Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 416
July 12, 2014
The Kalimba as Digital Muse
Call it analog-digital tension, call it a tribute to Brian Eno’s admonition that computer music needs more “Africa” in it, or call it a desire for simple tools when endless tools abound. Whatever the cause, the kalimba is a favorite sample-ready source for electronic excursions, and it proves a worthy subject of attention on “Council Ring” by Chicago-based Mereology. The kalimba here is the root of low-key pachinko play, mixes of light random percussion that follow along a downtempo pace, abetted by lovely tonal foundational material:
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mereology. The musician also goes by the name Will Farina. More at twitter.com/mereologyst.
SOUND RESEARCH LOG: The Sound Design of Typing
“The Qwerkwriter has a very unique sound signature, due to its chrome accent as well as the mechanical switch, and the way the key caps are constructed.” That’s the pitch at the start of this video of a three-pound, tablet-friendly keyboard that combines Bluetooth connectivity with an old-school mechanism. It is unlikely anyone who worked in or near a corporate typing pool in the pre-computer, post-war era misses the cacophony, but for personal use the gadget no doubt has its charms. From the tech spec: “Cherry MX Blue switches (a modern switch that emulates the typewriter clicky feel).”
Hosted at vimeo.com and the kickstarter.com campaign, which passed its goal of $90,000 by almost 50 percent. More at qwerkytoys.com. Found via Richard Kadrey.
This entry cross-posted from the Disquiet linkblog project sound.tumblr.com.
July 11, 2014
The Geophony + Biophony + Anthrophony of Memory
The Berlin-based musician Micah Frank has posted this nearly two-minute recording of the Schönhauser Allee Cemetery (or Friedhof Schönhauser Allee in German). The Jewish cemetery dates from 1827. Frank’s annotation is simple. He marks it as a stereo recording, and he lists what he hears. What’s especially of note in regard to what he hears is less the sonic objects he finds distinct within the soundscape, so much as how he categorizes those objects. Seemingly drawing from the work of Bernie Krause, the notes here divide the sonic content into three complementary fields:
Geophony: rain, wind
Biophony: birds, insects
Anthrophony: air traffic, city noises
The words are fairly self-explanatory. “Anthrophony” refers to sounds made by humans. “Biophony” refers to sounds made by any other living organisms. “Geophony” refers to the remaining elements of nature. What makes them useful, and worthy of greater adoption by people who post field recordings, is how they usefully break down the sounds in a way that gives them context, makes them comprehensible, knowable, memorable. One might take issue with the difference between “anthrophony” and “biophony,” suggesting it creates a false dichotomy, but given that the intended listener is a human, the focus on “anthrophony” helps give the listener the sense of a broader role in the sound of the world.
There are numerous field recordings on Frank’s SoundCloud page, including ones from Puerto Rico:
And Woodstock, New York:
And the Baltic Sea near Rostock, Germany (“Geophony: waves”; “Anthrophony: beach cleaning equipment”):
Sometimes Frank plays with the source audio, as in this modified recording of his father-in-law’s home distillery (“My field recorder,” he writes, “picked up all of the bubbling and percolations in great detail”):
Berlin track originally posted at soundcloud.com/micahfrank. More on the historic cemetery at jg-berlin.org. More from Frank at twitter.com/micahfrank.
(Photo by Rae Allen from flickr.com, used via Creative Commons license.)
July 10, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 0132: Posthumous Nofi Trio
Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.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 mid-afternoon, California time, on Thursday, July 10, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 14, 2013, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0132: Posthumous Nofi Trio
This week’s project is a tribute to the late Jeffrey Melton, the talented musician, best known on SoundCloud and Twitter as @nofi. The project builds on the Disquiet Junto Project 0066, which took place 66 weeks ago.
The Disquiet Junto Project 0066 had participants perform live over a segment of a live recording of Melton himself playing solo. The result was a series of posthumous duets. This week we’ll produce a series of posthumous trios. The steps are as follows:
Step 1: Choose one of the tracks that resulted from Disquiet Junto project 0066:
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/...
Step 2: Listen to your chosen track several times, to get to know it.
Step 3: Extend the file by 10 to 15 seconds.
