Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 386
February 25, 2015
February 24, 2015
Sound Class, Week 4 of 15: The Jingle
The commercial jingle took a strange turn at the birth of radio. To understand that detour it can help to listen further back, to trace the jingle to the very birth of commerce, long before recorded music — arguably long before recorded history.
The “jingle” is the subject of the fourth week of the course 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, the fourth week is the start of the second arc of the course: “sounds of brands.” This second arc is the longest of the course’s three arcs, and runs through week 10. 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.
As with the previous two weeks, the structure of this lecture is based around a timeline of sorts. For class meeting two it is “the history of listening,” and for class meeting three (last week) it is “a trajectory of the use of sound in film and (later) television.” This week it is a rough outline of “the history of the jingle.” The outline reads as follows. This is less a timeline than a sequence of talking points in rough chronological order:
•• the development of the jingle
We start with the definition of the “jingle,” which originates in the 14th century to mean “of imitative origin,” in Dutch and German. In time this comes to be a verb, and to expand in the mid-1600s to be a “catchy array of words in prose or verse.” Its employment as a “song in an advertisement” dates from around 1930, fairly recently. But if the usage is recent, the role of the jingle is not.
• from the Moroccan market to newsboys
We start with the purpose and benefit of the jingle. As early as there were marketplaces there was the need for a product to distinguish itself, for a caller to attract consumers, to get them to visit one stall rather than another. That practice continues to this day in some markets, and had something of a heyday in modern times with the “newsboy,” who could announce bits of the headlines but still make purchase of the paper requisite for getting the full story.
• song sheets
There’s a received assumption that connects the jingle specifically to a commercial song, a ditty written to sell a product. I talk a bit about popular singers who got their start as jingle writers. But as the word’s definition explains, the “catchy” verse preceded what we have come to think of as a full song — which isn’t to say we had to wait until the rise of radio and recorded music for the jingle to be a proper song. One artifact of interest is the advertising or promotional “song sheet,” as documented by Elizabeth C. Axford and by Timothy D. Taylor, among others. The song sheet, in its day, was a promotional song given as a small gift to consumers, for example when they visited a Studebaker dealership to test-drive a vehicle. The genius, in retrospect, of the song sheet was that it meant people would then return to their homes and played the advertiser’s jingle themselves on the family’s parlor piano. Talk about “viral.” The practice makes the Max Headroom “blipvert” seem like a brute force attack by comparison.
• Burma Shave
These popular roadside signs (e.g., “Don’t pass cars / on curve or hill / If the cops don’t get you / morticians will / Burma Shave”) didn’t kick in until well into the 20th century, but they serve as a good example of a modern jingle that isn’t truly a song, and also how a jingle can be crafted to suit its environment. The question that lingers over this class meeting is: “What is the Burma Shave of the Internet?”
• Texaco Star Theatre
The odd detour I mention early on is how at first radio was not a matter of interstitial advertising, as we experience it today, but of sponsored hours. To that end, for many years early in radio one had a positive association with an advertiser because their name was affixed to a regular weekly variety show. Only later on did radio stations stop selling “time” and start selling “audience.” The jingle as we know it may have its roots in the markets of yore, but it only really took shape once brands needed to make the most of a half minute or so of advertising, after the hour-long sponsorship had faded. We may not have solved the riddle that is the “Burma Shave of the Internet,” but we can draw a fairly straight line from the Texaco radio hour, and its ilk, to to modern-day resurgences of the practice, such as “branded playlists” on Spotify.
For this week’s class, the students’ homework included a research and analysis project. The assignment read in part: “Identify a single song that’s been used more than once (three times at least) in different settings to promote different products/services from different companies. Explain the role that the song plays in the varied executions, and how it’s employed differently in each setting.” In class I break them into small groups, of three or four students each, and they compare what they learned in their research. The goal for each group is to develop a list of best practices they agree upon for employing a pre-existing song to represent an organization, brand, or service. We then collate these best practices again when the whole class reconvenes to sort out what the individual groups decided.
I usually show a few archaic commercials at this point. We already marveled at some Kit Kat candy commercials in recent weeks. We now watch an animated Chiquita TV commercial that explains how you don’t refrigerate bananas, and compare it with how, say, early iPod commercials had to teach the viewer how to use the (then) new touch interface. We also watch an early Brycreem commercial, and I investigate how the melody is quite expertly insinuated into the narrative before it appears explicitly as a jingle. The close reading of the Brylcreem requires several repeat viewings and a lot of pausing, as we did the week prior with a scene from the David Fincher version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
• Homework
For the next week they have three assignments. They are to write in their sound journals, as always four times in the given week. They are to read an interview with former KCRW DJ Nic Harcourt, to learn about the role of the music supervisor. And they are to watch Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime and write about the role of sound in its narrative. I warn them that if they found The Conversation, which we watched for homework two weeks prior, to be a little slow, that Playtime is about half its speed.
