Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 307

This Week in Sound: Plasma Waves + Cymatic Art +

A lightly annotated clipping service.

Ring Cycle: The second season of The Expanse, the Syfy channel’s excellent (stellar?) adaptation of the James S. A. Corey novels, may have come to a close last month, but NASA is here to fill the void. Not only has the Cassini spacecraft situated itself between Saturn and its rings, it has captured audio data of the particulates therein. As Rae Paoletta reports at gizmodo.com, the Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument on Cassini (see recording above) picked up “the hits of hundreds of ring particles per second,” something of an apparent surprise to scientists back home on Earth.

Synaesthesia Loop: Over at nautil.us, Heather Sparks summarizes the cymatic art of Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown. They took pictures of what different notes look like (see above) when stimulating “ink-black water,” and then turned those images back into sound, using the software Photosounder.

Audiophile Update: The whole notion of what “home audio” means is experiencing a continuing shift of late, as listening becomes — for better and worse — as much a subject for gadgets as producing sound: Google Home, it’s listening-enabled tech hub, now supports multiple users, by recognizing their independent voices; Amazon, in a race with Google Home, has made its AI available to chatbot developers; and in case neither of those instances raise privacy concerns for you, a lawsuit alleges that Bose wireless headphones spy on their users.

Womb Tune: An artificial womb, currently being tested on lamb fetuses, is being considered for gestating humans. As Jessica Hamzelou writes at newscientist.com, the parent-oriented item would allow “parents to communicate sounds to the baby and to see it with a camera.””

Sound Material: The miracle substance graphene, the world’s reported strongest material, has numerous gee-whiz applications, ranging from desalinating sea water to cleaning up radioactive waste. It also has sonic potential, according to a paper (at nature.com) by M. S. Heath & D. W. Horsell. Check it out for details on thermoacoustics.

Noise Central: Three of the noisiest cities on the planet are in one country, India, according to a report in indiatimes.com. This coincided with the attempts to institute an annual “No-Horn Day” (thehindu.com).

This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the May 2, 2017, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.

What Sound Looks Like

This photograph was shot in New York after I landed at JFK a few weeks ago for a short visit from San Francisco. We touched down late, later even than planned, and so my memory is a little foggy. I’ve pieced together the first stages of the itinerary from the timeline that is automated Google photos backup (a fairly dependable course of action in such circumstances). The timeline exception is when photos are added from other services, like those edited in Instagram or another app, or transferred over from SMS or email — and those would only appear reverse-anachronistically later in the timeline, anyhow, not earlier. In any case, I’m fairly certain that this was shot not on the intra-JFK train that shuttles you from your arrival terminal to where you gather your bags and head out into the world (maybe such a thing doesn’t even exist — like I said, I was pooped), but on one of the city’s subway trains. This shot is a closeup of a well-worn sticker fixed next to an older, larger, metal speaker/button combo labeled only in all-caps English: “Emergency Intercom,” with the additional instructions “To Talk / Press and Release Button / Wait for Steady Light.” (That last bit suggests itself for poetic treatment.) This instructional infographic — instructographic? — does a good job of connecting speaking to pushing, thanks to the red color coding, though I must note that in real life the red button is a far darker shade. The little bright green light does its assigned job of reaffirming the text, which is to say it’s just as confusing, especially in, you know, an emergency. What seems to be missing from the image is any sense of, well, emergency. The demeanor of the cartoon human seems to be that of someone serenading a favorite device (Her: The Musical, now on Broadway), not alerting authorities to the existence of a suspicious package. Also worth mentioning: the red, waveformy, RSS-logo-ish speaking pattern seems to treat the microphone (below) and speaker (above) as equals.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

A Modular Bloom

This elegant, gestural piece for modular synthesizer cycles a bit of low-key, atmospheric glitch several times in a row before a joyous little rupture occurs. When that happens, just prior to three minutes into this nearly four-minute piece, the whole sense of time shifts. What had felt slow and relaxed takes on a more sublime bearing. Once you know what’s hidden beneath the surface, it’s impossible to not sense its presence on repeat listens. What had been calm and collected now feels anticipatory, like a stop-motion image of a flower that quite suddenly, in strong daylight, blooms.

