in a recent update, this app came to include automatic transcription, though I find MacWhisper to be superior), and I use it every day at my desk and when I got for walks. However, unlike Messages and Maps and Podcasts and other such apps — even many non-Apple apps, like YouTube Music and Libby and Hoopla — Apple’s Voice Memos app has zero presence in CarPlay. I’ve mentioned this functional void routinely on social media, and I’ve summed up my frustration and confusion in the article linked to above.

And I’m not alone. A search for variations on “CarPlay voice memo” (and for its Google equivalent, Android Auto) yields numerous online discussions about makeshift fixes, such as leaving yourself a voice mail or texting yourself a voice recording. None of these options, I’ve found, has been particularly useful. The best I’ve been able to do is to use Apple’s Shortcuts feature to create a button on my phone’s home screen and lock screen to record right into the Voice Memos app — which works well, except it means I still have to use my phone, physically, which is not great when you’re driving a car.

And then, out of the blue, a person named David Kellas added a comment to my two-year-old blog post, saying he had gone ahead and made the app himself. “I wanted an app like this for ages,” he wrote in his post, “so built it for everyone to use without any subscription.” And it’s true: the app, which is named Auto Memo Recorder, costs just $1.99, a one-time fee. And it does what it says.

I installed Auto Memo Recorder on my iPhone (an iPhone 13 Pro) and I have been trying it out. It works well. It’s nothing fancy, just pure function. I generally am more of a touchscreen user than a voice-activation user, so my habit so far is to have the app on the home screen, which makes for a two-click or three-click process. I click on the app, and then I click to start recording. The third click is if CarPlay already has an app open (like Maps or Plex or YouTube Music), which actually is most of the time.

Right now, pretty much the only thing that, for my purposes, would improve upon what Auto Memo Recorder offers is for it to sync recordings via iCloud or Dropbox. I’ll keep using it, and I’ll report back on any other observations I have.

Auto Memo Recorder is available through the App Store. More details at invisiblestorm.co.uk/auto-memo. The website mentions “AI enhanced applications,” but the only apparent AI in Auto Memo Recorder is that it will transcribe the voice recording to text. The above image is a screenshot from the app’s website.

Under the Boardwalk

I’m not sure it is accurate to say that the four tracks of artfully mangled and repurposed tracks that comprise Boardwalk by Grey Tissue (aka Gabe Konrad) necessarily proceed from whisper to scream. Why, the very first track on the release, “Boardwalk I,” has a protracted feedback screech midway through that may keep some listeners from proceeding further, but doing so is highly recommended. There is, from “Boardwalk I” through the especially chaotic and boisterous “Boardwalk IV,” a persistent sense of consideration here, of sounds both sourced and utilized with particular ends in mind, more narrative than abstract, also haunting yet enticing. In the Drifters’s classic “Under the Boardwalk,” Johnny Moore sang, “From the park you hear the happy sound of the carousel,” and while quite different sounds are deployed on Grey Tissue’s Boardwalk, it is still very much a depiction of a place, a time, and a mood. The album was released by the Japanese label NEUS-318

On Repeat: Schulz, Monome, Downes

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Jeannine Schulz has an approach to releasing music that I’m still wrapping my head around, a mix of singles and albums and EPs that mark her as prolific but are also so understated that they feel less like a torrent and more like a steady trickle. A note at the end of the release page on Bandcamp reads: “Please make sure you download the music after the purchase as the musical content of the site sometimes changes. Tracks or albums are occasionally removed from the catalog.” Her latest, two tracks under the title All Is Found, is absolutely perfect for this mode, as it sounds like music being erased as it is being recorded. Schulz is based in Germany.

▰ I am a sucker for works in progress. I probably listen to more half-finished music than to mastered commercial releases. This video is an early-stages work (turn up the volume, as it’s quiet), a “a realtime performance processor and synthesizer” currently under development, using two Monome-made devices, the Grid and the Arc. It’s by Element433 (aka Pere Villez), based in Brighton and Hove, U.K.

▰ Archival listen: Enemy — actually all caps, ENEMY, apparently — is a trio consisting of Kit Downes, piano; Petter Eldh, double bass; and James Maddren, drums. I’ve been getting deep into Downes since hearing him on Breaking the Shell (my favorite album 2024), the trio record he recorded (playing organ, not piano) with electric guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Andrew Cyrille. I like a lot of the Enemy album The Betrayal, in particular the first track, which does this thing Robert Glasper, among others, does, where the piano sounds as if it had been sampled, the way the lines are fragmented and repeat little snippets frequently. The idea of a pianist simulating the sound of a seam in an audio loop makes me ecstatically happy. This is “post-MPC jazz” (the MPC being the sampling instrument made by Akai). Downes appears to split his time between London, England, and Berlin, Germany.

