Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 389

Video, Final Days of San Jose Museum of Art Installation

The San Jose Museum of Art has posted this interview with me about the piece, “Sonic Frame,” that I developed to be part of its 45th anniversary exhibit, Momentum, which runs through February 22, 2015:

Post by San Jose Museum of Art.

Sound Class, Week 2 of 15: A Brief History of Listening

The question at the heart of the second meeting of the sound course I teach to a mix of BA and MFA students is something of a hypothetical, a historical one: Imagine it is 1750 and the fellow who sang songs at the pub in your town every Friday night has, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, died. You will never hear his voice again. What is that like? How is that loss experienced — how was that 18th-century celebrity death experienced? And as we ponder the historical question, we consider further what someone in 1750 didn’t know, couldn’t necessarily have conceived of: that a few centuries later we would have recordings of our favorite musicians, recordings that would largely constitute their artistic legacy. To wrap one’s head around that kind of loss — that is what this week’s class meeting is an attempt at.

The second week of sound class is titled “A Brief History of Listening.” In three hours we cover roughly 150,000 years of human history, and still have time to talk about candy bars and Whitney Houston, and to go over the previous week’s homework, which included reading an essay by neuroscientist Seth S. Horowitz and reading an interview with composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer.

Needless to say, this is all handled in a fairly succinct manner. This lecture and discussion is part of an initial three-week build up to the core of the course.

I teach my course about the role of sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. The first three weeks of the course focus on listening to media, followed by seven weeks on the “sounds of brands,” followed by the final five weeks, which are dedicated to “brands of sounds.” The class meets for three hours every Wednesday starting at noon, and there are nine hours of assigned homework. Each week 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, less than 10 percent of what occurs in class.

Week 1 of class was largely given over to the syllabus and to a handful examples to get discussion and ideas flowing. I had 7 students last semester, and I have more than twice as many this semester, so I’m adjusting to the number of voices in class. As a result, I have a little bit of material left over from the opening week’s lecture that I need to cover, and this is where the candy bars come in.

Much as during the first week I found it useful to focus on various examples of JJ Abrams’ work in television and film to show how a single individual can embrace sound as a creative part of a broader, collaborative cultural pursuit, this week I spend a few minutes watching old TV commercials with the students. First I show two Kit Kat candy commercials from the late 1980s, in which the “Gimme a Break” jingle is so absurdly optimistic that it verges on, like the worst jingles, a kind of corporate pop-culture jingoism.

I apologize for my generation, though we were more victims of that culture than perpetrators of it. And then I show two Kit Kat commercials from the past five years, in which the same jingle plays out with each note sourced from on-screen, real-life, real-world sound — quotidian sound. One of these commercials is shot in a library, where books being shut and computer keyboards being typed on collectively play the Kit Kat jingle. There is a second such commercial set on the steps outside the library, the main difference being that the second one has the louder outdoor background sound of the city, a thick urban hum.

There’s an enormous amount that can be unpacked from these two commercials, in particular the idea of field recordings, of everyday sound, having sonorous, musical qualities, and of how these commercials connect the act of “taking a break” (that being the “idea,” such as it is, at the heart of this particular brand of candy, much as “happiness” is central to Coca-Cola’s marketing endeavors) to the actual jingle. After watching one of these commercials, the next time you type or close a book, you will likely hear the jingle in your head. These commercials take the corniest aspect of sound branding — the jingle — and make it somehow tasteful. The full fourth class meeting in this course will focus on jingles, so I pretty much leave it there, except to show one contemporaneous Kit Kat commercial from India that makes the 1980s American commercials look subtle by comparison.

We then close the loop with an exercise from the previous class meeting. The first class included two listening exercises. At the very start of the first class, students for 15 minutes wrote every sound they heard. This introduced them to the sound journal they will write in four times a week for the length of the course. After a brief mid-period break, for 10 minutes that first class meeting they wrote down every sound they associated with the first few minutes after waking up on an average Tuesday morning. For the second class, part of their homework was to do just that: wake on Tuesday, the morning before class, and write down everything they heard. In class I then return to them their exercise from the first week, and we compare and contrast what they had heard with what they thought they heard.

