Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 356

Teaching Sound / Spring 2016

I’ll be teaching my course on “the role of sound in the media landscape” — aka “Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds” — again this coming spring 2016 at the Academy of Art here in San Francisco.

The semester runs from February 1, 2016, through May 21, 2016. The class meets on Wednesdays from noon to 2:50pm, which means the first class meeting is February 3 and the final class meeting will be on May 18. There’s no class on March 23, which is spring break, for which I’ll probably assign a close-listening analysis of Cliff Martinez’s work on the score to Spring Breakers. Just kidding. Well, maybe not kidding.

Last semester we had one of the heads of the Mutek festival (Patti Schmidt) address the class, as well as someone from the software developer Cycling ’74 and someone from Facebook’s virtual-reality team, among others. The previous semester we had someone from BitTorrent and someone from SoundCloud, and we took a field trip to an anechoic chamber at the local research lab of an audio company. The guest speakers aren’t generally lecturers; I usually interview them in front of the students, who also ask questions. The semester prior both the sound artist Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) and the voice actor Phil LaMarr (Samurai Jack, Static Shock) visited via Skype.

Here’s the course outline from last year:

I teach the course to a mix of MFA and BA students. This is the seventh semester that I’ve taught the course, after taking off last semester with the intention of teaching it once a year rather than twice a year, to leave room for loads of other projects.

You can read summaries and documentation from past semesters using the “brands of sounds” and “sounds of brands” tags here at Disquiet.com.

Industrial Techno from Machine Woman

Much of the unaffiliated techno that appears on SoundCloud is a tease. Devoid of a record label or even a descriptive liner note, it generally opens with an enticing mood-setting tone, and then very quickly flexes a beat. Light variations occur as the beat proceeds, but as for that tone, at best it returns for a late-in-the-track break, or perhaps at the eventual fadeout.

Machine Woman’s “Untitled – 30 11 2015 22.36” drops that opening tone entirely. There’s no void to fill for Machine Woman. There is just the beat. Her techno is of the industrial variety, the rhythm mechanical, true to form, and the texture rough and ragged. It’s the routinized crunch of gears, not of digits.

“Untitled – 30 11 2015 22.36” opens straight off with its 120bpm beat, and the cycle varies barely at all for the subsequent six and a half minutes. There’s a tidy, tiny horn-like solo, and an even smaller snippet of Latin-ate stick percussion and a castanet-like rattle, but otherwise the variation is left to a series of subtle white-noise flourishes that bring to mind brushed snares.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/machinewoman. More from Machine Woman, aka Russian-born Anastasia Vtorova, at twitter.com/mmachinewwoman and facebook.com/machinewoman.

That Time I Interviewed Brian Eno in 1990

Twenty five years ago I stood on the rooftop of the Diva hotel in San Francisco and interviewed Brian Eno while a photographer did his best to take advantage of the light.

We were there to discuss Wrong Way Up, the album Eno had just released with John Cale of the Velvet Underground. I was on assignment for Down Beat magazine, and the article appeared in the January 1991 issue. I’ve just now uploaded it to Disquiet.com, backdating it to the original publication — hence this small note of its (re)appearance.

The record is a lot of fun, but apparently the daggers depicted on the cover were appropriate, as neither Eno nor Cale came away from it with warm feelings. Said Cale, whom I interviewed by phone:

“With Brian, I think what happened is that he would listen to what you said, but he really didn’t have much patience with it. His idea of listening to what you said was eventually, you know, slam the door and come out with a solution. I haven’t figured out yet what Brian’s notion of cooperation, or collaboration, is.”

Read the full piece: “Reconcilable Differences.” If I can track down my tapes of the interviews, I’ll transcribe them and post them, too.

A New Album of Shoegazer Cello Beauty

Ted Laderas, who goes by OO-Ray when he’s piping his cello through layers of effects and, in turn, breathing out reams of lovely music that’s half classical and half shoegazer, has a new EP out soon, a half-hour cassette titled Vespers. The album’s name, taken from the early evening prayer, is certainly appropriate, as his music often has the aura of a cathedral, in both its sense of space and its contemplative presence. This two-minute sample of Vespers does not disappoint, with deep echoing of subsumed sawing, the effect as much like an organ as like a chorus.

