Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 390
February 6, 2015
Modular Activity on a Rainy Afternoon
The latest in a series of baby steps with modular synthesis. This is one wave form, a saw wave, doing several things at the same time. Well, it’s two waves, more about the second one in a moment, the second one indirectly impacting the first. The end result is an off-kilter metric pattern with a lot of internal motion and timbre. Drone music often has an implicit rhythmic sense, and this was an attempt to make that implicit sense explicit.
This project benefits from my purchase of the second item from the left on the top row. It’s a small little mixer that lets me combine things with ease, which is to say within the rig, rather than requiring me to use an outboard mixer (which means a bunch more cables and adapters and a power source and surface area).
The original saw wave is doing several things here, all of which are shown in the accompanying image. There’s a pure version of the saw wave going into the mixer — that’s the black cable in the fourth slot down of the mixer. (The combo blue/yellow cable at the bottom of the mixer is the output, which is also going into a little recording device, though this audio was recorded straight from the speaker that is part of the rig.)
The red cable going into the mixer is the end of a fairly long line of processing, and it’s turned down fairly low in the mix. That is the wave first going into a filter, where the resonance is being modulated by a saw wave from a secondary oscillator (the orange cable going into the same filter), and then into an echo, and then into a distortion/waveform shaper. I’ve only just obtained this distortion/waveform module, so I’m way early on in figuring it out.
And finally, a third copy of the original saw wave is going into the Phonogene, which simulates tape effects. In this case the sound is being tweaked by a wave that is a reverse image of the same saw wave that is doing its magic on the filter. OK, maybe that means it’s three waves, total.
All of this was nudged by ear until the rhythmic complexity, the sense of phasing, felt optimized. The goal was to use the same basic wave to do as much as possible, though in the end I also used that pair of secondary LFO waves for two different purposes.
This track originally posted (by me) for free download at soundcloud.com/disquiet. It’s the latest in occasional uploads I’m posting of modular synthesis I’m experimenting with. A snapshot of my rig is at modulargrid.net.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Comparing and merging saw waves on a rainy afternoon. #modular #eurorack
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
February 5, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0162: Junto in a Box
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 length of the project:
This supplemental playlist sequences the “after” and “before” versions of the tracks in the project — well, those for which there is a “before” version on SoundCloud:
This assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, February 5, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 9, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0162: Junto in a Box
The Assignment: Use Paul Lamere’s “Girl Talk in a Box” to gain a new perspective on your own music.
These are the steps:
Step 1: Choose a piece of music of your own that you would like to get a new perspective on.
Step 2: Go to the following URL to access the web app Girl Talk in a Box, which Paul Lamere designed. As he explains, “While a song is playing, you can take control, speeding it up, slowing it down, skipping beats and so on.”
http://static.echonest.com/girltalkin...
Step 3: Upload your song to Girl Talk in a Box and play with it. After gaining some measure of facility with the web app, record your own edit of your song.
Step 4: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 5: Be sure to include a link to the original track, so listeners can compare and contrast.
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, February 5, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 9, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be between two 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 “disquiet0162-juntoinabox” 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 162nd Disquiet Junto project — “Use Paul Lamere’s ‘Girl Talk in a Box’ to gain a new perspective on your own music” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/02/05/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
via instagram.com/dsqt
“Digital voice” instructions posted above San Francisco bus driver’s steering wheel. #soundstudies #ui #ux
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
February 4, 2015
Sound Class, Week by Week
As I mentioned yesterday, the 15 weeks of the sound class I teach here in San Francisco at the Academy of Art are divided into three arcs. Above is a breakdown of the topics for each of the 15 weeks. I’ll be summarizing each week’s class meeting in the email newsletter I publish on Tuesdays at tinyletter.com/disquiet, and I’ll post the material here at Disquiet.com. Today’s session — week two, “A Brief History of Sound” — was largely about celebrity death, more on which in next week’s email newsletter.
No Birds Were Harmed in This Sonic Manipulation
Caitlin Rowley says her piece “Nightbirds” is best listened to with headphones. The title is also the source audio, birdsong captured and manipulated. There is no caged bird singing. There is some vestige of the wild bird, worked with out of context, the sounds transformed into files, and the files into something else. Rowley labels the piece as “acousmatic,” which is to say it’s tape music, intended to be heard not performed, or that the performance is the act of hitting play.