For most of the remainder of this class meeting, a timeline appears on the screen at the head of the room. It reads as follows. I apologize that this is a ridiculously brief & largely Western timeline, but it’s still useful:

•• A Brief Timeline of Listening

• 90k ~ 50k BC: human hearing & speech
• ~3300 BC: Sumerian proto-Cuneiform
• ~3000 BC: ancient Egypt homing pigeons
• 750 ~ 550 BC: “oral culture becomes written culture”
• 1450s: moveable type / Gutenberg
• 1850s: recorded sound
• 1870s: the telephone
• 1952: John Cage’s 4’33”
• 1993: Mosaic browser / World Wide Web

I’ll now, as briefly as possible, run through what we discuss for each of those items.

•• A Brief Timeline of Listening

• 90k ~ 50k BC: human hearing & speech

This number probably goes back another 50,000 to 100,000 years, and what is up for grabs is what it means to be human, what did communication constitute before we had the physical capability of hearing, and how long a gap was there between our ability to hear and our development of speech.

• ~3300 BC: Sumerian proto-Cuneiform

However long the gap between our development of hearing and speaking, there was in turn a gap before the rise and proliferation of notated speech — of notated thought. This all helps set the stage for the introduction, far in the future, of recorded (and notated, though we don’t discuss it in depth here) sound.

• ~3000 BC: ancient Egypt homing pigeons

We could mark this transition in human expression at several points along our collective timeline, but the homing pigeon makes a stronger model than the horse because a message carried by a horse suggests a distance, a form of travel, that a human might take, while the pigeon follows a path that people cannot as easily traverse. This is, in essence, the telephone, the Internet, of its time. The ability to send information a very long distance emphasizes how language is, itself, a form of technology.

• 750 ~ 550 BC: “oral culture becomes written culture”

In the homework reading from week 1, R. Murray Schafer talks about how complaints about noise pollution go back to Roman days. Here we talk about an ancient Greek anxiety expressed by Socrates, who says to his interlocutor, Phaedrus: “If men learn this, it will plant forgetfulness in their souls.” What is the “this” in this sentence? This is: writing. I pause here and play some music by the late Whitney Houston, not her singing, just the background music, what is listed on singles as the “instrumental track.” We listen to what a Whitney Houston song sounds like without Whitney Houston, which leads to an extended group conversation that explores the 1750 hypothetical I mention up top. It’s a very engaging topic for discussion, and we try to imagine what loss was like at a time before recorded sound. I can barely scratch the surface here, but this is one of my favorite topics in a class that I love to teach.

• 1450s: moveable type / Gutenberg 1850s: recorded sound

It remains the case that people mistakenly say Gutenberg “invented the printing press,” and after clearing that up we talk about moveable type as a precursor to recorded sound. Our experience of recorded sound has a strong precedent in the development of printing and, later, moveable type.

• 1870s: the telephone

I go over a brief history of its development, and matters of technological adoption in general. Much as humans didn’t all wake up one day able to hear and speak, or later with the ability to read and write, nor did we all suddenly have telephones delivered to our front doors. Recent episodes of Downtown Abbey, set exactly 90 years ago, helpfully reinforce this. (Also: radio.)

• 1952: John Cage’s 4’33”

I introduced the concept of an anechoic chamber — a space designed to have no echo — in the previous class, and here expand on it by talking about John Cage. I stick to his greatest hits: his famous anechoic-chamber anecdote, his 4’33” composition, and his book Silence. I quote him from Silence, in which he connects the ideas behind 4’33″” to the glass houses of Mies van der Rohe (how they “reflect their environment, presenting to the eye images of clouds, trees, or grass, according to the situation”) and the sculptures of Richard Lippold (“it is inevitable that one will see other things, and people too, if they happen to be there at the same time”). We focus discussion on this statement of Cage’s: “There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” The students have undertaken sound journals, and emphasizing that silence is an “idea” not an actual real thing is helpful in getting them to listen to that which we have long been taught not to hear. If, as William Gibson said, “cyberspace” is a consensual hallucination of a place, then “silence” is a consensual hallucination of an absence.