Step 4: Record yourself performing live along with the track. Any instrumentation is fine. Just no voice. Be sure to play alone for approximately 10 seconds after the original track ends.
Step 5: Upload the track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud, following the directions below.
Background: Melton passed away March 30, 2013, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he lived with his wife and seven-year-old son. He was 42. Melton had been involved with the Disquiet Junto since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012, and he early on volunteered to create a Twitter list of the handles of participating Junto members.
Deadline: Monday, July 14, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: The length of your finished work will be 10 to 15 seconds longer than the track you selected.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0132-posthumousnofitrio″ 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 link to the source track from project 0066, and to include this information:
More on this 132nd Disquiet Junto project — “Collaborate with the late Jeffrey (Nofi) Melton using a previous tribute track” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/07/10/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
My Aphex Twin Talk at CCRMA/Stanford
The first talk I gave on my book Selected Ambient Works Volume II, in the 33 1/3 series, on the Aphex Twin album of that name was back on February 19 of this year, a few days after the book’s official release date. This is full video of that talk. It took place at Stanford University’s CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics:
One cool thing that came out of the event was the reviving of a URL that played an indirect but influential role in the history of the album. My book is as much about the cultural afterlife of Selected Ambient Works Volume II as it is about the album itself. Part of that afterlife took place online, with particular vitality on email discussion groups. The ones housed at Hyperreal.org were frequented by Greg Eden, whom I interviewed in the book, and who is the individual bearing primary responsibility for the words associated as track titles for the album (on which with one exception, the tracks are officially untitled). As background for the book, I interviewed Hyperreal.org founder Brian Behlendorf, who among other things explained to me that before Hyperreal got that name, it was running on “a dedicated box at the Medical Information Systems Group.” The URL for the boards was techno.stanford.edu. This was on a Sun Sparcstation 1+. The Hyperreal lists IDM@ and Ambient@ started on techno.stanford.edu in early 1993.
Speaking to the hometown crowd, I mentioned the techno.stanford.edu URL in my talk. Shortly after the event, Carr Wilkerson at CCRMA managed to get the URL — which had long since gone 404-error dormant — to redirect to the CCRMA home page.
Oh, and two facts to correct:
1: Toward the beginning I mention Jonathan Lethem’s entry in the 33 1/3 series, about the Talking Heads album Fear of Music. It is #86, not #89, in the series.
2: And very close to the end, in response to a question from the audience, I can’t recall the name of a sculptor whom John Cage compares his compositions to in his book Silence. The sculptor of wire works is Richard Lippold.
The video is housed at youtube.com. Original event listing at ccrma.stanford.edu.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Genius Bar genius told me this loop is how you avoid your MacBook cable from breaking.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
July 9, 2014
Numbers Stations and the Fog of War
4 5 97 02 04
If you tune your radio between stations and come across someone reading numbers like these, it’s likely because you’ve stumbled upon a numbers station, a lo-tech and enticingly antiquated means of transmitting encoded information.
The numbers up top contain basic information about numbers stations. The popular comprehension of numbers stations is largely founded on The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations, a collection that initially consisted of four and, later, five compact discs. The set was released by the label Irdial-Discs in 1997. In 2002, the band Wilco used some of the sounds in a track, “Poor Places,” off its Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. That album’s title is itself sourced from a phrase uttered on the Conet album. (Wilco later, in 2004, settled a suit about this unauthorized use.)
In a series of haunting pieces of subsumed numbers recitation, the England-based musician and sound artist Norah Lorway threads a needle. She maintains enough of the source audio that it is recognizable if not always comprehensible, yet buries it in enough sonic detritus that the result gives listeners the experience of having, on their own, come upon the numbers. At times, the numbers are kept entirely from sonic view, the voices giving way to harsh static, and to sudden noises that might be heard as air raid sirens or the clash of machine guns. The voices themselves are at times warped, rendered anxious, as if the utterances contain not just coded factual information but also raw emotional content.
This is a set of two of Lorway’s pieces. According to the brief accompanying note, there is also a third:
More from Lorway, who is based in Birmingham, England, at norahlorway.com, academia.edu, twitter.com/norahlo, and norahlorway.bandcamp.com.