There’s also a lovely, misty video for it on YouTube:

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/lightbath. More from Lightbath, aka Bryan Noll, at lightbath.com.

The Organ as Installation

The opening roar of this excerpt of a recording suggests a crowd going wild, not so much at a concert as at a vuvuzela-filled soccer stadium. In this case, the stadium is a stately gothic structure, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago, and the ecstatic noise is coming from its E.M. Skinner pipe organ, in an original piece of music by Olivia Block. Advance notice of the performance, which was recorded live on April 21, 2017, described it as something that “straddles the line between musical composition and sound installation.” The installation aspect is in part related to how Block’s use of the organ explores the contours of the space, and also how speakers distributed throughout the building suggest that attendees wander amid the sound to hear it from different vantages. The work, as reproduced in this stereo document, moves from recognizable organ tones to fantasms of eager, treble-piercing waves. Live performances are difficult to reproduce, spatially informed ones all the more so. This recording, by Alex Inglesian, gives us a sense of the work’s breadth and impact.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/olivia-block. More from Block, who is from Texas and lives in Chicago, at twitter.com/oliviablock and oliviablock.net, and on the piece at renaissancesociety.org.

“HVAC Cosplay”

I’ve come to recognize that the sounds I aspire to make on my modular synthesizer are, often as not, the sounds that I hear in public transportation and HVAC systems. I had several titles planned for this, but in the end it is HVAC cosplay. It is a synthesizer disguising itself as a semi-industrial drone, the drone the product of the infrastructure of some imagined generic place, an office building, a hotel, a school, that works very hard to disguise the presence of its infrastructure. The drone is the evidence of infrastructure that seeps into view — into hearing view, that is, into earshot — when your elevator is stuck between floors, or you find yourself in a subbasement because of poor wayfinding signage in the staircase, or most opportunely at a particular spot in a hall where the duct ley lines create a confluence of overtones. The sound may not even be present in the world; it may be specific to how your ear receives and contorts the sound. You alone may be witness to a particular signal.

More practically, the overtones here are the result of three different oscillators on my modular synthesizer being heard in unison, impacting each other, and being impacted by a handful of low frequency oscillators. Some frequency bands within those main oscillators themselves are being impacted by variations on the low frequency oscillations, and then amid it all one of those three main oscillators occasionally is triggered to move up and down an octave, at times suggesting a tonal center, at others testing the contours of the system’s comfort zone.

More specifically, for those playing along at home, the three oscillators are: an Intellijel Dixie II, a Hikari Sine, and a Pittsburgh Oscillator. The LFOs are all courtesy of a single module, the Xaoc Batumi (I just installed it last night; this is my first patch with it). The filter bank is an ADDAC 601. There’s a Doepfer A-121 and a Circuit Abbey Invy in the mix, too, as well as a 2hp Filt. They keyboard is a QuNexus, doing its thing on the Dixie II. I’ve long fiddled with oscillators to try to engender dense, rich tones, and this is closer to what I’ve been trying for than anything I’ve done until now.

Disquiet Junto Project 0279: Word Interiorities

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.

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 8, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, May 4, 2017.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0279: Word Interiorities
Dissect the sonic properties of a single spoken word.

Step 1: We’ll be composing short explorations of sound by taking apart the recording of a single spoken word, excavating it for its components, and then exposing them through various techniques, such as repetition, elongation, and contrast. The first step is to choose your word. You can choose your own, or you can follow these chance instructions, which require a single dice. First, roll the dice once. That number tells you which of the six chapters in Luciano Berio’s book Remembering the Future contains your word. Then roll the dice three times; the combined values of those three rolls (e.g., a roll of 3 and a roll of 4 and a roll of 2 yields 9) is how many words to count into the chapter to find your word. You should be able to access a digital copy of the book via Google Books at this URL:

https://goo.gl/hQ1kc0

If the first page of a chapter isn’t available, then simply begin counting from the first available page of the chapter. You can also see if your local library has a copy — or maybe there’s already one on your bookshelf.

Or just choose your own word (preferably one that is family-friendly), or use the chance operation with another book.

Step 2: You don’t need to know much if anything about the composer Berio to do this project. However, it may be helpful to know that he has said that phonemes were more important than syllables when composing for lyrics.