At first it may very well be just birdsong, though the tight echo suggests either an unfamiliar species or a circumstance with very particular acoustics. The echo is not the result of a room, but of the virtual chamber of Rowley’s digital audio workstation. The found sound is, in short order, transformed beyond anything a fellow bird might recognize. It gets deeper, darker, less content. The nightbird song merges with the night.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/caitlinrowley. More from Rowley at caitlinrowley.com. She is is an Australian composer living in the United Kingdom.
February 3, 2015
Sound Class, Week 1 of 15: An Introduction to Listening
One of the great pleasures of teaching a course on sound is reading students’ sound journals. This semester there are 17 students enrolled in the course that I teach about the role of sound in the media landscape. Each student is required to keep a sound journal in which they write — at least four times a week — about their experience of sound. These student journals begin simply, at the start of the semester, with lists of overheard things, not even full sentences, just clauses, descriptive bits, reference points. For example, I just opened one of these journals and saw a recent entry about a date at a Japanese restaurant. The first four observations in this student’s journal entry, out of a dozen or so such line items, read as follows:
“Coins are putting in parking meter”
“Customers writing on the waiting list, the pen and paper made a soft sound”
“People zipping off their jackets”
“Chairs moving”
By tonight at 11pm (San Francisco time), the due date for the first week’s homework, there will be almost 70 such entries among the 17 students’ collective journals. I have them write the journals in reverse chronological order as Google Drive documents, so I can pull them up anywhere and start reading immediately. I’ll often enough find myself on a bus reading about a student’s experience on a different bus, or while waiting for a movie to start I’ll read a student’s comments about a film they had just seen. This list-making only lasts so long. In two weeks, maybe three, the assignments will be pushed toward more considered, toward more reflective observations. The journal instruction at that stage will read something along the lines of this: “Write more about less.” We’ll move from clauses to sentences, from sentences to paragraphs, from paragraphs to essays.
The first day of class I put a slide up that shows the trajectory I plan for their sound studies to follow. This is how it reads: Hearing → Listening → Discerning → Describing → Analyzing → Interpreting → Implementing.
We start with hearing. The course begins like the journals, with list-making. The first day of class, as we did this past Wednesday, I have students sit in (near) silence and write down everything that they hear. I post the instructions on the television monitor at the front of the room and I wait patiently as they write on the provided pieces of paper. They have 15 minutes to do this, and the situation usually plays out as follows. For the first 5 minutes there is much to write about, for the second 5 minutes they are asking what the heck they’ve gotten themselves into, and for the final 5 minutes the world opens itself up a little bit, and they find renewed energy to observe the sounds around them: the muffled discussion in a neighboring classroom, a passing siren, their classmates’ scribbling, me coughing, footsteps in the hallway.
Thus begins the first class. The course, which is held at the Academy of Art downtown, runs for 15 weeks straight, excepting spring break, with one class meeting per week, three hours each class starting at noon on Wednesdays, plus about nine hours of related homework assignments each week.
The course is divided into three arcs, to borrow a term from serial television and comic books. The first three weeks are about “Listening to Media.” The second arc runs from week four through week 10, and is about “Sounds of Brands”: how companies, products, and people express themselves through sound; we’ll talk about jingles, and the sound of retail spaces, and product design, and public address systems. The third arc runs from week 11 through 15; it’s titled “Brands of Sounds,” and it’s about how things related to sound — headphones, streaming services, bands, albums — express themselves in the marketplace.
If workload allows, I plan to outline each week’s class meeting here. This isn’t the lecture; it’s a summary of the class meeting. Much of the first day is explaining to the students what I wrote above, about the outline of the syllabus. I mention that we will have occasional guests — not guest speakers so much as people I will interview in front of them. In past semesters we’ve had representatives of SoundCloud and BitTorrent, sound designers and voice actors, music publicists and app developers. And we’ll take field trips. We’ve visited backstage at the opera, we’ve entered the ambisonic workspace of a major engineering consultancy, and we’ve stood in the anechoic chamber of a consumer-audio company’s local research laboratory.