Vespers comes out December 4 at lifelikefamily.bandcamp.com. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ooray. More from Laderas, who is based in Portland, Oregon, at twitter.com/ooray and 15people.net.

An Ambient Roil

Murkok’s “A Forest with Water and Rocks” is nearly five minutes of ambient roil — it is at once soothing and seething, placid and active. It’s almost all gaseous sounds, but they churn at a rapid rate. The result is a sense of heightened awareness, as if a storm is coming in and you’ve just noticed it on the horizon. Slipping through the overwhelming cloud effect are micro shards, like a rain of distilled white noise, and occasional sharp moments, a bell hit hard, a seeming chorus or slammed door heard from deep in the mix, a high tone flying overhead. The track continuously lulls you and alerts you, over and over, often at the same time — a lullaby on a rocky ship.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/murkok. More from Murkok, aka Ilya Glebov of Vyborg, Rusia, at murkok.bandcamp.com, and petroglyphmurkok.wordpress.com.

“The Crying Bowl”

The singing bowl is one of the major proto-ambient instruments. A bowl, rubbed or struck, emits a purely tonal sound that has no attack — no hard starting point, as would a struck guitar string or a piano key — and that sound, in turn, lingers for a long time. Noise Jockey has used a variety of electronic tools and performance techniques to update and amplify the singing bowl. His “The Crying Bowl” turns an everyday salad bowl into an otherworldly vehicle for tonal expression. In this case, the bowl is serving less as an instrument unto itself and more as an amplifier, providing, in Noise Jockey’s words, the “resonant body” from which the source audio emanates.

That source audio is from a gorgeous touch-sensitive instrument called the Tocante Phashi, designed by Peter Blasser of Ciat-Lonbarde, and pictured here. The Phasi, along with other instruments in the Tocante line, employs capacitors (the exposed circuit board) to control a large number of oscillators. It also has a built-in solar panel for charging its internal battery.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/noisejockey. More from Noise Jockey, aka Nathan Moody of San Francisco, at noisejockey.net, twitter.com/noisejockey, and nathanmoody.bandcamp.com. Phasi image from pugix.com/synth.

Realtime Sonification

Someone adds an entry about a cooking magazine from the 1950s? Boom …

Someone corrects the release date in the discography of James Taylor? Bleep …

Someone undoes a spelling correction in an entry about an undersecretary from a mid-century U.S. presidential administration? Bong …

Audible tones and expanding, colored circles are used in tandem to announce changes to the vast collaborative encyclopedia thanks to the great online tool Listen to Wikipedia (listen.hatnote.com), one of the best examples of realtime sonification on the web. Developed by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, it’s the subject of a short recent interview from radio station KQED. The conversation with Hashemi goes into the background of the tool. He talks about the software’s actions, and how it serves both as an expression of Wikipedia and as a response to the economic focus of Silicon Valley.

There’s something very pleasing and centering about the placid surveillance of Listen to Wikipedia, all that communal and often rancorous activity transformed into dulcet tones. Sometimes I just let it run on a side screen as I work. Sometimes I also run this pure geographic visualizer, at rcmap.hatnote.com:

Up at the top of this post is a sample still frame of Listen to Wikipedia in action. Here is an example of the sort of realtime information that Listen to Wikipedia parses:

This documentation summarizes how the sounds and related images of Listen to Wikipedia correlate with actual edits:

Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots.

Here’s a short video of Listen to Wikipedia in action:

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/kqed. The KQED story was produced by Sam Harnett, of the podcast The World According to Sound (theworldaccordingtosound.org). Check out Listen to Wikipedia at listen.hatnote.com. It’s also available as a free iOS app (itunes.apple.com).

Disquiet Junto Project 0204: Under Beat

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.

This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, November 26, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, November 30, 2015.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0204: Under Beat
Add a foundational rhythm to an ambient foreground.

