Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 437

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

RT @benjamindauer: With 8,700+ plays and 130+ downloads, my @disquiet remix for @nilsfrahm remains my most popular track. Thank you!

https… ->



I've no doubt gotten a lot more use out of my (gen 2) Nexus 7 by not putting it in a case, but the thing is taking a beating. ->



21 tracks (so far) in tribute to the late Lou Reed and his classic Metal Machine Music: http://t.co/R2Qujl5ath ->



Street music. #readymade #speaker #urbanstudies #gadget #waste #progress http://t.co/brGTJRxjUW ->



"An obscure guitar pedal was for him another kind of poem." Patti Smith on Lou Reed: http://t.co/7NhB9jeo5O via @pheezy ->



The calendar in Mavericks is a huge improvement. It's downright elegant. ->



Now 28 tracks inspired by the late Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music: http://t.co/cEZ52F7IZ9. And still almost half a day to go. ->



Just sent email newsletter to http://t.co/A2xaR3KK3n list with contest for free 33 1/3 sampler. To subscribe, here: http://t.co/7gtoM0uy6N ->



Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FrVmKgO1Mx ->



I haven't been to Japan in about four years. Maybe I should start thinking about October 2014, when Red Bull Music Academy lands there. ->



Been reading Dave Eggers' The Circle. So far I've learned that he uses commas even more often than I do. I need to step up my game. ->



Any sufficiently advanced use of technology is described as hacking. ->



Getting excited about the Oulipo sound workshop I'll run at San Francisco Art Institute this Saturday: http://t.co/vtqV0931iR ->



Bingo. MT @AnnieGilbertson: Fitting for meeting I'm sitting in discussing #lausd student "hacking". They just deleted security file #nomagic ->



Thing I learned today: updates of Arthur C. Clarke quotes are of interest to people. #magic ->



My edit of Clarke's 3rd law came after I read opening of Eggers' The Circle + headline about Mayor Ford hiring "hacker" to delete the video. ->



Tomorrow in the sound class I teach: student "sound audits" of various consumer products. Next week: what sound looks like. ->



static gif #recentretronyms ->



Yo, Google: Any sense of when spreadsheets will work offline in OS X? #nudge ->



Jealous. MT @mrbiggsdotcom: Cardiff's 40-part motet at Cloisters, in Fuentiduenas Chapel. Thought of you @disquiet http://t.co/YCiMlDA2kQ ->



Great student presentations today in sound class (1) about breathing in yoga and (2) about audio in film. ->



Sad to read about Internet Archive's fire damage, but sounds like it's OK. Great resource online and neighbor here in the Richmond District. ->



Maybe we need to sort out some sort of @NASAJuno Junto. ->



Kinda hoped OuPhoPo was a workshop for potential Vietnamese food, but is happy to look at experimental photography. ->



"What's this box with the levers on it next to the turntables?" Kid Koala on taking his Jazzy Jeff LP to RadioShack: http://t.co/Q49pk1jPM5 ->



San FranciscOuLiPo: last night at City Lights, tonight at Mechanics Inst, Friday at Green Apple, Saturday at SFAI: http://t.co/INt3wG28eo ->



Vague relief that Mail-app freezing issues in OS X Mavericks is being addressed: http://t.co/CYJS4GZoqz. Still visiting Geniuses tomorrow. ->



OS X Maverick, in which Apple plays cards with your data's fate. #badjamesgarnerjoke ->



Just tried Ford Madox Ford's "Page 99 Test" on my Aphex Twin / SAW2 book and it's all drones, power-grid hum, and movie scores. Not bad. ->



Speaker on rear of crossing-signal button box. #urbanstudies. #traffic #yellow #electricbirds http://t.co/iCZRtG5ZrL ->



Checking out the SFAI room where this Saturday I'm running an Oulipo/Disquiet Junto sound workshop. http://t.co/KLZrtPFzsx #oumupo ->



Tonight at the SF Mechanics' Institute, 3 Oulipians & 1 fellow Pessoa-head read from 50 years of experimental writing http://t.co/B1ZfM6MgnZ ->



TRS-808 is my new DJ name. ->



In light of the Oulipo activity in San Francisco this week, the Disquiet Junto will have a literary theme, transforming words into music. ->



Hope you can join in. MT @c_yantis: Thrilled, though honestly not that surprised, to see that Ford Madox Ford has found his way into a Junto ->



Do it up! #bonkers RT @Le_Berger: An 80 notes melody? That @djunto guy is bonkers. ->