Step 3: Record a short piece of sound/music exploring your selected word, using the ideas described in Step 1 and Step 2, and/or any other approaches you wish to employ.

Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: If you hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0279″ (no spaces) in the name of your track. If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to my locating the tracks and creating a playlist of them.

Step 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 3: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track:

http://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0279-word-interiorities/

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

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 8, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, May 4, 2017.

Length: The length is entirely up to the participant.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0279″ 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: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 279th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Word Interiorities: Dissect the sonic properties of a single spoken word” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0279/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

http://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0279-word-interiorities/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image associated with this project is a detail of a public domain photo of Luciano Berio, from:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luciano_Berio.jpg#mw-jump-to-license

What Sound Looks Like

This is the doorbell of a friend’s home, where I managed to crash on the couch a week or so ago while traveling. My friend wasn’t present the entire time, so I didn’t have to ring the bell when I arrived. I just used the key that had been left for me. This is an apartment I’ve visited many times, and rarely ever have I had to actually ring that bell. Usually by the time I’ve made my way up via elevator, the door has been left open a crack, my arrival having been preceded by an announcement from the doorman. On occasion I have rung it, but each time it felt like I was expressing an impatience I didn’t actually feel. I did once ring it purposefully, many years ago. Someone else, by all evidence a resident, was lingering in the hallway, and I got the sense that I was being viewed with suspicion. Pushing the doorbell provided a signal of belonging, sufficient enough that I sensed my onlooker begin to relax. I spent three nights here last week, and by the end felt a bit like a resident myself. No one visited me during my stay, so I never heard the doorbell ring. When I finally left, I had been instructed to put the key under the door. I did so and then, after a moment’s consideration, pushed the doorbell and listened as it resonated in the rooms that I was fully aware were entirely empty.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

Industrial Interstices

The syrupy pace of the brief Corruption piece “Slow Life” brings to mind the chopped and screwed versions of hip-hop tracks. It’s not merely slow. It’s slow so as to announce its slowness. The damage done to the source material is such that the fact of the original audio’s once more peppy existence is a foregone conclusion. The sound wears its wear on its sleeve, reveling in the muddy slipstream it inhabits. Corruption is making a kind of industrial music here, echoing the sounds of mechanized life, but exploring the interstices rather than mimicking the means of production.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/corrption. More from Corruption, who is based in Japan, at corruption-scrapbook.tumblr.com, mostly in the form of photographic documentation of urban scenes, a fine complement to the music.

Disquietude Podcast Episode 0002

This is the second episode of the Disquietude podcast of ambient electronic music. (There’s an odd little glitch at the opening, but otherwise it seems to sound good.) All seven tracks of music are featured with the permission of the individual artists or their record labels. It’s currently on SoundCloud, and will shortly be at Mixcloud, YouTube, iTunes, and Stitcher. There’s also an RSS link, should you need it.

Below is the structure of the episode with time codes for the tracks:

00:00 theme and intro

01:42 Naoyuki Sasanami’s “Winter”

05:12 Geneva Skeen’s “Ambivalence”

10:42 Jeanann Dara and Jherek Bischoff’s “Jherek”

17:46 R. Beny’s “Basin”

23:21 Bana Haffar’s “Memoriam”

30:27 Scanner’s “Captiva 7”

35:44 Yann Novak’s “Surroundings (Excerpt)”

44:22 track notes

49:18 essay on room tone

51:50 outro

53:19 end

What follows is a rough transcript of the spoken material in the podcast, as well as links to the artists whose work is included:

00:00 theme and intro

Welcome to the Disquietude podcast.

This is the second episode.

The goal of the Disquietude podcast is to collect adventurous work in the field of ambient electronic music. This is music that explores the intersection of sound, art, and technology. What follows is all music that captured my imagination, and I hope that it appeals to your imagination as well.

The seven tracks heard here are all reproduced with the permission of the individual recording artists — or, in one case, their record labels.

To varying degrees, all the work in the Disquietude podcast can be described as a sort of drone, or as having a drone at its core. All but one piece here are by musicians working alone; these consist of R. Beny, Bana Haffar, Naoyuki Sasanami (who goes by Naotko), Geneva Skeen, Robin Rimbaud (who goes by Scanner), and Yann Novak. The one exception is the duo of Jeanann Dara and Jherek Bischoff.