This week’s project is a complement to last week’s — but you can do this week’s project without having done, or even been aware of, last week’s. Last week we added a foreground to an underlying beat. This week we’re adding an underlying beat to a foreground.

Step 1: Listen to and download the track “Beacon, For Marissa” by Toaster:

https://soundcloud.com/toaster-1/beacon-for-marissa

Step 2: You’ll be adding a foundational, underlying rhythm — a beat, that is — to the track. The original is quite long, at over 17 minutes. You can certainly utilize the full piece, but it’s recommended that you select a segment of between 2 to 4 minutes.

Step 3: Please create a new track by adding a beat to the source audio from Step 2. (Do not change the source audio, other than perhaps fading in and out at the start and end, though you can use it as raw material for whatever beat you choose to add.)

Step 4: Upload your completed track from Step 3 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 in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, November 26, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, November 30, 2015.

Length: The length is up to you. The original is just over 17 minutes, though you needn’t create something that long. A segment of between 2 to 4 minutes is recommended.

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 “disquiet0204-underbeat.” Also use “disquiet0204-underbeat” as a tag for your track.

Download: Set your track as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution), per the license of Toaster’s source audio.

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

More on this 204th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Add a foundational rhythm to an ambient foreground”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/11/26/disquiet0204-underbeat/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

The image associated with this project is a light reworking of the image that accompanied the track, Toaster’s “Beacon, For Marissa,” that is the source audio for this week’s project:

https://soundcloud.com/toaster-1/beacon-for-marissa

New Silence from Aphex Twin

At some point in the past 24 hours, the 260 some odd tracks in Aphex Twin’s soundcloud.com/user18081971 have gone missing. In the past he’s deleted and re-added them, so they may show up again.

Before he had the user18081971 account, whose seemingly generic numerals in fact represent his birthday, he used the account user48736353001. That account went blank in advance of the tracks appearing under the user name user18081971.

There’s a detailed spreadsheet of the tracks associated with the account, via a Reddit user. The spreadsheet includes the brief commentary that Aphex Twin posted in the bio field for the account. Among these were political references, shoutouts to listeners, and a brief notice about the recent death of visual artist Paul Laffoley.

For the time being this development means that the Selected Ambient Works Volume 3 beta playlist I have been developing is now blank. I may be able to recreate it based on YouTube re-postings of the audio.

There remain six tracks at soundcloud.com/richarddjames.

Update (November 26, 2015): One thing that does remain at the user18081971 account is a collection of likes, at this count 32, ranging from a µ-Ziq track dating back to 1993 to a recording of Nikola Bašić’s sea organ in Zadar, Croatia, the latter of which has achieved 2.7 million listens.

Brigid Feral’s Sonic Transformations

There is little to no annotation associated with the audio that Brigid Feral posts at soundcloud.com/fferal. The closest she generally comes is a hashtag, such as the “#augmented lute” that appears on the page for her “Violet.” The source audio for her thoroughly transformed sounds can provide the distinguishing factoid, as in “Sound of Friend Peeing,” which, in case the title isn’t clear, has “#pee.” Much of the work she’s posted to SoundCloud starts with some specific sonic basis, and then goes somewhere else entirely. Recent live recordings by Feral, such as one from September 11, and another “Residuum,” posted in the past couple of weeks, use a female voice — presumably her own — as their point of origin.

In the first of these syllables give way to a stuttery beat. In the second there is a delightfully flowery, fluttering affect that is half human, half synthesized.

As for “Violet,” it has a dampened-industrial quality. What is being done to the lute is unclear, but the result is a battery of soft poundings: sawtooth waveforms with their edges rubbed off, beats like a mallet hitting a bag of wet feathers. The rhythm is insistent, but it’s enacted with purposefully unstable resources.

Now, there’s no lute pictured in Feral’s Instagram feed (instagram.com/fferal), but there is some excellent footage of her destroying a piano from the inside:

A video posted by bridget feral (@fferal) on Aug 19, 2015 at 3:27pm PDT

“Violet” originally posted at soundcloud.com/fferal.