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 February 24, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
This Week in Sound: Superheroes, Maps, Freesound(s), …
• Heroic Jingle: Kudos to readers of ign.com for noticing the small text on the poster for the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie and discerning from it that Spider-Man may very well be in the film. Why? Because there’s a credit for composer Danny Elfman, who wrote the theme for the modern Spider-Man films:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/02/24/behold-the-new-poster-for-marvels-avengers-age-of-ultron
• Sound Trip: My friends Nick Sowers and Bryan Finoki are now using sound to investigate the urban environment with a series at Design Observer. The first takes them to San Francisco’s Mission District:
http://designobserver.com/feature/infringe-01-the-new-mission-soundtrack/38775
• Tracking Sound: This is a bit old, dating from late December, but I just came across the news that Freesound.org, a massive shared database of field recordings and other sounds, now allows users to track specific tags and users. Useful if you have a fetish for creaking doors, foghorns, or particular species of bird:
http://blog.freesound.org/?p=532
• Mapping Sound: The National Park Service has mapped the quietest places in the United States of America. The word “sonification” is a useful one in discussing the way sound can be employed to explain data, but in this case it is, in turn, a simple visualization that best depicts how the west is far more quiet than the east:
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/02/the-quietest-places-in-america-mapped/385620/
This first appeared in the February 24, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Volume 3 (Beta)
As of yesterday morning, there were 155 tracks in the rogue Aphex Twin account on SoundCloud, where Richard D. James has added the generic “user48736353001″ to his long list of monikers, among them AFX, Polygon Window, and Caustic Window.
Then quite suddenly, after a 17-day gap, there was a 156th track, “Lannerlog,” which I wrote about yesterday afternoon. Over on ello.co, someone subsequently wondered if the “spigot” might be in the process of being turned on, and that turned out to be the case. First there were three more tracks on the user48736353001 account, then 14 more, and as of this writing, a full day later, there are now 173 tracks total in the account.
I’ve begun compiling the above set, under the working title Selected Ambient Works Volume 3, as an imaginary sequel to Selected Ambient Works 85-92, whose earliest tracks are 30 years old as of 2015, and to Selected Ambient Works Volume II. I wrote a book on the latter album. It was published last year as part of the 33 1/3 series to note the Volume II album’s 20th anniversary.
What does and doesn’t belong in this Volume 3 is up for debate. I’m emphasizing material that has an apparent parallel to the material on Volume II, including tracks whose titles include a “SAWII” reference. If you happen to hear anything on Aphex Twin’s SoundCloud accounts that you think should be included, please let me know (I’m at marc@disquiet.com), and I’ll see if they fit into this playlist. Arguably a Volume III in the series would have a distinct character to the previous volumes, much as Volume II was distinct from 85-92. The precise qualities of that character are unclear, and perhaps would draw from elements of the antic percussion that were evident on his later 1990s albums.
My 33 1/3 book has seven chapters, the last of which I titled “Selected Ambient Works Volume III” and in which I tried to piece together semblances of ambient work in the releases Aphex put out following the release of Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It was a purposeful exercise in well-intentioned, fully informed futility, the point being to note the distinction of Selected Ambient Works Volume II amid the broader catalog. All of which said, there is a considerable amount of material in the newly opened archive at the user48736353001 account that has the sinuous ambient quality of his early years, and that is well worth spending time with. I’ll be expanding this playlist as I continue to listen through the newly posted material.
And because Aphex Twin is more than likely to delete all these tracks at some point, I’ll also include the titles here, for posterity’s sake:
“35 SAW II Un Road Shimmer F”
“9 Un Chopped F Beginning [SAWII Un]”
“33 SAW II Un Stabbing Interview”
“4 Red Calx[slo]”
“5 Just Fall Asleep”
“blue carpet”
“Th1 [slo]”
“(watery big ez)”
“8 Lush Ambulance 2″
“11 Early Morning Clissold”
Of the current 173, there are several close calls, like “1 nocares” and 19 Ssnb, that I haven’t included here.
Setlist posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet. My 33 1/3 book is available from many retailers, including Bleep.com, which is operated by the label, Warp, that releases the majority of Aphex Twin’s music. In my book I interview the individual who is largely responsible for the track names later associated with the songs on Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and who went on to work at Warp for a decade, during which time he helped to launch Bleep.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Three doorbells, iterative-expansion edition. #soundstudies #ui #ux
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
February 23, 2015
If It Really Is User48736353001
That Aphex Twin SoundCloud account is going strong. A little more than two weeks since he’d seemingly topped it off at 155 tracks, a 156th track appeared earlier today. The newly arrived song’s name, “Lannerlog,” seems to come from Llannerlog, the name Richard D. James had given his studio in Cornwall toward the start of his public music-making. As the helpful WATMM message-board commenters noted almost a decade ago, “Llannerlog” sounds like “analog.” Laner is a town in Cornwall.
The new (that is, likely new old) track has the mix of near-subliminal melodic synth and understated, routinized, mesmerizing beat that helped define the concept of “ambient techno” and was the foundation of his Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and some of his early tracks under the alternate name Polygon Window, such as “If It Really Is Me” (off the 1993 album Surfing on Sine Waves), a song whose title seems more meaningful than ever.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/user48736353001.