All the music heard here is instrumental, which is to say there is no prominent vocal part, and thus it’s suitable for background listening. It’s all ambient, which is to say it’s also suitable for close, concentrated listening. That dual sense of potential uses, both inattentive and attentive, both background and foreground, is the hallmark of fine ambient music.

As for me, my name is Marc Weidenbaum, and I’m the host of Disquietude. You can learn more about the material in this episode of the Disquietude podcast at disquiet.com/podcast0002.

And now, on to the music — after which I’ll explore the sounds in a bit more detail, with a little information on the musicians and some observations about their recordings, and a few additional comments. Thank you.

44:22 track notes

I’m going to take a few minutes to work through the tracks I played, starting with the most recent one, which is fading out now. It’s the sole excerpt in this episode of Disquietude, even though it’s also the longest track. The piece is titled “Surroundings,” and the full half hour of it is available in a new album by that title released on the LINE record label. The artist is Yann Novak, who is based in Los Angeles. The audio was originally created for a project at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, not far from where I live in San Francisco. The source audio in the track is from the museum and from the park. I began speaking as it faded out specifically because there is no natural place to fade out, which is very much to its deeply organic credit.

Full Novak album at lineimprint.com.

Going back to the beginning, the set started with “Winter” by the musician Naoyuki Sasanami, who lived for a long time in Tokyo and recently moved back to his native Yoichi in Hokkaido, Japan. “Winter” was part of a January 2017 anniversary release from the Naviar Records label. The work seems gentle but is quite dynamic, relieving pressure and building it back up, and moving things around in the stereo spectrum in a manner that’s especially evident on headphones.

Sasanami track also at naoyukisasanami.bandcamp.com.

Next came “Ambivalence” by Geneva Skeen, who is based in Los Angeles. The track is from her album Dark Speech, released in September 2016, on the Dragon’s Eye record label, which is run by Yann Novak, whom I mentioned earlier. The piece feels more mechanized, more metallic, than Novak’s, but like Novak’s it is based largely on field recordings. There are also elements of Skeen’s own lilting voice. In just five and a half minutes, the track goes through numerous transitions, the high point being a kind of fugue for steam pipes with her layered voice as choral accompaniment.

Skeen album at dragonseyerecordings.bandcamp.com.

“Jherek” is the title of this piece from Jeanann Dara, and it’s also the first name of the musician she collaborated with in its creation, Jherek Bischoff. It’s from the album Énouement I — forgive my pronunciation — released in September 2016. Dara is based in Brooklyn, New York, and works primarily with the viola. There is a lot of music these days that, in terms of classification, teases at both atmospheric and classical, and in the best cases, such as this, it can comfortably be situated in either area.

Dara album at soundcloud.com/jeananndara.

The next piece, “Basin,” is by R. Beny, who is based in Oakland, California. I am big admirer of his, and while I’ve only seen him perform live once, at a small cafe in the South Bay, I’ve see him work live many times, thanks to his excellent YouTube video channel, which is where I first came across him performing “Basin” on a modular synthesizer. There’s a wonderful balance in it between the soft melodic transitions, and the rougher background sound, the latter of which suggests the creak of a boat tugging at its mooring.

R. Beny video at youtube.com

Bana Haffar’s “Memoriam” was recorded to honor those who died in the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland in early December 2016. Haffar herself is based in LA, and I had the pleasure of seeing her play at the Sync 01 event in San Francisco’s SOMA district about a year ago. She nudges a rhythmic element that asks the head to nod along, even as the piece’s more tonal material seduces one into a lulling stasis.

Haffar track at soundcloud.com/banahaffarmusic.

The London-based musician Robin Rimbaud, who for decades has recorded under the name Scanner, sent me this track along with several others when I inquired about his time on Captiva Island, Florida. He was participating in an artists residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the same residency at which Marcus Fischer recorded a piece in the previous episode of the Disquietude podcast. Like the Haffar piece that precedes it here, Scanner’s — titled “Captiva 7” — has a rhythmic bauble at its core. As the piece proceeds, it at times threatens to frazzle, the high end exceeding whatever confine Scanner has set for it, and at times it gets so quiet, so muffled, as to merge with the underlying ambient bed.