• 1993: Mosaic browser / World Wide Web

If I’ve learned anything in the six semesters I’ve taught this class, it is to not overestimate the benefits of talking to students about the past 20 years of rapid increase in technology. So, I just end my timeline with the introduction of the Mosaic browser, which I posit as a division not unlike the one on the other side of which stand those people back in 1750 who didn’t know what they were missing — or so we 21st-century listeners might contend, and condescend.

• Homework

And I’ll close here with the homework that I assign in advance of the third week. There will be four more weekly sound journal entries. There will be a viewing, of the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film The Conversation. There will be one reading: an interview with sound designer Walter Murch conducted by Michael Jarrett (whose recent book Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings is great — and shares its publisher, Wesleyan, with Cage’s Silence). And there is one listening exercise. I’ll end by copying and pasting the exercise directly from the homework:

Exercise: This should take between an hour and a half and two hours to complete. Part A: First, plot out a bus ride or a walk (BART is also fine) that will take approximately one half hour, and during which you’re unlikely to run into anyone or be required to speak with anyone. (If you elect for the bus route, which I recommend, you should remain on the same bus for the full half hour.) Use your phone or another device to record the complete half-hour length of your trip. Part B: Immediately after the trip is over, sit down and make an annotated list of the sounds you recall from the trip. Part C: Immediately after that, listen back to the tape all the way through; make an annotated list of the relative prominence of sounds you had or hadn’t noticed or paid attention to. Part D: Create and send to me a document containing the lists that resulted from Parts B and C above.

And next week, in part three of “Listening to Media,” the class will focus on “The Score”: not on 150,000 years of human history, but on 100 years of film and, later, television. Which is why we’re watching — and listening to — Coppola’s The Conversation.

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 10, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.

This Week in Sound: Chaucer’s Ear, Mouthing Words, Hearing Voices

CHAUCER’S EAR: There’s a new book about 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales), which is something of a feat since we at this point know very well how little we known about him. The book is The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales, written by Paul Strohm. In a (characteristically unsigned) review in The Economist, we’re told what Strohm does in his history: “What he does instead is create a soundscape.” This is very promising, indeed. I am not accustomed to writing about books I have not yet read, but in this case I’m expressing enthusiasm and getting the word out. (Thanks for the tip, Scott Fletcher.)
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21642124-chaucers-year-living-dangerously-racket-genius

MOUTHING WORDS: At Boing Boing, Kortny Rolston reports on technology that allows one to use one’s tongue to hear. This would potentially remove the need for cochlear implants. It is fascinating to understand that both the production and reception of speech might be accomplished with the same muscle. One thing that gets glossed over sometimes in writing about sound is how senses themselves overlap, that hearing is a form of tactile experience — a form of touch — and this tongue-listening development further blurs our received conception of what it means to be human.
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/05/words-in-the-mouth-device-let.html

HEARING VOICES: What did the development radio mean to voices that had previously not necessarily expressed authority? Christine Ehrick has uploaded to academia.edu an essay titled “Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies” that serves as an advance notice on her book Radio and the Gendered Soundscape in Latin America: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950, which will be published by Cambridge this fall. Ehrick is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Louisville, and she writes in detail not just about the way radio informed conceptions of gender, but also about the way the increase in sound studies is changing gender studies. In the class I teach we spend time on related topics by studying the work of Nina Power, specifically public address systems and how they relate to the notions of the feminine and the robotic. I guess, again, I am writing about a book I haven’t yet read — in this case one that has not yet even been published. The essay originated in the sound studies blog Sounding Out! this month as part of a forum on “Gendered Voices.”
http://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/02/02/vocal-gender-and-the-gendered-soundscape-at-the-intersection-of-gender-studies-and-sound-studies/

This first appeared in the February 10, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.

