Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 383
March 14, 2015
via instagram.com/dsqt
Find a Benjamin Franklin biography, look up Junto in the index.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
March 13, 2015
When Repetition Doesn’t Sound Like Repetition
Taylor Deupree posts regularly in his 2015 SoundCloud Studio Diary, which is now up to 29 tracks. Yesterday’s entry was one of the longest, at nearly 8 minutes. They’re often shorter snippets of caught moments and rough ideas. This approach is one more musicians should take, but it’s also one that works particularly well for Deupree, in that his fragments welcome looping, which compensates for the occasional brevity, and because their generally ethereal qualities aren’t hampered by a lack of context. He describes this current piece as a sample of an album-in-progress, and that it represents a new approach to composition that he dubs “intense repetition without sounding like it.” Here that repetition is a series of lightly plucked guitar strings and glass rattles, around which arises this rich, swarming drone.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/12k. More from him at twitter.com/taylordeupree.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Doorbells, sequence confusion, distressed. #soundstudies #ui #ux
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
March 12, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0167: Placid Cell
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.
This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, March 12, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 16, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0167: Placid Cell
Marking the 3rd anniversary of Bassel Khartabil’s incarceration, turn the silence of a room into something soothing.
This project is the second time that the Junto gathered its resources to pay tribute to the wrongfully imprisoned Creative Commons advocate and coder Bassel. Sunday, March 15, marks the third anniversary of Bassel’s incarceration in Syria.
In Bassel’s honor, this week we’ll make music by taking the loneliness of a small, closed room and making something beautiful and soothing from it.
Step 1: Go into the quietest room in your home and record the room’s tone. Also record the sound of the door being closed.
Step 2: Locate in that track a suitably quiet 10 consecutive seconds. Also locate the moment when the door is closed.
Step 3: Locate in those 10 seconds a handful of signature sonic events, moments, however small or subtle, that stand out from the general silence.
Step 4: Create an original composition that begins with the door being closed, proceeds through the 10 unadulterated seconds of room tone, and after which samples of those sonic events from Step 3 are transformed into something soothing. This being a project about isolation, you cannot add any external sound elements.
Step 5: Upload the combination of your accompaniment and the foundational track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 6: 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 12, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 16, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be roughly between two and five 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 “disquiet0167-freebassel” 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 167th Disquiet Junto project — “Marking the 3rd anniversary of Bassel Khartabil’s incarceration, turn the silence of a room into something soothing” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/03/12/disqui...
More on Bassel Khartabil 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 11, 2015
“Abomenon”/”Causal”
“Abomenon” is a short, slurry mash of moist industrial noise, slowed within an inch of its life and injected with alien voices. It is the perfect anecdote to rote techno, opening with dense, insolent beats and then overcome with vocoded chatter, muffled dialog that gives way to insectoid anxiety. It’s paired with “Causal,” which trades voices for another form of communication, what seems to be the methodical clunk of a manual typewriter, rendered here like some sort of persistent, automated weapon.
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/darkmatter.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Ring for pickup & delivery only. #soundstudies #ui #ux #nicetype
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
March 10, 2015
Elisa Luu’s Enchanting Gaze
The six tracks of Elisa Luu’s Enchanting Gaze are mosaics made of fractures. Each piece is more than cohesive enough to stand as a composition, like the string-inflected “Sabadilla,” with which the collection opens, or the pluck’n’drone of closing track “Bro…” — but within each piece the source segments stand sturdily alone, so much so that the compositions themselves threaten to fall apart, to fall into parts. This isn’t a criticism. Quite the contrary, it’s the very solidity of the source material from which Enchanting Gaze is constructed that gives it strength. Luu refers to the work as “post-ambient.” Others might cite minimalism, whose rigor the work reflects, event if it favors tonal phrasings and occasional rhythmic whimsy, as on the creakily industrial “B.P.M.,” over overt patterning. This is a phenomenal set.
Album originally posted mid-November 2014 at elisaluu.bandcamp.com. More from Luu, who is based in Rome, Italy, at soundcloud.com/elisa-luu, elisaluu.bandcamp.com, and hiddenshoal.com.