February 22, 2015
via instagram.com/dsqt
I look forward to these two words again being on a museum or gallery wall.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
February 21, 2015
Making Abstraction Engaging
I’ve been thinking for a long time to make a Disquiet.com podcast, and I’m still intent on doing it, but not quite yet. I even have the theme music in the can, thanks to a regular participant of the Disquiet Junto project series, but I’m still fiddling with the format, and I want to make sure I have the time to do it regularly. I may wait until after this semester is over, since I’m already dedicating time each week to creating 2,000-word summaries of each lecture in my “role of sound in the media landscape” course, and sending those to my tinyletter.com/disquiet email list.
What’s been on my mind lately has been how best to frame the abstract work I’m often up to in sound, so that it can have an audience beyond those already attracted to abstraction. The goal isn’t a larger audience unto itself; the goal is an audience that would quickly find the work of interest when given the proper context.
The “Sonic Frames” installation I developed for the San Jose Museum of Art was an attempt at this, and I think a fairly successful one. Using imagery, and elegant physical frames, and directional speakers, along with other tools, the piece can attract a potential listener from across the room, and keep them focused once they decide to interact with it.
For the Junto projects, I share the written instructions each week as part of the setlist I create for the given project, but that requires someone to take the time to read. Also, those instructions are intended for a different audience: the participants in the projects. So, three weeks ago I acted on the instinct to record myself describing the project. It’s very different to be told a story than to read one, and very different to have a (somewhat?) friendly voice explain something abstract than to have to decipher it on a page. So now each week’s setlist begins with me, for a minute or so, explaining what the project is about. Collectively the intro and the tracks that follow it comprise something akin to a podcast, though it’s not quite yet the podcast I have in mind.
Below are the first four such project-introduction narrations. The first week I did this, I actually made two separate playlists, for reasons explained in the audio below:
More on the Disquiet Junto at disquiet.com/junto.
February 20, 2015
Interior Decorating — and Exterior
Leonardo Rosado’s new track “Dreaming in Velvet” deserves its title, the nearly seven-minute drone composition a lush series of swells that is downright luxurious. Play it low as background music. Play it loud as sonic interior decorating — and exterior decorating, as well, the muted percussives seeming like storm noise heard at a distance. For a self-described drone, the music has a lot more going for it than just clusters of tattered sine waves. There’s field recordings and vocal incantations, paced in a manner that’s too unpredictable to ever be fully relaxing. Dense, rich material.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/leonrosado. More from Rosado, who is based in Göteborg, Sweden, at works-by-lr.tumblr.com.
DIY in the Digital Age
Last Friday night, the 13th, I had the pleasure of giving a short talk at an event sponsored by the Creative Commons and organized by artist and writer Niki Korth. The event title: “Creative Commons DIY Salon – I Can Do Anything Badly.” It was set up to celebrate the publication of Korth’s fascinating new book, I Can Do Anything Badly 2: Learning by Doing Is a Shared Responsibility, which collects conversations, in English and French, with artists, coders, lawyers and others “in order to document the spirit of DIY in the digital age.” The book is available in print and as a free PDF. More on it at icdab.club.
My talk was about the Disquiet Junto, and what led up to it, about my transition over the past decades from interviewing musicians to engaging with them in music projects. The main junctures I focused on were 1989, when I started as an editor at a music magazine; 1996, when I left the magazine to take an online job; 2006, when, with the Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet project, I for the first time commissioned original works of music in response to a compositional query; 2011, when I opened the commissioning process a little for what became the Instagr/am/bient compilation; January 2012, with the launch of the Junto; and October 2014, when the Junto sound installation was exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art. I talked about the structure of the Junto, in which musicians each week, 500+ at last count, respond to compositional prompts, how the varying nature of those projects combined with the communal structure provides a comfortable, supportive structure (I’m studiously avoiding the word “community,” and failing) in which to potentially fail. And I explained how my own development and moderation of the Junto similarly pushes me into areas of deep inexpertise.
The other presentations were very interesting. Korth (twitter.com/kikisurvives) gave an overview the overall plan for the evening, and connected it to her recent book.
Luca Nino Antonucci (itwillbeok.com) talked about the history of the Venus de Milo, “bad sculpture,” and how incompleteness has its own sense of attraction.
Mahmoud Hashemi (github.com/mahmoud) talked about his great sonification project Listen to Wikipedia (listen.hatnote.com), which he built with Stephen LaPorte. I was especially happy that Hashemi was involved, because despite the fact that we’d never met before, I use Listen to Wikipedia every semester as a subject when I teach my class about the role of sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art.
And for her presentation, Carissa Potter (peopleiveloved.com) went from theory to practice by having everyone in attendance fail in public at doing the tango.
There had been a plan initially to have music performed by members of the Disquiet Junto, but the timing just didn’t work out, which is for the best because the presentations went — happily — well past the planned 8pm closing time.
More on the event at thebigconversationspace.org, which was held at the Park Life gallery in the Mission District of San Francisco.