There is a second listening exercise halfway through the first class meeting. This time they don’t listen, and instead they write down what listening they associate with a specific time: what sounds they associate with waking on a Tuesday morning. They make a list of the sounds that come to mind. Inevitably this consists of things like the burbling of a coffee maker, the white noise of a running shower, the grinding of a garbage truck’s receptacle. They submit this to me, and I hold on to it for the time being.
We then focus in on the familiar: popular entertainment. I play the opening credits to the television show Fringe, developed by JJ Abrams, and we talk about what the credits have in them, what triggers and nuances and reference points that the music contains, from its sense of mystery, to its touches of modern classical minimalism, to its dreamy apparitions. We talk through the variations that credit sequence underwent as the TV series Fringe unfolded — the “red” episodes that meant it would take place primarily in an alternate universe, the 80s rendition that meant a major flashback. And I explain that every class I teach has at its heart some question I to which don’t even begin know the answer. For this first class meeting what I don’t know is to what extent JJ Abrams’ close, career-long attention to sound plays a role in the popular success of his work.
We then talk about a variety of themes associated with JJ Abrams, from the coy reworking of the theme to Mission: Impossible, to the replaced open-credit music in his first Star Trek film, to the tone-as-jingle that constituted the brief title card score for Lost, and we close on the classic John Williams opening to Star Wars, and consider what a JJ Abrams version of Star Wars, which will debut later this December, might sound like. We spend a lot of time on each of these TV and film credit sequences, playing them over and over, listening for and discussing details, pausing every few seconds.
That all takes close to the allotted three hours. Then I talk through the grading procedures, how to share homework, and what the homework will be for the coming week. The first class met last Wednesday, January 28. Due tonight by 11pm is the first week’s homework. They will write four sound journal entries. They will read an essay by neuroscientist Seth S. Horowitz and an interview with acoustic ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer. And they will have, this morning, woken up and written down all the sounds they heard. We will then, in class, compare and contrast what they actually heard with what they thought they would hear on a Tuesday morning. But that’s not until the second week of class, which happens tomorrow.
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 3, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
This Week in Sound: Aphex ^N, Household Ghosts, Retroj.am
APHEX ^N: We’re 10 days from the first anniversary of the publication of my book in the 33 1/3 series on Aphex Twin’s landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Volume II. I’m excited that it was one of the five best-selling volumes in the series last year, and I’m also overwhelmed at what a difference a year makes. Aphex Twin was mostly a memory when I researched and wrote the book, and for many months following the book’s release. He hadn’t released a full-length album in well over a decade. Just about everyone I spoke with about him spoke of him in the past tense. And then last fall he — Richard D. James — came, quite suddenly, out of hiding. He announced his reappearance with a blimp over London; released a widely acclaimed album, Syro; and filled a SoundCloud account with dozens of previously unreleased music. Then that account (soundcloud.com/richarddjames) when dark, though two new tracks have recently appeared. The first of those two new tracks announced the arrival of a new post-Syro EP, the excellent downtempo set Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2. And then came soundcloud.com/user48736353001, where he has been posting dozens upon dozens of previously unreleased tracks. There were 110 tracks attributed to user48736353001 as of a few days ago, and then another 20 popped up today. And as if that weren’t enough, a mysterious new account associated with it, soundcloud.com/somadril, has 15 tracks — so far. (I’ve been informed via a conversation on ello.co that folks deep in the Aphex well are under the impression Somadril is a friend of Aphex, not him.)