More from Rimbaud/Scanner at scannerdot.com.

49:18 essay on room tone

This is a podcast about music and sound, so it makes sense I’d think and talk a bit about the sound in the podcast, specifically the recording process. The first episode’s narration was recorded in my home in San Francisco. So was this one’s. I live in the Richmond District, which is relatively quiet by city standards, but still has its share of emergency vehicles, helicopters, and passing planes. We live a few blocks from the nearest fire station, and about a mile or so from the ocean. When the high school band practices or there are games, we can hear it from the backyard — likewise concerts in Golden Gate Park, which is a couple blocks away.

I remember back in 2013 working late one night when I was completing my book on the Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It was my first book, and I was a little stressed, maybe more than a little. As I walked home in the dark from a café where I’d been typing, I heard Paul McCartney, headlining the Outside Lands festival, screaming “Helter Skelter” from deep in the park. I could relate.

My neighborhood is also home to numerous motorcycle, scooter, and car enthusiasts who work from their garages, and any given afternoon, especially on the weekend, there is likely a moment out of one of the Mad Max films or Peter Weir’s The Cars Ate That Paris, when home-brew engines are tested out on our hills.

I tried various places to record Disquietude audio.

I tried a closet with lots of clothes packed in.

I tried, at a friend’s suggestion, our car, which having a curved interior and lots of fabric should be conducive, but the street noise was too loud through our slim garage door.

I tried the small office I rent in the Inner Richmond, but it is long and narrow and prone to unkind echoes.

Many years ago a sound engineer came to my home office to record me for someone else’s podcast. It was the first and only time I’ve had a professional record in my home, and I asked her for a copy of the room tone, which at the time was higher grade than anything I could accomplish, though since then I’ve been using an H4N Zoom and, at times, a Shure microphone. I loved listening to that room tone recording, and would often play it live in the same room, listening to the room in the room, enjoying the locative reverberations.

Room tone has come in handy when putting this podcast together. At the very last minute of the previous episode, the morning of March 18, when I was about to post it, I realized that when I meant to say “0001” in a URL I accidentally said “000 01” — an extra fifth digit. So, I had to go in and edit it. If you listen closely you’ll hear the edit, and many other little background noises.

Those small sounds in many other contexts would be easily ignorable. But this is a podcast focused on music and field recordings that are likely to be overheard at best. They’re ambient music, and the fissures are especially evident in quiet — especially in a context when one is already likely to listen closely.

51:50 outro

And that brings to an end this episode of the Disquietude podcast. I want to thank all the musicians who approved the inclusion of their recordings. Thanks as well to Brian Scott of Boon Design for help designing the logo, and to Max La Rivière-Hedrick of Futureprüf for technical support. Thanks also to Lee Rosevere of Happy Puppy Records, to Marc Kate of the great Why We Listen podcast, to Lynda Hansen, and to Richard Chartier of the record label LINE.

The opening and closing theme music of the Disuietqude podcast is by Jimmy Kipple, who’s based in England, and who was acting on some vague directions I provided. Kipple has his own podcast, which is called “patzr radio” (that’s p a t z r). The voice heard in the theme belongs to the musician Paula Daunt, who is currently living in Japan. She’s saying the word “disquiet” in Portuguese. I won’t mangle it by trying to say it myself. That word is a nod to the late Futurist poet Fernando Pessoa, whose Book of Disquiet provided the name of my long-running website, Disquiet.com, back in 1996 when I first launched it.

You can learn more about the material in this episode of the Disquietude podcast at disquiet.com/podcast0002.

Thanks for listening. The next episode should air in about one month.

Two Programs in Collaboration

Multiple lines thread through this piece, one slow and muffled, like a water-logged bandoneon, the other chipper and vibrant, like a tiny robotic vibraphone with a glitchy chip. What it is is an experiment, apparently, in letting two pieces of software share data with each other in real time. The musician at the helm(s) of these softwares, programmed in SuperCollider, goes by Data Mads, who likens the composition to an experiment in code that is “selfaware.”

Video originally posted at YouTube. More on the processes at sccode.org.