Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 381
March 28, 2015
Glia’s Beat
The arrhythmia of the beat against the tonal sweetness of the melodic material makes the track “__..____._” by Glia sound like someone having an acute panic attack on an otherwise serene day. The gap between those sensations, the significant expanse between the anxious churning percussion of the beat and the soft see-saw of the suspended waveforms, makes for a third presence. The track’s title, with its suggestion of a coded message, adds yet another layer of context. I wondered if the apparent Morse code might be supplying the beat, so I popped it into a translator, but it returned a null.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/glia. More from Glia at ssuunnddiiaall.tumblr.com.
March 27, 2015
March 26, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0169: HTML505
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at Disquiet.com, 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.
Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:
This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, March 26, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 30, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0169: HTML505
Make a track using only an HTML5 drum machine.
Every Junto project is about, to some degree or another, exploring the freedom to be found within constraints. This week’s project takes a piece of software as its constraint.
Step 1: Go to the following webpage in a browser that supports HTML5:
Step 2: Create an original track using only this tool.
Step 3: Upload your 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 assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, March 26, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 30, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be roughly between one and four minutes.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, and 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 include the term “disquiet0169-html505” in the title of your track, and 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 169th Disquiet Junto project — “Make a track using only an HTML5 drum machine” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/03/26/disqui...
More on the drum machine at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
March 25, 2015
This Week in Sound: Ableton Book, Hearing Aids 2.0 …
A lightly annotated clipping service:
— Ableton, Bookmaker: Recently the former lead singer of Depeche Mode, Vince Clarke, announced a line of synthesizer modules. In turn, the module synthesizer manufacturer Tiptop announced it had formed a record label. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Ableton, the developer of the widely used software Live, has become a book publisher. This week it announced Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers, a collection of “solutions to common roadblocks in the creative process” by Dennis DeSantis. Warp Records trainspotters will recognize DeSantis as the person who arranged an Autechre track for the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and who produced remixes for the group’s collection of acoustic renditions of Aphex Twin tracks. More on DeSantis’ book at:
https://makingmusic.ableton.com/
— Aural Hearing: For Bloomberg, David Gauvey Herbert wrote a solid overview of the state of assisted hearing devices, with an emphasis on how cost, new technology, and Bluetooth are changing the landscape. One useful term is “PSAP,” which stands for “personal sound amplification products. That term encompasses the range of hearing assistance tools not, in the United States, classified by the FDA as medical devices:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-05/hearing-aid-alternatives-get-cheaper-more-powerful
— Game On: At Gamasutra, game developer Rob Bridgett wrote in detail about the challenges of employing “adaptive audio” in mobile video games. In the course of doing so, he made a useful distinction between “adaptive” and “interactive”: “By adaptive, I’m describing a system that is aware of the activity of the user through collection of data, which then makes changes of certain factors to either fit that behavior, or to adjust certain parameters and responses to best cater for that behavior. It is a system that doesn’t ask for a user-input, but makes changes on their behalf based on data collected. By interactive, I simply mean that a user has access to, and control over, certain elements of the experience.”: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobBridgett/
— CNMAT Man: The “musical scientist/scientific musician” David Wessel passed away last October at age 72. Wessel founded the University of Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, aka CNMAT, and this month Andrew Gilbert wrote an overview of Wessel’s life and career:
http://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/03/20/david-wessel-musical-scientistscientific-musician/
This first appeared in the March 24, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Two phones, one emergency. #soundstudies #florida #nofilter #ui #ux
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
March 24, 2015
Sound Class, Week 7 of 15: Explicit vs. Implicit
On the very first day of class I share this sequence:
Hearing → Listening → Discerning → Describing → Analyzing → Interpreting → Implementing →
That is, in a handful or so of words, a map of the 15-week course that I teach on the role of sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
The first semester I taught the course, back in 2012, a student raised a hand from the back of the room and asked, in effect, if I am making up any of the words we use. I suppose hearing “anechoic” and “acoustemology,” among other less esoteric terms, over and over takes its toll, and I replied that I did not make up any of the words. I did, however, take responsibility for two familiar words used in a particular context. Those words, and that context, are the subject of week 7.
First some background on the course, in case this is the first week you’ve read one of these summaries: Each week of the 15-week course my plan is to summarize the previous class session here. Please keep in mind that three hours of lecture and discussion is roughly 25,000 words; this summary is just an outline, in this case less than 10 percent of what occurs in class. Some class meetings emphasize more discussion than others. Week 7 this semester is especially discussion-heavy, and hence the lecture outline here is fairly cursory.
I start off week 7 by reviewing recent vocabulary. When this goes well, we don’t stop with the words I initially reprise, words like “soundscape” and “soundmark,” and, yes, “anechoic” and “acoustemology.” We discuss how the first two develop out of the work of R. Murray Schafer, how the third relates to John Cage, and how the fourth comes out of the work of Steven Feld. To revisit the previous week’s class meeting, on the role of sound in retail space, we discuss Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the “Third Place.” In turn, student queries lead to additional vocabulary refreshes, among them sonic equivalents of so-called “skeuomorphism” design (the shutter sound of digital cameras serves as a good example), “haptic” feedback, and the difference between a “neologism” and a “retronym.”