https://soundcloud.com/user48736353001/
GHOST-IN-THE-HOME MACHINES: Geoff Manaugh writes at New Scientist about the ways technology maintains our presence in our absence, for the purposes of home safety: “For example, there are already albums of background noise available to make it sound as if someone is rummaging through the refrigerator or watching TV in the other room. One collection specifically promises ‘hundreds of professionally recorded interior house sounds to give the realistic impression that someone is at home’. It won’t be long before audio effects such as these are integrated directly into a FakeTV-like system, playing deceptive sounds through hidden speakers in an otherwise empty house or apartment.” Once upon a time we might have used simple timers on lamps to do the job, and at more paranoid moments I did hook timers up to radios for the effect that Manaugh describes. The commercialization of such activities makes one wonder what’s ahead. William Gibson tells us the street finds its own uses for things. What uses will the home find? (Thanks, boondesign.com, for the tip.)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26904-new-urbanist-the-ghosts-that-keep-your-house-safe.html/
PLAYLISTS OF YOUR YOUTH: The new web service http://retroj.am/ — I write out the full URL because “retroj.am” doesn’t immediately announce itself as a web address — provides you with playlists tagged to various moments in your life. You enter your birthday — today, February 3, happens to be my half birthday, and my late paternal grandmother’s birthday — and it pumps out what was playing (in the U.S.) when you were born, and when you entered first grade and second grade, and when you graduated from high school, and so on. Well, not “and so on” for very long. Interestingly, it ends when you graduate from college — the presumption, likely correct, is that once you enter the work force what is playing on the radio is less likely to correspond with your actual life. One demerit: retroj.am only goes back to 1950, which leaves plenty of room for my memories, but not for everyone’s — and not for many curious listeners who might wonder what was a hit before your mother was born.
http://retroj.am/
This first appeared in the February 3, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
“Sound as Commentary”
Niki Korth asks great questions. She interviewed me recently about the “Sonic Frame” audio-visual installation I developed for the 45th anniversary of the founding of the San Jose Museum of Art. The work will be on display through the 22nd of this month. “Sonic Frame” is a response to an earlier piece of work, a silent video by Josh Azzarella, that is part of the museum’s permanent collection. The interview was published today at The Big Conversation Space, the website of a collaboration between Korth and Paris-based Clémence de Montgolfier.
Below is the opening question and my response, about the nature of that overused term “disruption” and the unique capabilities of sound in an artistic context. Later in the interview she asks about the source video for the project, the extent to which I was in touch with the original artist, the inherent subject of terrorism, the nature of the Creative Commons, and what was involved in working with around 80 composers in the process of developing the piece.
Korth: The SJMA describes the Momentum exhibition as one that ¨disrupts the status quo¨ by inviting artists to ¨intervene¨ on the works from their permanent collection that are on display by responding to them through the creation of new works. Do you consider your work to function as a disruption, in this context? What do you see as the function of disruptions and interventions within art practice more generally, in particular as they pertain to sound?
Weidenbaum: I’m personally a bit hesitant about the specific word “disrupt” because of its current broad use, perhaps its overuse, as an adopted term of tech jargon. Even in tech jargon it’s a meaningful and useful term, but for every useful employment there are dozens that are less than informed, more received, less considered. But more generally, yeah, certainly: this work, like the other work in the Momentum exhibit, was generated as an act of disruption, as the word was specifically employed by the fine folks at the San Jose Museum of Art. I think the museum’s use of the word was a solid choice — the museum is at the heart of Silicon Valley, and this approach to the world, this upending of systems, is very much on the minds of many of the people who visit the museum, the people who drive by it every day, the people who live and work in its vicinity.
The goal of the interventions was to develop something original that influences the audience’s reception of the source work. “Intervention” is a word that the museum also employed, in addition to “disrupt,” and I personally connected a bit more to “intervention” than to “disrupt.” I like the idea of intervening between the original work and the spectator, the idea of being an “active spectator,” somewhere between the original artist and traditional spectator. I am quite engaged by the idea of appropriative musicians, those who work with pre-existing material, being what I like to call “active listeners,” and I saw this project as being something of an “active viewer” — someone who has an impression of what they view, in this case Azzarella’s video, and expresses that impression by making something in response.
I use the phrase “sound as commentary” a lot to describe this process, that there’s a non-verbal yet still sonic way to communicate ideas. The original video is silent and singular, and I worked on something that is sonorous and has myriad points of view. I think anything that reminds people that the art on the wall is the start of a process as much as the end of one is a good thing. We tend to think of art as the culmination of artistic intent, and it’s great to have an opportunity to make active and to present the idea that art builds on art, as well as the fact that our perception of a work can be influenced in many ways by external circumstances. I think that sound is a particularly useful tool in such a scenario because there is always a sonic content for work, even work that is intended to be silent, and drawing attention to that activity can be thought-provoking, informative, disorienting.
The full interview is at thebigconversationspace.org, where the above photo is sourced from.