Sound Class, Week 6 of 15: Retail Space
I was once eating dinner at a Japanese restaurant that was, truly, a mom and pop operation. Pop was in the back, preparing the food, and Mom was the sole waiter. There were no other evident employees, not even a dishwasher. Between the two of them they managed the tiny space, which had maybe six small tables in it. The mood was relaxed, the room quiet, the diners committed to an unwritten agreement to keep their conversations private. A light bit of music could be heard at a low volume, tasteful bits of ancient French pop songs, elegant pre-fusion jazz, and atmospheric cues from post-orchestral movie soundtracks. Nothing in the evening’s music sounded Japanese in origin, nor did it sound out of place. I asked Mom what we were listening to. She signaled that she would let me know soon, but that she was busy with all the tables. Later in the meal she appeared at my side and handed me, without comment, a thin, flimsy square of paper. A pink sleeve, it was the envelope that contained the CD we were all hearing. I turned the square around in my hands and read the cover text. It was a music sampler CD from a large chain of retail clothing stores.
It is generally understood that music can change the mood of a place. What became clear to me that evening was that a place can influence the appreciation of music. The role of sound in public commercial settings is a symbiotic one.
The sonic capacity of retail space is the subject of week 6 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. After three weeks spent studying listening, we then spend seven weeks on the second arc of the course: “sounds of brands.” (A third and final arc, “brands of sounds,” begins week 11.) After spending week 4 on the history of the jingle and week 5 on the role of sound in product design, we proceed to “retail space.” 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.
We begin week 6 by revisiting the previous week’s class, and related recent vocabulary. We talk about how the terms “soundscape” and “soundmark” and “acoustemology” inform our understanding of sound in product design. While R. Murray Schafer did not develop the first two terms with product design in mind, a consideration of the use case for a given product certainly would include its sonic context, and in turn the sounds directly associated with, unique to, a given product would certainly constitute its soundmarks, akin therefore not only to “landmark” but to “trademark.” I talk a bit more about Schafer’s work in acoustic ecology, and while correcting my accidental misspelling of his family name I connect him to his near-namesake, Pierre Schaeffer, who developed musique concrète. If Schafer wanted to preserve the sounds around us, then Schaeffer wanted to make something new of them: music constructed from everyday and other pre-recorded sound.
In part I revisit these terms from the week prior to reinforce them, but also to reference how we first discuss philosophical matters before proceeding to practical ones. Only after talking about soundscapes do we talk about how Audi uses an anechoic chamber to construct sounds for its electric cars, and how Harley-Davidson failed in its attempt to register a trademark of its motorcycle engine noise.
This week only after the introduction of new terminology will we proceed to how coffee shops and clothiers use music to construct their environments, and connect to consumers. This week we talk about “the third place,” the phrase developed by Ray Oldenburg to describe the place that is neither the first place, home, or the second place, work. As Oldenburg writes, the third place is one “in which people relax in good company and do so on a regular basis. Some have coffee there before work. Some have a beer there after work. … Some drop by whenever it’s convenient.” I am quoting from Oldenburg’s introduction to Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities, a collection he edited. Using his theories as a starting point, I make his connection to Tocqueville sense of Americans’ “habit of association.”
We work through the idea of the third place, discussing as a group examples, and probing outlying cases. If a cafe and a barbershop and bar are classic third places, what then of a gym, or a place of worship, or a sports arena? What of public transportation? Most semesters someone asks about online spaces, like message boards and the comments of favorite websites and email discussion lists.
And only then do we move from generalities to specifics, from theory to application. I walk through a variety of examples, discussing first a major coffee retailer, and how its CEO emphasizes the role of third place in his development of the ubiquitous chain. I talk about the various ways in which the chain reverse-outsources its environment, letting you bring home, after purchase, not only its coffee beans, but the cups it serves coffee in, and how somewhat inevitably, after paying a lot of attention to the music in its stores, the company got into the music business. Just this month this chain announced it was going to stop selling CDs in its stores, but that is not a reflection of its attention to music, just of the marketplace for physical recordings. We dissect a coffee-shop television commercial, how the music and everyday sounds combine to make a certain impression. We then continue on through examples of music in retail spaces, and from the samplers of franchises to the online listening stations of clothing stores, an idea that connects back to the first week of this arc of the class, about how today’s branded playlists on streaming-music services nod to the sponsored radio hours of a century ago.