Then we proceed to those two fairly common terms I mentioned up above, “explicit” and “implicit,” which we employ in a specific context. For the purposes of discussion, an “explicit” sound related to a subject is one closely tied, in the public imagination, to it, such as the “pop pop, fizz fizz” of Alka-Seltzer, or the anthropomorphized Snap, Crackle, and Pop of Rice Krispies. In contrast, “implicit” sounds are those that are to some extent inherent in a given subject, but that are not fully, for lack of a more nuanced term, branded. Different makes of door lock, for example, will sound different upon close inspection, but it would be hard to make a case that to anyone other than a discerning thief those sounds are closely associated with the locks.
We begin by drawing a grid, two by two, and we put those two words on the Y axis. On the X axis, horizontally, we write “category” and “product.” The remainder of week 7 involves working through how sounds can be oriented in those four quadrants. This plays out in various ways, largely as a result of group discussion, and thus it doesn’t translate particularly well to summary. So, I’ll just emphasize some things I’ve learned when teaching this class:
It’s important to keep top of mind that the quadrants in this two-by-two grid are along a continuum. Students often mistake them as four independent if interrelated categories. That’s not the case.
An operating system startup sound is a useful example. The startup sound itself began deep in the implicit/category zone, and was later elevated to explicit/product when Apple and Windows, just to note two examples, developed unique audio logos.
Homework: The homework for week 8 is to take another pass on the research from week 7, which involved the development of a “sonic audit.” This week in class we take time, in small groups, to compare notes about how to apply the explicit/implicit grids to the students’ chosen topics, which range from Oreo cookies to Nike sneakers to Rolex watches. The assignment is as follows: Do a “sonic audit” of a specific brand/product of your choosing.
Your brand/product should not be inherently sonic; that is, for example, it should be a candy bar, not a headphone — a clothing store, not an MP3 player — an airline, not a mobile music app. You will explore the role of sound in the brand/product that you select. (You can, alternately, elect to focus on an industry/category, such as the Got Milk? and National Pork Board campaigns.)
In the process of developing your sonic audit you should look deeply at the brand/product from numerous viewpoints, such as, but not exclusive to, the following: (a) sounds inherent in the category, (b) sounds exclusive to the brand/product, (c) cultural references (e.g., song lyrics), (d) brand history (e.g., jingles, concert sponsorships, musician spokespeople), etc. Your presentation of your findings should consist not only of exhaustive examples you locate, but of the “cultural meaning” of what you discern. How you present this material is up to you, but it should be substantial. We’ve used short essays in assignments and four-quadrant grids in class, and those are particularly recommended. In the end, the documentation should state and support a specific point of view about the sonic properties of the brand.
Next week: The software tools of sound, with an emphasis on Audacity and, just to nudge things a little, Max/MSP.
Note: I’ve tried to do these week-by-week updates of the course in the past, and I’m hopeful this time I’ll make it through all 15 weeks. Part of what held me up in the past was adding videos and documents, so this time I’m going to likely bypass that.
This first appeared in the March 24, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
March 23, 2015
Sabrina Schroeder’s Industrial Theater
The sheer scale of Sabrina Schroeder’s “Stircrazer: Hammer + Flutter” brings to mind theater as much as it does music. Despite its extended quiet passages, it is dense with activity. It has the implicit energy and presence of a massive construction site sealed off by a privacy wall. Whirring and rattles, dragged equipment and electric drones, all amid fierce rumbles, collectively bring to mind an industrial set piece out of Heiner Goebbels. The work credits four performers in addition, presumably, to Schroeder herself — Pablo Coello, saxophone; Angélica Vázquez, harp; David Durán, piano; and Ramón Souto, percussion — but it sounds like legion. And as it progresses, it comes into focus, like the massive machinery has been laid bare, and yet its purposes remain mysterious.
In an accompanying note, Schroeder, who posted the track at the start of this month, gives some context: “Work-in-progress workshopped and premiered this past November (2014) by Vertixe Sonora Ensemble in the Correspondencias Sonoras Festival at Galician Center for Contemporary Art, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.”
The piece was posted at soundcloud.com/sabrinaschroeder. More from Schroeder at sabrinaschroeder.com. She is based in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she is pursuing her PhD at Harvard in composition, and is director of the Harvard Group for New Music (hgnm.org).
via instagram.com/dsqt
Mechanical doorbell, below knocker. #soundstudies #ui #ux #welcome
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
March 22, 2015
The Art of the Sound of the Security of Art
Many artists and musicians end up in, strive to be in, museums. Fewer make the museum the subject of their work. One such artist-musician is the prolific John Kannenberg, who in various pursuits has studied the sonic property of the institutions where art is on display. He may make sound art, but more to the point he makes art of the sound of art. He’s been sharing well-edited, studiously sequenced videos of his work, including “A Sound Map of the Art Institute of Chicago: Security (Excerpt),” which combines the voluminous echo of the place with overheard snippets of directives and responses from staff security, such as “No flashes” (as in photography) and “Being told the elevator doesn’t go where I want to go.”
Video originally posted at vimeo.com. More from Kannenberg at johnkannenberg.com.
