Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 350
January 28, 2016
A Mixtape Singularity
I’m ripping old cassette mixtapes and burning them to CD for a friend’s birthday party, marking a significant milestone — the party, not the ripping. It used to take a long time to rip a CD, almost as long as it did to listen to one. Then it took very little time at all. At some point the digital process sped up so much that the CD itself essentially disintegrated, or at least its utility did. That is, you no longer needed the CD at all. Audio had, in a manner, reached a singularity. Digital had accelerated to the point where you bypassed the physical medium entirely, and you listened directly to the digital audio file on a device that both stored and played back the file. The intermediary CD, that mirror-faced descendant of the vinyl LP and the tape cassette, was no longer a requisite.
Where streaming sits along or alongside this continuum remains a little unclear. Streaming is more like radio than it is like a recording medium. Radio can be said to have experienced its own parallel acceleration toward a singularity: optimization through automation of commercial broadcasts. Commercial radio went, over time, from a freeform medium to one managed by human beancounters, to one managed by algorithmic beancounters. At some point the algorithm decided for us — not unlike humanity’s helicopter parent at the center of D.F. Jones’s anxious artificial-intelligence novel Colossus, published in 1966, same year as the first Association for Computing Machinery Turning Prize — that the optimal ’cast scenario wasn’t broad-cast at all. Instead, the algorithm proclaimed beneficently, we should all stream what we want to stream.
In many instances, thousands upon thousands of people might be listening to the exact same song at roughly the same time, but off by a matter of seconds or minutes. Somewhere right now thousands upon thousands of people are listening to the latest momentarily popular verse-chorus-verse assemblage about failed or expectant romance. If we were able to listen to them all at once it would be a mutant version of the original: repeated, layered, looping back on itself, reaching crescendos of volume during peak listening, and fading out when the majority of the population in the target audience — Central Time Zone in North America, perhaps — happens to be asleep.
That communal sound, if we had access to it — if, say, the Spotify API could let us sync and produce such a pop-music ambient surveillance apparatus — might produce an apt sonic portrait of what it means to listen in culture, to listen to culture, at this moment. Imagine observing Spotify activity the way a service like Listen to Wikipedia (listen.hatnote.com), by Mahmoud Hashemi and Stephen LaPorte, allows us to observer activity on the global communal encyclopedia: we wouldn’t be listening to Spotify so much as Listening to Listening to Spotify.
I have a dream where observing that streaming process becomes not just technically possible but genuinely popular, and pop music itself mutates to match the new norm. Songs as we known them would slowly disappear, replaced by rich, long miasmas: a slow-motion, longitudinal EDM of ambient pop. Paul Lamere is the Director of Developer Platform at Echonest, a division of Spotify. I asked him this past week if my dream API scenario could be implemented, and he said the current API doesn’t necessarily support it, but he pointed me to a visualization tool called Serendipity coded by Kyle McDonald during an arts residency there. McDonald’s Serendipity depicts pairs of people listening, per chance, to the same track within seconds of each other across the globe.
As for the ripping and burning of cassette tapes to CDs, it’s proceeding at its own, antediluvian pace. It’s very fast to burn a CD, but the tape needs to be recorded at its original speed. I have no fancy, double-speed cassette player, just this old stereo-system component. There are no functional silences on the tape, at least not by contemporary standards. In regard to these mixtapes, this isn’t simply because of the static of the tape’s own surface noise. It’s because the tape was itself second generation: most of these tracks were copied from LPs, so the CD versions are replicating not just the tape noise, but the vinyl noise, as well as whatever file-format compression is involved on the digital side of things. The residual file-format artifact is inaudible to me, and probably to most people. Perhaps down the road we’ll be able “hear” that something was an MP3 or a Wav or a FLAC file the way, today, we can “hear” that something was vinyl or tape. The idea that a skill like that would become commonplace seems futuristic, but then again the idea of burning one’s own digital media once seemed futuristic — and now burning one’s own digital media doesn’t just seem antiquated; it is antiquated.