Request for Modular/Eurorack Ideas

A photo posted by Marc Weidenbaum (@dsqt) on Feb 10, 2015 at 2:05pm PST

If you’re digging into modular synthesis, your input would be appreciated. Above is a snapshot of my current Eurorack synth, via modulargrid.net. Next up on my list of likely acquisitions are:

ADSR

sample/hold (w/ random/noise)

VCA

another looper

outs.

If you have feedback or thoughts, that’d be great. I posted this on Instagram because that seems to be a place where I’m in touch with a lot of people who are into modular synthesizers.

And though that’s a ModularGrid page pictured here, I own all that stuff in real/physical life, though the two in the upper left (Radio Thing and Soundmachines capacitive strip) are in the mail.

And these are the pieces:

Circuit Abbey Gozinta Input & Amplification

Critter and Guitari IIO Speaker

Doepfer A-119 Ext.Input/Env.Follower

Doepfer A-136 Distortion / Waveshaper

Doepfer A-138b Mixer (Logarithmic)

Doepfer A-145 Low Frequency Oscillator

Doepfer A-180-1 Multiple I

Make Noise phonogene Sampling

Pittsburgh Modular Oscillator Sawtooth-core Utility VCO

Soundmachines LS1lightstrip capacitive technology slider

Synthrotek EKO Voltage Controlled Echo

The Harvestman Polivoks VCF

Thonk Music Thing Radio Music (Sample Player)

Tiptop Audio Z2040 LP-VCF

Seasonal Drones

“Seasonal” by Vapor Lanes has that beading, blood-in-the-ear waver that is used by sound designers to simulate shock and disorientation on the part of the protagonist, and by modular synthesists to check the calibration of their oscillators. The disorientation is not entirely plot-driven, or mechanical. As heard here, it is a bewildering noise that surrounds you at the same time as it eludes even the most attentive listening. In “Seasonal” it at first appears out of a bell tone and above light percussion, and in time it gives way — to a cymbal-like ringing, to warp-speed rattle, to depth-charge watery currents, to white-noise junctures, and to much more, all playing out over the course of nearly 11 minutes.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/vaporlanes.

A Very Early Greg Davis EP

Perhaps Aphex Twin’s unloading of his old hard drives will have dividends in other acts following his lead. In any case, Greg Davis has just uploaded to his SoundCloud account a great, unreleased three-track set that predates his 2002 debut album, Arbor (Carpark), by almost half a decade. This artifact EP is titled One of Us and is attributed to Davis’ Asterisk moniker.

The first track, “I Have a Peanut Butter Knife & a Cheese Knife,” opens with a post-digital scatter, an early-PC version of pause-tape mania. Fractured elements are broken and splattered in a frantic rhythm that only functions as a rhythm if you stop trying to tap your foot to it. Sure, it works, ultimately, as 4/4, but banging your head to the downbeat requires you to negate the ecstasy that the beat is just barely containing. Halfway through, the piece dissolves into welcome country-pop exotica.

“Artie” goes in the opposite direction, from a hazy melody of tuned drones to something upbeat, in this case minimalist-percussive patterning. Throughout it is a mantra worthy of Terry Riley. Like the second half of “”I Have a Peanut Butter Knife & a Cheese Knife,” it emphasizes the repetition of an individual phrase with slight variations and, ultimately, a slow removal of core materials as the music fades. At its peak, this could be Philip Glass’ idea of county-fair music.

“Giants” reiterates the opening track’s broken-beat madness with a crunch reminiscent of boots in hard snow, albeit filtered through an early digital aesthetic: thick pixels meet blunt implements. As one listener, Chang Terhune, has mentioned in the SoundCloud comments, “Giants” favorably brings to mind what Autechre was up to around that same time.

Over on Facebook, Davis provided a bit more background information:

“i just uploaded an unreleased e.p. i made back in my chicago / depaul days of 1997-98. me, a studio apartment, my early mac clone computer and a handful of instruments and samples. enjoy!”‪

Set originally posted at soundcloud.com/greg-davis. More music from Davis, who is based in Burlington, Vermont, at gregdavismusic.com and autumnrecords.net.