Re-upped with a Mechanics Institute Library membership today. Was a member back in the late 1990s when I first moved to San Francisco. ->



Thanks to a tweet by @DavidjHendy ( https://t.co/oov7cychVb ) for inspiring this week's @djunto project: http://t.co/PT8LBLTJ4q ->



Great fun this evening at the Oulipo event at the Mechanics' Institute. Tomorrow at Green Apple, Saturday at San Francisco Art Institute. ->



Judging by io9 comments today people hate cliffhangers more than spoilers so much that they support spoilers about cliffhangers. #9timesfast ->



MT @mutagene: wrote ruby script to help with week's disquiet junto https://t.co/bDouSIiSbp . accuracy not guaranteed. now for the hard part. ->



Love when stuff is added to @academia it says "uploaded a paper on http://t.co/oDJvAqVamI" as if every paper's about http://t.co/oDJvAqVamI. ->



RIP, San Francisco DJ/musician Cheb I Sabbah (1947-2013): http://t.co/rOGTYg7P5s http://t.co/eTrcNJp4Lx ->



Headed to Green Apple books shortly for the evening's reading of work by the late Georges Perec. Tomorrow: Oulipo sound workshop at SFAI. ->



A helpful reminder during the Q&A that plenty of Oulipo, public readings aside, isn't funny. Takes pressure off tomorrow's music event. ->

Code to Decode

The latest Disquiet Junto finds music hidden in everyday books. The project began Thursday evening, November 7, and ends this coming Monday, November 11, at 11:59pm. It ends not at midnight but at 11:59pm, as do all Junto projects, because early on in the Junto series it became clear to me that when you type “midnight Monday” sometimes people don’t know if you meant the midnight that began Monday or the midnight that ended Monday. These sorts of distinctions are important, because the framing structure of the Junto is as much a set of rules as are the rules of a given project.

If there were two key rules about writing rules they would probably be:

Make sure the rules work.

Make sure the rules aren’t likely to be misinterpreted.

Each of the weekly projects has its own vibe, its own likely/intended audience of participants, and its own surprises, and when it comes to surprises — especially in the form of generous contributions of code from participants — this week is no exception. A few notes follow regarding this week’s project, which involves transforming into music 80 characters selected from page 99 a book selected by the musician. The page number, 99, was selected from a comment by the author Ford Madox Ford (more details at the project page).

1: Shortly after project’s announcement, I got a note from Junto member David Wilkins, who has done text->music work in the past. He directed me to his website wilkinsworks.net, from which this is excerpted:

The earliest known version of this system appeared in the Renaissance as a technique called soggetto cavato, first used by Josquin des Prez around 1500, and later named by Zarlino in his 1558 treatise Le institutioni harmoniche as soggetto cavato dalle vocali di queste parole, or literally, a subject ‘carved out of the vowels from these words.’ des Prez only used the vowels, mapping them to the solmization syllables, and using the resulting notes as the cantus firmus for the Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae and other works. …

My first foray into this idea occurred in 1976 while an undergrad music student, waiting for a recital to begin. There is a famous organ work by Bach, based on his own name, which gave me the idea in the first place. In German, B is B flat and H is B natural. Being an American I wanted to use the A through G as is, so had to start with H as something else. Being a trombonist I tend to favor flats over sharps, so assigned H to A flat, I to B flat, and up to the first twelve notes. Start over again with M assigned to A, and so on for the remaining letters.

2: Junto participant Mutagene posted to github.com a script in the Ruby language to help automate the process of changing letters and punctuation into notes:

3: And Junto member Defaoieclan wrote a piece of software in Processing that would likewise assist in the transform. Full piece at the track’s page. Here’s the opening part:

4: And Junto member Inlet wrote something in Supercollider, available at the track’s page. Here’s the opening part:

Student Work: Yoga Breathing

The work shared below is a segment of a project by a student, Karina Saroyan, enrolled in the course I teach at the Academy of Art here in San Francisco. The course is about the role of sound in the media landscape. Saroyan’s four audio tracks were part of an in-class presentation she gave this past Wednesday. Each of the course’s students (there are a dozen or so) give a short, ten-minute presentation at some point during the semester. The presentations don’t begin until several weeks in, at least until we’ve gotten the initial three class sessions done — those are focused on learning to listen, in part through exercises and in part through reflections on history, media, commerce, physiology and other useful perspectives.