Scratch Pad: Wah, Autechre, Attenborough

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ A Chinese restaurant, not a guitar pedal shop

▰ Obsidian-headz: is there a detriment to deleting files from the Finder folder (I’m on a Mac), versus deleting them within the app itself (right click -> delete)? Thanks. I ask because I often have a dozen Bebop files and it’s easier to delete a group rather than one by one. (And I got replies, including one from someone who works on Obsidian, that indeed, this is OK. No detriments, no issues.)

▰ Imagine working on a product where everyone cheers when it goes down and talks about how much more they’re getting done

▰ Hyper local, but I just gotta take a moment to say that the vegan coconut at Polly Ann Ice Cream in the Outer Sunset (San Francisco) is insanely fluffy and tasty

▰ As I mentioned in the email containing the instructions for this week’s Disquiet Junto, the weekly process of these projects is like a biological clock for me, somewhere between the two processes — the “physiological” and the “behavioral” — that provide this week’s theme. And if I bungled the science with this one, that’s on me — please just roll with the metaphor.

▰ The cash register at this cafe had a malfunctioning receipt roll, and after an extended period of failed attempts by the cashier, who had many other simultaneous duties, to rectify the situation, several customers went on YouTube to locate solutions, and one of those worked. Just remarkable.

▰ Wasn’t expecting the first episode of the new season of Reacher to have a Thee Headcoats song playing during the end credits. (I’m wondering if a music supervisor just did a lyric search for a song talking about something context-specific, in this case a young girl.)

▰ I have no idea the extent to which this makes me an economic boycott scab, but I did manage to jump over various e-commerce hurdles to purchase a ticket to attend the Autechre / Mark Broom concert in a little over seven months. It’s at the Regency. Last show I saw there was the Atarashii Gakko! concert.

▰ I entered a tiny bathroom stall at the back of a bar, only to be greeted by a voice. The voice belonged to David Attenborough: a recording of him from Life on Earth. As I flushed, I Iearned that the “identity of species is proclaimed by the plumage.”

▰ Reading: I finished reading my third novel of the year, which given that we’re two months into 2025 feels a little slow, but of course this third book was Neal Stephenson’s epic and fantastic Cryptonomicon, and I read its 900-plus pages at a particularly slow pace because, this being my fourth time through it, I really wanted to pay particular attention. And I have to say, it is better than ever. When it was published, in 1999, the end of World War II was barely a half century past, and now we’re more than a quarter of a century since the book came out. Its technology is now old, if not as old as the technology of the Second World War. The book also closes better than I had recalled; Stephenson is known for often falling short in how his books conclude, but this Cryptonomicon should not be counted among the failures in that regard. And this bit comes from close to the end:

I’m nearly done, meanwhile, with Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and well into Cory Doctorow’s Walkway, and making continued slow progress with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. And I somehow didn’t finish reading a single graphic novel this week, even though I’m in the middle of a few.

RIP, Gene Hackman (1930 – 2025)

Gene Hackman arrives at the Pearly Gates. Saint Peter welcomes him in without even looking up. Hackman asks, “How did you know it was me?” Saint Peter replies, “You have a certain way of opening up the door. Y’know, first the key goes in real quiet, and then the door comes open real fast, just like you think you’re going to catch me at something.”

I’m not sure there is a movie that took my head, and in particular my ears, and put them squarely on the rails they were meant to be on quite like the The Conversation did, in large part thanks to sound designer Walter Murch, and of course the embodiment of the fraught act of listening that is Hackman’s surveillance expert, Harry Caul. I’ve been uncovering the deep truths of this 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film ever since.

My attempt at a joke in the first paragraph above cribs directly from what Teri Garr’s character, Amy, says to Hackman’s Caul.

There is a lot of tragedy in this film, and for me the essential tragedy is Caul’s inability — and keep in mind, this is someone whose job is to discern people’s hidden truths by observing them — to recognize Amy as his soulmate. He gets outwitted several times in The Conversation, but his worst error of judgment is his lack of real appreciation for Amy. The fact that she catches him spying on her should be reason enough for him to see in her something special — countersurveillance as foreplay. But here, in this scene, she makes it clear that her ear is as good as, if not better than, his.

Whenever I watch the movie, I can’t help but wonder if Amy would have noticed the misunderstanding at the heart of the audio recording that Caul, fatally, doesn’t. If only Caul had let her in.

Disquiet Junto Project 0687: Applied Science

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0687: Applied Science
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that explores physiological and behavioral techniques.

Step 1: It is understood in biology that there are differences between the “behavioral” and the “physiological,” between an action or response a person makes by choice, and one that happens on instinct or involuntarily. (Please forgive these rough descriptions.) Familiarize yourself with the concepts.

Step 2: Consider various ways that some musical activities might be considered behavioral, such as consciously playing notes, and others might be physiological, such as maintaining a beat.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that combines a mix of some of the behavioral and physiological music activities you thought about in Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0687” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0687-applied-science/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, March 3, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 687th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Applied Science — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that includes physiological and behavioral techniques — at https://disquiet.com/0687/