Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 42

Disquiet Junto Project 0670: Right of Way

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0670: Right of Way
The Assignment: Music for turn signals.

Step 1: Record the sound of a car’s turn signal (or, alternately, use a prerecorded one, for example at freesound.org).

Step 2: Improvise on top of the recording of the turn signal with as many or few layers of additional sound as you like, emphasizing rhythm (versus melody or harmony), and retain the original turn signal sound, so it is still audible for most if not all of your finished track

Background: This project is something of a callback to the 11th Disquiet Junto project, way back at the end of March 2012.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0670” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0670-right-of-way/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long a wait at the light is it?

Deadline: Monday, November 4, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 670th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Right of Way — The Assignment: Music for turn signals — at https://disquiet.com/0670/

This Week in Sound: Shame Has a New Ringtone

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the October 29, 2024, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ NO BACKSIES: Shame has a new ringtone. At the American Airlines terminal at San Francisco International Airport, “a warning sound [is] triggered when passengers attempt to board outside their assigned group. When a boarding pass is scanned, an ‘audible alert’ will notify the gate agent, displaying the passenger’s correct group number.”

▰ DUTY CALLS: “The audio team at lead dev studio Treyarch is enhancing the 3D soundscape to new levels, allowing players to better sense the location, speed, and direction of nearby activity, helping them to respond more effectively and become even more immersed in the world,” writes Dean Takahashi. I’m intrigued by this level of sound design detail in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, especially as it correlates with being a meaningful component of gameplay, and not just of story, design, and setting. Says audio engineer audio engineer William Cornell: “We’ve been working closely with the Project Acoustics team to simulate the way that sound waves bounce and propagate through the world down to the smallest details like what materials are made of, the size and shape of the room, and what path the sound has to take to get from where it happened to where you’re hearing it.”

▰ CREW CUT: The year-old company Crewless Marine, based in Rhode Island, expands sea research: “It’s important to understand our oceans, and understanding undersea acoustics is really a key part of that. The scope of that problem is something that crewed or manned platforms can’t handle alone — the ocean is too big. With the emergence of uncrewed platforms — in surface vehicles, undersea vehicles, and stationary platforms — we have an opportunity to put acoustic sensors on these vehicles to get a sense of the ocean and get a better understanding of what manmade and biological sounds are doing to the marine environment.”

▰ FLY BY: A potential model for how airports manage community concerns about noise will debut at the website of Tweed New Haven Regional Airport, reportedly to “give airport officials and airport neighbors the opportunity to measure where a plane is, or was, and how loud it was at any given time, from any spot on the map.” The website will be powered by tools developed by the Australian company Envirosuite. Per an article in the New Haven Register, this offering is beyond the capabilities of familiar plane-tracking services such as flightaware.com and flightradar24.com.

▰ PALETTE CLEANSER: A brief summary on the four-note theme of the San Francisco television station KRON on the occasion of the station’s 75th anniversary: “The four-note sonic brand originated during KRON’s 50th anniversary when composer Michael Boyd created the station’s signature sound, debuting in 1995 and in use until 2001 and again from 2006 until 2020. The new orchestration builds upon this foundation while expanding the musical palette.” Says an engineer at the firm that refreshed the sound logo: “If you’re at home and preparing dinner, and you hear that logo, you know it’s time for the news.” (Bonus points for the idea that one “hears” a logo.) 

▰ GRACE NOTES: Hear, Say: The word “earwitness” was wordsmith.org’s word of the day this week, and apparently, if I’m reading correctly, it dates back to 1539? (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Unbound: “Audiobooks have surpassed e-book sales for August and the first eight months of the year for the first time.” ▰ Sales Call:SoundHound CEO and cofounder Keyvan Mohajer talks about helping power the “voice-commerce ecosystem,” which to a good degree means shopping by talking. ▰ A Good Caws: Movies get birds wrong a lot, and “rarely sound, look, or behave like they should.” One bird in one movie in particular apparently has disturbed birders for a quarter century: Charlie’s Angels (2000) may contain “the wrongest bird in the history of cinema.” ▰ Lab Report: Good Morning America got to visit Apple’s audio lab. ▰ Pod Saves: The podcast of The Wirecutter piggybacked on the hearing tools in Apple’s AirPods for a full episode of gadget commentary and personal anecdotes. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Road Rave: Local coverage, from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England, on the installation of so-called sound cameras, which capture images of loud vehicles. ▰ Orchestral Manoeuvres: The Los Angeles Philharmonic has announced a half-day marathon on November 16: “This year’s programming focuses on field recordings, combining a series of performances with panels engaging composers, acoustic ecologists, field recordists and climate scientists on the intersections of art, nature and technology.” ▰ Ads Up: This isn’t going to be a big surprise, but research suggests that, when it comes to advertising on smart services like Alexa and Siri, “giving users more sense of control through a combination of methods reduced negative reactions to advertising messages.”

On the Line

▰ Like a Glove:

The chanters give the puppets voice with intense and compressed screeches, gasps, and tears of terror, shame, and remorse — but they themselves slip from our awareness. Their disembodied voices operate like a soundtrack, synchronized with puppet gesture and emotion: a sinking chest, the kink of an elbow, a feverish shake.