(Thanks to Larry Johnson for the recommendation.)
July 8, 2014
sound.tumblr.com -> disquiet.com
One more note regarding site maintenance, to follow up yesterday’s announcement about the expansion of the Downstream department: The linkblog I maintain at sound.tumblr.com will now be co-posted here at Disquiet.com, under the Field Notes category. This has already been underway for a few days. The linkblog content relates to the subject of the course I teach at the Academy of Art here in San Francisco. Its subject is the role of sound in the media landscape. As it’s described at sound.tumblr.com:
Sounds of Brands: The role of sound in the media landscape
Brands of Sounds: How commerce + audio harmonize
Recent posts to sound.tumblr.com have included whether water sounds different based on its temperature, an over-the-counter sleep aid that is expanding into the realm of white-noise machines, and the fading glory of Italian dance halls. One ongoing thread of obsession is devices whose microphones are always on, always listening. There’s also emphasis on shifts in what once was called the “record industry,” not so much out of an interest in business practices as an advance sense of how what was largely a business of fixed sonic artifacts is responding to the fluid nature of digital culture.
A little background: Since 2007 I’ve, on and off, mostly off, been maintaining separate activities at sound.tumblr.com. Tumblr launched in February 2007, and a few months later I found myself in Japan. I kept an online sound journal using Tumblr throughout that trip, and shortly thereafter compiled it into a single post here at Disquiet.com (“Tokyo Sound Diary, May 2007″). Since 2012, that site has served — again, on and off, mostly off — as a place to deposit brief observations related to this course I teach. Last July I thought I’d finally wrapped my head around how to handle the Tumblr side project, but that didn’t last too long. Then, again, this past month I felt I’d gotten a sense of how to manage it. At the time, I wrote, “So, I’m now using Tumblr as a kind of linkblog, an ‘active delicio.us’ as it were. It has a specific focus: entirely on my research on ‘the role of sound in the media landscape.’” It’s felt pretty good since then, hence its porting — via an IFTTT script — to Disquiet.com. IFTTT isn’t perfect. It can take more than an hour for an item in Tumblr to show up on Disquiet.com. Triggers from the app on my Android phone don’t work as effectively as the ones from the website. And don’t even get me started with the shortcomings of the Tumblr app.
In any case, I hope people find the linkblog material of interest. I certainly do, which is why I make note of it here. By and large, I’m not a fan of blind links, of links without any additional context; that said, there’s need to collect and collate material, and so I post these links with some framing information, and with tags for me to access the material at a later date.
When Sounds Are Images
The album Northern Gulfs by Yair Elazar Glotman comes and goes in rich swells. The music — entirely free of vocals, and essentially of melodies for that matter — is built less from notes than from images. These are sounds, of course, but each sound is so specific, so distinct from each other, that they individually have the quality of images. They’re memorable less for their sonic content than for their narrative content, the place they hold in memory, the stories they propose. On the track “High Tide,” for example, the constituent sounds include the sawing of wood, the creaking of a rope and a slat pier, some high-pitched ring tones, insectoid percussion that could be a cigarette lighter failing to make good on its sole responsibility, and an underlying bass tone with a somber cast. There are six Northern Gulfs tracks in all, each with its own collection of images. Some are more tonal, others more entranced with sourced field recordings, like the scatter of pebbles and echoed bell on “Low Tide” or the ratcheted gears in “Home Port.” Each of these elements, whether tonal or sourced, is entirely self-defined. Each may individually have been processed — stretched, given texture, looped mechanically, hushed — but they never seem to merge in any given track. They are like semi-opaque cards in a deck being constantly shuffled. “Khaypudyr Bay,” named for a spot in the brittle cold of northwest Russia, features a delicate counterpoint of clipped signals, buried deep in a warm, gray hum. Much of the record retains that muted malevolence, but it reaches an extreme on “Kara Sea,” named for the Siberian waters, which feels truly tortured, its elements including backward masked bits that suggest regret, as well as harsh winds and a haunting organ.
Northern Gulfs by Yair Elazar Glotman
The album is streaming in full at glacialmovements.bandcamp.com. It was released in April 2014 by glacialmovements.com. Yair Elazar Glotman is based in Berlin, Germany.