The original reason to make these tapes was just to have some dusty musical memories playing at the party, but it’s clear now that the music is only part of the memory process. The tape hiss and the vinyl crackle will provide their own ambience, as will the physical act of putting one of these CDs into a CD player. (A thumb drive is being filled up, too, just in case. In the world of Spotify playlists — and, yes, Apple Music and Google Play Music, among others — tiny portable hard drives are simply another, more recent antiquity.) The physical act of putting a CD into a player will initiate a surface hiss that will summon the physical act of putting a tape in a tape player, and in that tape noise there will appear the sound of a needle touching vinyl, triggering yet another memory of physical activity. Audio has passed its singularity, and in our post-physical listening mode we now hear echoes of our earlier, embodied listening. Nostalgia may be as much a fool’s game as is futurism, but heck, that’s what birthdays are for.
Right now, though, I’m just watching in a software program called Audacity to keep an eye on the audio levels of the source tape. When they flatline, I’ll know the tape is through.
This first appeared in the January 26, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Disquiet Junto Project 0213: Complex Signatures
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at disquiet.com/junto, 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. 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.
Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:
This project was posted shortly before noon, California time, on Thursday, January 28, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 1, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0213: Complex Signatures
The Assignment: Combine three field recordings from artist Charles Lindsay to explore and express notions of perceived techno-organic intelligence.
This week’s project is being done in conjunction with the head of the Artist in Residence program at the SETI Institute. His name is Charles Lindsay, and he has provided us with three very different field recordings. Work completed for this project will be considered for employment in a future project of Charlie’s. Work won’t be used without the given participating musician’s permission.
Step 1: Consider what it is that Charlie is exploring in his work: “I’m thinking about evolution, entropy, sentience, and the complex signatures of intelligence: what microtonal soundtrack would best express the micro and the vast, the field and the matrix, what we call nature and what we call machine, in unity, as music or as sound?”
Step 2: Download the three tracks recorded by Charle that are in this playlist on SoundCloud. The first track was made on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, rain-forest ambient sounds caught with a parabolic microphone at nightfall. The second was made with a hydrophone at dusk amid the Bunsby Islands in British Columbia. The third was made at the D-WAVE2 Quantum Computer at NASA Ames.
https://soundcloud.com/charlies-exper...
Step 3: Follow this request from Charlie: “Please process, merge, and mix these tracks to seven minutes total. Imagine the final track looping indefinitely in a sound installation in a museum or gallery environment. This use of sound in controlled space is something I’m very interested in, as a real time, real space tool to blend so-called realities. Imagine dream images, much the way our mind seems to, glitches and all. I look forward to what you come up with, and thanks very much for your interest.”
Step 4: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This project was posted shortly before noon, California time, on Thursday, January 28, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 1, 2016.
Length: Your track should be seven minutes in length — if that request proves too long, certainly consider submitting something shorter.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, 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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0213-complexsignatures.” Also use “disquiet0213-complexsignatures” as a tag for your track.
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, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 213th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Combine three field recordings from artist Charles Lindsay to explore and express notions of perceived techno-organic intelligence”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2016/01/28/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
The photo associated with this project is the cover of Charles Lindsay’s forthcoming book, Carbon, more on which here:
http://minormattersbooks.com/collecti...
And here are details on a MASS MoCA exhibit he will be participating in. It begins May 28, 2016:
January 27, 2016
Musical Development That Occurs Over Repeated Listens
This piece by John Hudak moves trilled percussion figures amid slowly modulating chords, like Amon Tobin chilling with Herbie Hancock at the end of a particularly long and dolorous night. It’s soft, and suggestive, and enigmatic, what with all the rattles and chattering and stereoscopic pinging. Tiny noises momentarily hold, like they’re caught in the thin beam of light. Slow gurgles almost gain a resemblance to slurred speech. At 10 minutes in length, the track has plenty of time to circulate. It doesn’t necessarily gain complexity as it progresses, but it does so on repeated listens, as the details come to the fore, and the whole wide field of sonic elements seems to brighten — what once was dark becomes various shades of blue. The title “ATC4pm5nov2015” suggests it was recorded at 4pm on November 5, 2015 — what the “ATC” stands for isn’t immediately clear.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/johnhudak. More from Hudak, who’s based in Dobbs Ferry, New York, at johnhudak.bandcamp.com. (Found via a repost from the soundcloud.com/audio-obscura-music account.)