And since we didn’t have the time last week, we talk about the Jacques Tati movie Playtime. While it was assigned in advance of a class meeting on the role of sound in product design, it just as well serves the purpose of discussion of the role of music, and more broadly sound, in public spaces.
We have recently completed one “sonic audit” project and are about to embark on another one, and so we talk through the components of an audit, how one can thoroughly extract from a given subject the way sound plays a role in it. For a given retailer, what songs are associated with it, what is the sonic nature of its physical environment, how is it, perhaps, itself the subject of musical cultural references, such as song lyrics? These and other lines of inquiry comprise the sonic audit of a given subject. (Also, I’ve been myself recently working on a public-space project related to music. It’s not quite ready for me to talk about here, but I hope to soon. In class I discuss in some detail how the project came to be, and how music is being employed to reinforce the public space that it is filling.)
I revisit the quadrants we discussed last week, the ones in which we have “explicit” and “implicit” along one axis and “product” and “category” along the perpendicular axis. That means of coordinating sonic matters, of placing them in relative positions, will inform their new homework assignments. We’ll be discussing these quadrants in detail next week.
Homework
They will continue their sound journals, in which they write four times a week. And they will do the first of a two-part project, titled “Sonic Audit.” The instructions are as follows: The first part is to 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 explicit and the implicit.
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 10, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
This Week in Sound: Animal Music, Conrad’s Drone, Telephone Music, …
A lightly annotated clipping service:
— Sonic Husbandry: It was a big week for sound and the natural world. We learned from Kevin Holmes at the Creators Project how scientists are using slime molds to make music, and from just about every news service on the planet of a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that explains how to compose music with cats as the intended listeners. (The mold item via the theater director and playwright Elyse Singer.)
http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/scientists-are-making-music-with-slime-mold-and-whale-songs
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150310160037.htm
— String Theory: Liz Glass at the great website of the Walker Art Center writes at length about the 1972 “Long String Drone” of artist Tony Conrad: “Conrad’s relationship to the sounds created by the Theatre of Eternal Music is based on both an understanding of mathematics and musical mechanics as well as on an interest in attaining certain physical, spatial, and spiritual experiences. The plasticity that Conrad attributes to the sounds created by the Theatre of Eternal Music’s unyielding drone signals a shift in his understanding of his role as the maker of a sound, moving from the position of a composer to that of a technician, or, as he would say, ‘from progenitor of the sound to the groundskeeper at its gravesite.'”
http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/art-expanded/moment-enlightenment-sound-tony-conrad-long-string-drone/
— Bell Tones: The National Museum of American History has an exhibit running through October 25 on Alexander Graham Bell and the Origins of Recorded Sound. (Via the Washington, DC, comics blogger and medical-history archivist Michael Rhode.)
http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/hear-my-voice
http://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2015/01/29/smithsonians-hear-my-voice-reveals-sounds-thought-lost-to-time-like-the-voice-of-alexander-graham-bell/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/hear-my-voice-alexander-graham-bell-exhibition-at-american-history-museum/2015/02/05/3b0ecf4c-a8a2-11e4-a2b2-776095f393b2_story.html
— Sample This: Ethan Hein has started a month-long residency at the composer-oriented website NewMusicBox.org. His first piece there is about the aesthetics and politics of sampling: “Playing a riff from a chart sounds very different from discovering it in the heat of the moment.”
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/biting-breaks-sampling-and-ownership/
— Beyond Delia: Over at rateyourmusic.com, a user who goes by hardboiledbabe has compiled a massive list of female practitioners of “early electronic, electroacoustic, minimalism, tape music, drone, and musique concrète.” Kudos.
http://goo.gl/XsOgTn
This first appeared in the March 10, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