Ladeez and Gentlemen, Effecks Twin

My book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II was published a year ago this coming Friday, February 13. A year ago he was largely a memory. Tonight he won a Grammy.

It’s weird to have written a book on a subject that everyone discussed in the past tense, and now he is fully actively present tense.

People so spoke of Aphex Twin in 2013 in the past tense that I talk in the book about how much people spoke of him in the past tense. Weird.

Those were among the thoughts I posted on Twitter this evening after the announcement that Syro had won the award for best album in the Dance/Electronica category. Syro was released last fall, after a 13-year gap since the album Drukqs. The award was given out in the pre-show Grammy ceremony, and this video snippet of the moment was uploaded shortly thereafter to YouTube:

So much anticlimax is packed into that moment, from the semi-anonymous nature of those non-show categories, to the mispronunciation of the name Aphex Twin. What stands out is the Hollywood wallpaper music that fades in after the announcement is made, this sad, out-of-place cocktail-party piano. It seems especially, unwittingly ironic given the centrality of piano to some of Aphex Twin’s own recording, including the closing track to Syro.

I mentioned on Twitter, where there was quite a bit of fun back’n’forth — including noting that music by Harry Partch, a fine precursor to Richard D. James in the field of making one’s own instruments, also won an award this evening — that I wanted nothing so much as to hear Aphex Twin snatch that bit of cocktail piano and remix it.

Ask, and, thanks to the Internet, you sometimes receive. Of course, Aphex Twin himself didn’t do the remixing, but Lee Rosevere of Vancouver, Canada, did a great job of it, breaking the source audio into pieces, layering it to stuttered and melodramatic effect, and doing a Max Headroom with the announcement itself:

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/happypuppyrecords. More from Rosevere at twitter.com/leerosevere.

Update (2015.02.09): Peculiarly, this alternate upload (found thanks to Eric Legendre) of the award announcement has no cocktail piano, but does feature some weird warped vocals and what appears to be an acceptance acknowledgement:

via instagram.com/dsqt

This space being held for one of those Soundmachines LS1 capacitive sliders. #eurorack

Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

Caroline Park’s New 5-Track Album

Caroline Park in the past week or so posted a short teaser of her then forthcoming album, Less Than Human. At just 46 seconds, it seemed just a little short to constitute a standalone post here, and fortunately the releasing label, Pan y Rosas Discos, has followed up with the full, freely downloadable set of five tracks, and posted three of them on its SoundCloud account for streaming. The album’s brief liner note includes this instruction:

play at full volume,

with good speakers

in a nice room.

no head/earphones please (sound needs space).

Do follow the instructions when the opportunity arises. The material in the SoundCloud subset of Less Than Human ranges from luminous and droning (“Plantlife”) to ominous and distant (“A Moth Is Born”) to stuttered and disorienting (“Fractured Barnacles”), and all of it is best experienced in full body, the nuances not left to the compressed nature of headphones, and the volume not adjusted for proximity’s sake.

Missing from the SoundCloud set are the album’s opening and closing tracks, “Being States” and “Gldufglsd.” The first is perhaps the album’s most ambitious, a gentle melody refracted through subtle, pinging percussion. As for “Gldufglsd,” the album’s longest cut, at over 11 minutes, it is, like “Plantlife,” structured around a low-level drone, heard here below a harsh shimmer, out of which slowly arises a warmer tone whose sense of comfort is balanced by the increased threat of that buzzsaw shimmer. It seems to suggest a sequel to “A Moth Is Born,” in which the promise of a heat brings the end.

Three-track set originally posted at soundcloud.com/panyrosasdiscos. Get the full album at panyrosasdiscos.net. More from Park, who is based in Providence, Rhode Island, at soundcloud.com/cpark, cpark.bandcamp.com, and blanksound.org. Pan y Rosas Discos is a netlabel, based in Chicago and at panyrosasdiscos.net.

via instagram.com/dsqt

Tracing the silhouette of instrumental hip-hop tracks. #eurorack

Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.