January 26, 2016
Exploring the Object-ness of Sounds in Audio Headspace
Cullen Miller has a tremendous new album out, titled Simulateur. It’s a collection of 11 electronic ventures that move from gentle, prismatic percussion (the opening track, “Objecthood,” whose title expresses the physicality, the object-ness of the sounds in audio headspace) through shuddering drones (the glitchy light noise of “Purple Cycle”). The majority explores minimal techno, from its outer dubby realm (the enticing “Formant Network”) to more club-friendly, if still metrically complex, beats (“Euclidean Tropism”). Wonderful stuff throughout.
Album originally posted at soundcloud.com/cullenmiller. Get the album as a free download at pointlinesurface.com. More from Miller at cullenmiller.tumblr.com. Full disclosure: Miller taught me everything I know about Audacity, more or less.
What Sound Looks Like
I once worked on a project where the company’s website was so complex and detailed and, frankly, byzantine, that by the time we first visited the company’s actual office I wondered where the skyscraper was hiding. You’d never know from the company’s massive online presence that it was really just a few dozen people working on the top floor of a two-floor building. Sometimes such confusion is willful, an act of strategic dissimulation, a game of tactical artifice. Sometimes it’s a matter of putting on airs. Often it’s just bad planning. Either way, the company came to mind when I wandered by this extensive doorbell situated at the entryway of a modest two-story apartment building. The verticality of the form brought to mind soda cans that have the silhouette of a glass bottle drawn on them, as well as depictions of the very condensation that the can was designed to diminish. Of course, this doorbell grid isn’t really a skeuomorph, per se. It’s more of an aspiration. The architecture curator at a museum once described the faux lofts being built in San Francisco as “townhouses in drag.” This doorbell is playing its own sort of low-budget dress-up. It’s skyscraper cosplay.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
January 25, 2016
Satie, This Time with Feeling
If you know the piece coming is “Gymnopedie No. 1,” then the second that first note hits you have a sense of what’s up ahead. When the track doesn’t actually fulfill the second note of your solo-piano clairvoyance, your brain fills in the blank, and the blanks that follow immediately upon it. You hear “Gymnopedie” even if it isn’t playing.
In fact, in this reworking of the Satie classic, the song is playing, just transformed in two ways. First of all, it is slowed considerably. The roughly six-minute piece is extended to 10 times its original length. Second, this isn’t one “Gymnopedie” but about 60 “Gymnopedies.” It’s the track “Every Recording of Gymnopedie 1” by Brendan Landis, who initially stretched every rendition of the piece he could find to an equal length, yielding a slightly out of sync, phase-shifting rendition, halfway between Steve Reich and Brian Eno.
The initial “Every Recording of Gymnopedie 1” gained quite a following in the past week. When I first wrote about it it had about 2,000 listens on SoundCloud. As of this writing it has just over 50,000 listens. Following up the initial post I wrote a second appreciation, looking at how Satie himself as preordained the Landis reworking, and touched on a precedent by artist Sean Dack, who developed a gallery installation, a la Janet Cardiff, that played individual versions on freestanding speakers.
This new, half-hour piece by Landis has a stronger similarity to the Dack than did his earlier piece, because the Dack likewise employed extensive time-stretching. The strings of the piano take on gargantuan capacity, like one of Ellen Fullman’s long-stringed instruments. Being inside this piece — “being inside” inside describes the consumption process much more closely than does, say, “listening” — reveals the off-sync qualities of the original in a manner like shards being shed in rapturous slow motion.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/hey-exit. More from Hey Exit at heyexit.com, heyexit.bandcamp.com, and .