The in-class student presentations are research projects, but the instruction is to focus the research on something that is already important to the student: i.e., don’t go researching the physiology of the human ear if you’re not already a biology nut; instead, pay attention to the sounds in your hobby (painting), or favorite sport (tennis), or place of employment (there was a great presentation several semesters back about the cosmetics counter). Saroyan focused her presentation on yoga, in particular on the breathing, and as part of the project she uploaded these four audio tracks of her performing key breathing practices: ujjahi, alternate nostril, lion’s breath, and skull shining breath:

As someone who has practiced yoga on and off for close to two decades, and who recently has begun exploring tai chi, I was reminded in Saroyan’s work that for all the physicality of breathing, there is a specifically sonic aspect by which one can gauge one’s form. It was also a useful reminder than not all vocal sounds are verbal — that, in fact, some aren’t even produced in the same manner we generally associate with vocal sounds.

Disquiet Junto Project 0097: Ford Madox Ford Page 99 Remix

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 afternoon, California time, on Thursday, November 7, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, November 11, 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 0097: Ford Madox Ford Page 99 Remix

This week’s project takes as its source a comment attributed to the author Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” We will convert text from page 99 of various books into music.

Step 1: Pick up the book you are currently reading, or otherwise the first book you see nearby.

Step 2: Turn to page 99. Confirm that the page has enough consecutive text in it to add up to 80 characters.

Step 2a: If the page is blank or otherwise has no text, turn to page 98. Continue this process of moving backward through the book until your find an appropriate page.

Step 2b: If you are reading an ebook that lacks page numbers, or a book that happens to lack page numbers, then use the first page of the main body of the book (i.e., not the Library of Congress information or the table of contents) or flip to a random spot/page in the book.

Step 3: When you have located 80 consecutive characters, type them into a document on your computer or write the down on a piece of paper.

Step 4: You will turn these characters into music by following the following rules:

Step 4a: The letters A through L will correspond with the notes along the chromatic scale from A to G#. To convert a letter higher than L, simply cycle through the scale again (i.e., L = G#, M = A, etc.). Capital letters should be played slightly louder than lowercase letters.

Step 4b: Any spaces and any dashes/hyphens will be treated as blank, as a silent moment.

Step 4c: A comma or semicolon will signify a note one step below the preceding note.

Step 4d: A period, question mark, or exclamation point will signify a note one step above the preceding note.

Step 4e: All other punctuation (colon, ampersand, etc.) will be heard as a percussive beat.

Step 5: Record the piece of music using a digital or analog instrument.

Step 6: Set the pace for the recording to between 160 and 80 beats per minute (BPM). In other words, the track should be between 30 and 60 seconds in length.

Step 7: Add any desired underlying music or sound bed, and any additional instrumentation, but the melody resulting from Step 6 should be the most prominent sound.

Deadline: Monday, November 11, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between 30 and 60 seconds.

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. Name the book and share the 80 characters that were the source of your melody.

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0097-page99remix” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 97th Disquiet Junto project, in which music is decoded from a phrase in a book, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/11/07/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

Image via wikipedia.org.

When a Noise Force …

Noise music has an indeterminate quality, a quality that defies common conceptions of sonic reproduction. By striving for a level of volume, intensity, and texture that veers toward decay, noise music challenges the listener — especially the listener to recorded noise music — to locate the proper listening environment. When a sound is intended to signal a destructive force, how can its “proper” reproduction be gauged. This live performance by the Scotland-based musician Deadwood, aka Adam Baker, has the unique ability to sound like it is shredding your speaker even when played at a very low volume. If noise music played quietly is a form of ambient music, that is not to say that the sound cannot still do damage.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dead_wood. More on Deadwood, aka Adam Baker of Edinburgh, Scotland, at blotchcreek.blogspot.com.

Sonic “Sourcery”

The brief liner note reads like a recipe, or at least a shopping list of ingredients. There are six parts, each a standalone, identifiable element. The result is single minute of concatenated sound, from plucked drone through sonar ping through metallic rattle, and on into aural fragments both more and less soothing. It is exactly a minute in length and, as the title suggests, it is a piece in which mercurial action is brought about on source materials.

This is the track:

These are its contents:

guitar harmonics sans attacks

prepared banjo

electrons+zither

new age drone

prepared resonator guitar

bowed bamboo monochord

Track originaly posted for free download at soundcloud.com/laynegarrett. It is by Layne Garrett, more from whom at questionthetruth.com.

Free Oval / Markus Popp Ringtones

Oval, aka Markus Popp, continues to post free recordings to his Bandcamp page. Among the more recent is eight ringtones he released as a promotional EP back in 2010 to coincide with the double album O. This Ringtones EP contains brief tracks of repetitive, minimalist themes, half of them under a minute in length, the longest coming in at 1:23. They post-date the trenchant glitch of Oval’s early work and instead draw from his experiments with band instrumentation, in particular the use of taut guitar string sounds that have a distinct post-rock quality.

Ringtones EP by Oval

Album originally posted for free download at oval.bandcamp.com. The tracks are up for “name your price,” which includes “free.” More from Oval/Popp at markuspopp.me.

The Sound of Consumption

The sound comes from the end of the aisle. A wall of Lego boxes faces a wall of toy trains and other vehicles designed to delight children. The holiday crush is not quite in effect, but it is a weekend and the store is less than a month old, attracting curious shoppers. There is a temporary display at the end of the aisle. The display is a rack of inexpensive novelties, even by Lego standards: blind bags of toy figurines, each in an unrevealing foil package. You will not know which one you have purchased until you have opened it. Except in front of the rack there is a twenty-something man, clean cut and in good health, who has figured out a way around the blind bags. He is taking the Lego “minifigures” packages off the shelf one at a time. In short order, maybe five seconds each, he feels them, caressing the segments to ascertain what is inside: a gingerbread man, a yeti, a mustached policeman. The package design is covered in question marks, like the Riddler’s costume, but the man can essentially see inside. On an adjacent shelf he maintains a stack of the ones he desires, slowly and steadily making his way to a complete set of 16. Except for the brief moment when he switches between bags, there is a constant ruffling of metallic paper, like tinsel yet with an urgent, mechanical anxiousness in place of the seasonal gift-giving spirit.

Pachinko Fury

I’ve regularly said that a multi-floor pachinko parlor in Tokyo is by far the loudest, most aggressive sound I have experienced in person, and I’ve said that as someone who has seen Metallica, Danzig, Fugazi, Slayer, Godflesh, and Napalm Death live in concert, just to name a few bands famed for their volume. The closest I’ve come to the pachinko parlor intensity was probably a Dinosaur Jr. show that was so loud people walked out of the concert hall, though the lack of enthusiasm may also have been because Nirvana was the opening act on that tour, and Nirvana, then still on the rise, was the portrait of a tough act to follow. In any case, as mentioned here recently, Seth S. Horowitz, author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, is currently in Japan and making binaural field recordings of what he witnesses. His latest item from that information-gathering trip is a pachinko parlor, which he tweeted about earlier this evening:

@disquiet this one's for you: Binaural recording of a pachinko parlor. WARNING: REALLY loud. Turn down your volume https://t.co/nvH64OjWMg

— Seth S. Horowitz (@SethSHorowitz) November 4, 2013

His description of the track, six minutes of white noise so dense with treacly pop music, mechanical fury, and crowd chatter is as follows: “In-ear binaural recording of a soundwalk through 3 floors of the Maruan Pachinko Tower in Shibuya, Tokyo at 11 AM. WARNING: Incredibly LOUD. Use low volume to listen.”

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/universalsense. More on Horowitz at neuropop.com. Image found via wikipedia.org. Image found via wikimedia.org.

A Classic Synth, iOS-ified

Demos of apps by musicians are a great way to explore both their unintended consequences and their inherent strictures. In contrast with promotional videos, which generally show the app used by someone with advanced knowledge of its inner workings, initial demos by new adapters have a more hands-on feel, with the general sense of someone coming to grips with adapting something to their own musical style and performance workflow. What follows is one of Dean Terry’s demo runs through the iSEM app, which as its name suggests is an iOS adaptation of the 1974 Oberheim SEM synthesizer. He’s an especially good reference point. Not only is he familiar with the original, he has two of them in his studio.

Here are his notes on the piece, which has a steady, downtempo, stepwise flavor:

Quick test of the iSEM iOS app. This is a first patch with some live parameter noodling, driven by the built in arpeggiator. Single take, one track.

I have two actual SEMs in the studio. I think comparing is missing the point so I made something that took advantage of what this iOS app does best, which is modulation and polyphony. The best part is the 8 voice programmer which allows you to modify the sound for each of of 8 steps, which you can hear clearly in this test recording (except I’m only using 5 steps).

Recording notes: This is not exactly what the app sounds like raw. It was recorded via the ipad analog outs into outboard studio preamps, eqs, and a stereo compressor. It was then sent through a few mix bus eq’s and compressors in Protools. This is how I treat all iPad apps and other digital sources and it helps make them more vibrant and analog-like.

Two promotional videos for the app:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/therefore. More from Dean Terry at deanterry.com. More on the iSEM app at itunes.apple.com and
arturia.com.