That is Jennifer Homans in The New Yorker describing the art of Japanese puppetry, focusing here on the individuals who give voice to the dolls.

. . .

▰ Spaced Out:

... there are mysteries below our sky:the whale song, the songbird singingits call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

That is Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate, in her brief poem, “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” which could almost be read to suggest there’s enough on Earth worth wondering at, that the skies are a distraction. Almost.

. . .

▰ Room Tone:

In this case, the great volume of air seemed charged and activated, but often I felt that the elegant airiness operated like a buffer and that the work could use some coaxing, that some itinerary or timeline or thematic might have been laid out.

That is critic Alex Kitnick, writing at 4columns.org, about a retrospective of the art of Christine Kozlov currently exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Manhattan. The further context of this description is Kozlov’s Information: No Theory (1970), in Kitnick’s words: “a recording system that commits a room’s sound to magnetic tape only to immediately erase it.”

Sound Ledger: Dialects, Ocean, Noise

201: number of dialects (from 288 cities) reported to be supported by the voice recognition technology of the company iFlytek

4,000: distance, in kilometers, that the sound of airguns, used in oil and gas exploration underwater, can travel

147,000,000,000: estimate annual cost, in euros, of noise pollution, per France’s Environmental Transition Agency (aka ADEME)

Sources: dialects (techinasia.com), airguns (phys.org), noise (lemonde.fr)

Looking Out for No. 1

Looks like someone was voted off the island

On Repeat: Aarset, Kowalczyk, Fennesz

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ This 9-minute jam is pretty heavy, even by guitarist Eivind Aarset’s standards, like hearing Dark Magus emerge from Black Sabbath. It’s a new trio, teaming Aarset with drummer Audun Kleive and keyboardist Ståle Storløkken. According to Kleive: “We are currently building our repertoire further.” Eric Furst replied on Mastodon: “It’s a bit like a black hole posting that they are ‘currently in the process of becoming more massive.’”

▰ Some deep interstellar drones from Kamil Kowalczyk, born in Poland and based in Scotland:

▰ There’s a new album, Mosaic, due out in December from Fennesz, and its excellent opening track, “Heliconia,” is a shoegaze expanse you can really get lost in over the course of its 9+ minutes.

Scratch Pad: Lore Was Always Ahead of Mythos

I  do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ gluten-free breadboarding

▰ Still not sure why audiobook players don’t let you also listen to music

▰ Been doing this thing with TV ads lately where I unmute for the last second or, at most, two seconds (the now normalized ad countdown makes this easy), and seeing — that is, hearing — what makes the final sonic impression, and then trying gauge the extent to which advertisers are doing anything in that final moment to catch the ear of and appeal to vigilant ad-muters

▰ Friday morning hold-music dancing-in-place

▰ In the middle of reading too many books. As matters of gluttony go, it’s a lesser of numerous evils. I did finish reading a short graphic novel, Old Dog: Operations, an anthology by various writers and artists building out the world and lore introduced a year ago in Declan Shalvey’s Old Dog [Redact One]. I was going to type “mythos,” and then sorted “lore” as the more common word these days, and then wondered when lore overtook mythos, but according to the data in Google Books Ngram, lore was always ahead of mythos.

TWiS Listening Post (0024)

This went out to paid This Week in Sound subscribers as a thank you

The Science of Oz

Every week, when I send out the Disquiet Junto project, I don’t actually send it out directly. I set it up in various digital publishing tools, primarily my disquiet.com website and an email list service, and then I set them both on timers. I am almost always deep asleep when they actually go out, shortly after midnight. I do all this knowing that some of the first Junto members to see each week’s project instructions are in Australia, and in fact it’s not uncommon for an Australian track to pop up on the llllllll.co discussion thread before I wake up. (I’m looking at you, Bassling* — aka Jason Richardson.) So it seems particularly appropriate that this week’s project has as its basis the research of four scientists from an Australian University. I first became aware of it as part of the process of putting together my This Week in Sound email newsletter.

*And indeed, he had recorded and posted before I was up.

Slightly adapted from the note that appeared in the October 24, 2024, issue of the Disquiet Junto project announcement newsletter.

Disquiet Junto Project 0669: Phonosynthesis

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0669: Phonosynthesis
The Assignment: Make music to help a forest regenerate.

A scientific research paper this month documented evidence that sound can help fungus grow. The conclusion: “Demonstrating a tangible impact on fungal activity, our findings suggest that carefully tuned acoustic parameters might be able to enhance ecological processes.”

Record music to help a forest grow. Imagine an array of solar-powered speakers is spread through a forest-in-need. Or come up with another deployment scenario of your own imagining. What sort of music would you play for the forest to encourage its regeneration?

The research paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0295.

Coverage in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/science/fungus-sounds-growth.html

The paper is the work of four people from the College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, in Australia.

Thanks to Michael Rhode for having shared with me the research coverage.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0669” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0669-phonosynthesis/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How hard do you need to work to keep your secret?

Deadline: Monday, October 28, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 669th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Phonosynthesis — The Assignment: Make music to help a forest regenerate — at https://disquiet.com/0669/