January 24, 2016
Soloist at the Church of Modular Synthesis
“Marine Derelict” by R. Beny comes with a fairly long list of hashtags that express its technological origin as a mix of synthesizer parts. What it sounds like is a church organist on the rare day when the pews are empty, the building is otherwise vacated, and he can just play what he wants to play — ethereal, aching, blissful.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/rbeny/marine-derelict. More from R Beny, who is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, at this excellent YouTube account, which includes a lot of live performance pieces, such as this following “experimental / textural” segment featuring the Ciat-Lonbarde Sidrax Organ (that’s the wooden instrument visible in the video’s upper left corner):
January 23, 2016
When a Drone Is Called Upon to Do the Work of a Melody
There are drones that channel the hum and vibrance of machinery. In fact, most drones do. Much of what makes a drone a drone, as opposed to, for example, a note held for an extended period, is the warmth of its seemingly uncountable overtones, the sheer spread of warmly contrasting harmonics. Often as not, drone recordings leave the drone on its own. Call it the single-malt approach to composition. Then there is work like “My Grandmother Smiles at Me” by Russian musician Murkok, which puts the drone to melodic use. Here the singular yet internally rambunctious drone plays out a slow, peaceful sequence of notes. There’s no division between those notes. It’s pure resourceful melisma, endlessly transformative shifts that are glacial from a pop music perspective, even from a classical music one. It brings to mind Discreet Music–era Brian Eno, as well as Gavin Bryars when he was busy sinking the Titanic.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/murkok. More from Murkok, aka Ilya Glebov of Vyborg, Russia, at instagram.com/kaoioka and murkok.bandcamp.com.
January 22, 2016
Hearing Gray but Waiting for the Orchestra to Surface
The more you listen to drones, the less they sound like drones. One person’s gray wool flannel sweater of a sonic experience becomes someone else’s expansive orchestral grandeur. “Elixir,” heard here in an excerpt — though at over four and a half minutes in length, it’s more than enough to go by — is good training for those who hear gray and want to get through the gray to the detail.
It’s a thorough composite, a swollen, soupy mass of sound, but in it there is so much to pay attention to, glimmery effects and arpeggiating fragments, all moving behind a veil drenched in white noise. The track is credited to Keith Berry, who, as Invisible Birds notes, recorded for the excellent Trente Oiseaux label, run by Bernhard Günter. “Elixir” is from a forthcoming album by that name, due out on Invisible Birds around March of this year.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/invisible-birds. More from Keith Berry, who is based in the U.K., at invisiblebirds.org and twoinchesoffground.com.
January 21, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0212: 484 Hz Love Songs
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at disquiet.com/junto, 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. 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.
Tracks added to this playlist for the duration of the project:
This project was posted shortly after noon, California time, on Thursday, January 21, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 25, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0212: 484 Hz Love Songs
The Assignment: Make music intended to attract male mosquitoes.
The steps for this project are as follows:
Step 1: Recent research by Brian Johnson and Scott Ritchie of the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine has revealed that 484 Hz is “the frequency of a female Aedes aegypti’s wings flapping,” and thus is the frequency that attracts the male of the species. You can read up here:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-19...
Step 2: Create a brief, seductive love song that somehow features the 484 Hz frequency.
Step 3: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 4: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This project was posted shortly after noon, California time, on Thursday, January 21, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 25, 2016.
Length: Length is up to you, though between 30 seconds (mosquitoes do have a short lifespan) and 3 minutes (vaguely pop-song length) seems appropriate.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, 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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0212-484hzlovesongs.” Also use “disquiet0212-484hzlovesongs” as a tag for your track.
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, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 212th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Make music intended to attract male mosquitoes”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2016/01/21/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Photo courtesy of Jason Richardson, who recommended this news story as a Junto prompt:
