Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 444

Modest Beatcraft (MP3)

Another fine bit of slomo instrumental hip-hop from the Seattle-based musician who goes, simply, by Patrick. He’s a SoundCloud engineer, according to his brief bio, which may explain why his SoundCloud page has one of those snazzy personalized banners that are mostly reserved for big-league accounts. Big-league graphics aside, the track is reliably modest in scope, just a flutter of sub-downtempo beatcraft with enough bridge-like asides to keep things interesting. Ripe for repeat.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/patrick/amethyst. More from him at patrick.bandcamp.com.

Where Beat and Background Merge (MP3)

Tore Honoré Bøe has posted four and a half minutes of a performance recorded live at Det Akademiske Kvarter in Bergen, Norway, back in 2001. It is an industrial drone that is interrupted regularly by a pounding, percussive element. This is self-evident in the waveform visualization of the track, what with all those ragged, saw-blade juts. The pounding at first is in stark contrast to the background sound, but as time passes what becomes clear is that the pounding is not so self-contained, that the sound of the percussive has a resonance that extends beyond its initial imposition of a beat. And as these attenuations come to the fore, the distinction between the background and foreground gets confused. It is often said that repetition is a form of change, but generally what that means is that repetition fuels the ear’s attention to previously unapparent variety; by contrast, in Bøe’s piece, as time passed it is similarities, rather than distinctions, that make themselves heard.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/origamirepublika. Bøe’s “acoustic laptops” were mentioned here back in May. More from him at origami.teks.no and twitter.com/origamiboe. He is based in Gran Canaria, Spain.

Return Engagement / “Sounds of Brands, Brands of Sounds”

This coming fall semester I will again be teaching a course on sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

The class meets Wednesdays from noon until 2:50pm. It begins on September 11 and ends on December 18. There are 15 weeks in all. The course is divided roughly into thirds. The first third is about listening, the second third (“Sounds of Brands”) is about how companies and products use sound to define themselves in the market, and the final third (“Brands of Sounds”) is about how sound-related companies (music social networks, record labels), people (musicians, bands), and products (headphones, record albums) define themselves. In the Academy of Art’s catalog (online at academyart.edu), the course goes by the title “ADV 499-30: Special Topics: Sound Branding.”

Previous posts about the course are collected here under the “sounds-of-brands” tag.

Jurisdiction Inquiry

If you have thoughts on this following topic, I’d appreciate them. The topic is where the jurisdiction of sound.tumblr.com ends and where this site’s, Disquiet.com’s, begins. I’ve run Disquiet.com since 1996, and its emphasis has over the years come to encompass not just the “ambient/electronica” of its origins but the broader intersection of sound, art, and technology — things that correlate with, that grew out of, ambient music’s emphasis on technology, on the bleed between foreground and background, on music and sound that has a functional purpose, on generative systems, on the Creative Commons.

The sound.tumblr.com site I run as a satellite operation to Disquiet.com, and it’s intended as a lightly annotated linkblog related to “sound in the media landscape”; I do the Tumblr blog in coordination with a course that I teach at the Academy of Art (“Sounds of Brands, Brands of Sounds”) here in San Francisco. (The first class of the new semester will be on September 11, 2013.)

The thing is, much of what I post at sound.tumblr.com makes sense at Disquiet.com, but the occasional things that don’t — well, there’s the rub. It’s easier to explain with examples.

These are links to recent sound.tumblr.posts that easily would fit within the confines of Disquiet.com, in that they focus on real-world sounds, on the history of ambient music, on sound as a part of a user interface, and so on:

◼ the sounds of the fragrance dispensers at the International Perfume Museum in Grasse, Southern France

◼ an airport in Albany that switched its in-house music after 15 years of consistent classical recordings

◼ a brief history of the cover of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s 1973 album, No Pussyfooting

◼ an interview with the developer of the Coffitivity app, which broadcasts the background sound of cafes

◼ Sam Flax extended a pop song of his severalfold to serve as the score to an Yves Saint Laurent fashion show

◼ an overview of Red Bull Music Academy in the New York Times

◼ sounds of cable cars in advance of the 50th San Francisco Cable Car Ringing Contest

◼ on the website of The New Republic, each article has a prominent “listen” button

◼ Sonoport introduces “Sound-as-a-Service”

◼ how the sounds of slot machines make losers feel like winners

This is the full text of a short sound.tumblr.com post I wrote about a review of a book about neon:

Sound was an unintended part of the design of the neon sign, and yet became part of its signature. Katrina Gulliver notes this in the closing paragraph of her review at slate.com of Flickering Light: A History of Neon, a new book by Christoph Ribbat.

“Neon was one of the ways businesses personalized their identity, but our retail landscape is now dominated by chains, whose business model depends on replicating branches across the country without individualization. Perhaps the reason people felt so strongly about losing the Pepsi-Cola sign was that it was a lingering remnant of an age of urban decoration now lost. Video displays like those in Times Square offer us television in the street—but old neon signs became part of the street. We are now so often surrounded by moving images they can no longer draw us in, but neon still offers a distinctiveness that we could see and hear, its faint buzzing giving it a tactile there-ness that technologies ever newer and newer can’t match. Compared to LED and video, gas in glowing tubes feels real.”

One follow-up note: I don’t agree with the assessment described by Gulliver above. Much as the sound of neon was not an intentional part of its design, aspects of the “ever newer and newer” technologies to come will almost certainly have their own unintentional, sublime qualities, discovered after they are adopted.

By contrast, these recent sound.tumblr.com posts seem out of place on Disquiet.com, especially as standalone entries, in large part because the emphasis is so squarely on commerce:

◼ audio ads in city buses

◼ a member of OK Go says brands are easier to work with than record labels

◼ Lou Reed at Cannes on the merits and demerits of the post-MP3 era

◼ country music is the sole genre, besides rock, to show increased sales in 2012 in the U.S.

◼ an interview with the person who programs the music in Chipotle

◼ Budweiser signed Rihanna to a global promotion deal (but who is promoting whom)

One of the issues may be my very use of Tumblr. Most of the Tumblr blogs I follow are generally context-free (i.e., they present posts of material sourced from elsewhere, without much in the way of explanation or comment), and they tend to be highly visual (emphasizing photos and video and animated GIFs, not quotes from news articles).

Rihanna singing a deal with Budweiser sure seems out of place on Disquiet.com — though, when we talk about the functional purpose of sound, key among the most prominent of those functions is commerce, and talking about the Creative Commons approach without also discussing the commercial context seems shortsighted. Anyhow, thoughts appreciated, either via email or in the comments section below. Thanks.

Daybreak Ambient (MP3)

So quiet that its breadth of components might be missed, so placid that its development might be mistook for absence, this Sunday-morning improvisation is a slow-moving bit of sonic daybreak. Its association with Sunday morning here is literal (that’s when it was recorded), but it is also figurative: White noise washes suggest the rising surf, held tones suggest light cracking through clouds, gentle alterations in volume suggest a world in the midst of waking. The morning is a frequent reference point for this sort of music because what drama there is is displayed in minute gradations of change as dawn proceeds. The track is by Mark Harris:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mark-harris. More from Harris, who lives in England, at cargocollective.com/markharrismusic and twitter.com/mharris360.

Where Beat and Background Merge (MP3)

An archival noise performance by Tore Honoré Bøe

Tore Honoré Bøe has posted four and a half minutes of a performance recorded live at Det Akademiske Kvarter in Bergen, Norway, back in 2001. It is an industrial drone that is interrupted regularly by a pounding, percussive element. This is self-evident in the waveform visualization of the track. The pounding at first is in stark contrast to the background sound, but as time passes what becomes clear is that the pounding is not so self-contained, that the sound of the percussive has a resonance that extends beyond its initial imposition of a beat. And as these attenuations come to the fore, the distinction between the background and foreground gets confused. Repetition may be a form of change, but what changes may be that parallels, rather than distinctions, become evident.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/origamirepublika. Bøe’s “acoustic laptops” were mentioned here back in May. More from him at origami.teks.no and twitter.com/origamiboe.

Cues: Skywalker Sound Hunting, Persistent Memory App

Sound Hunting: Nathan Hurst of wired.com accompanies Benny Burtt, an assistant sound effects editor from Skywalker Sound, on a sound-hunting expedition:

“You guys ready?” says Burtt, then waits for the echoes to die. He fires the gun, with a pop and a spark.

The pistol gives off a “full frequency event” — that is, the sound covers the full range of audible frequencies, giving a complete impulse response. Back at Skywalker, the editors will use Altiverb to digitally remove the sound of the shot.

“Then we can run whatever sound we want through that program, and it’ll sound like we’re in here,” says Langfelder.

Each microphone they have, called mid-side mics, houses two units — a front facing element to capture the event, and a figure-eight shaped one that records stereo. Because the sounds reaching the side mic have bounced off the surroundings, they helps give a sense of ambient space, says Burtt. Together, they allow the sound engineers to adjust the width of the sound, making it project a sense of space. The microphones Skywalker brought all cost around $2,000 each, and, paired with $4,500, 24-bit recorders, capture sound at 192 kilohertz, around five to six times the quality of a CD.

The article is peculiar in the absence of a mention of Benny’s father, legendary sound designer Ben Burtt, but it does a great job of walking through the process of sourcing sounds, especially for something as expansive as recording the sonic essence of a particular place. Three sound examples are embedded in the article (wired.com).

Source Material: Judging by a photo used to promote the second, forthcoming episode (July 25) in Daniela Cascella and Salomé Voegelin‘s “voyages into listening and writing” podcast, Ora, it will include writings by HP Lovecraft and Pauline Oliveros, and music from the trio of Taku Sugimoto, Burkhard Stangl, and Christof Kurzmann, among other topics:

Persistent Memory: The iOS app Heard (apple.com) records continuously into a buffer, allowing you to retroactively determine you want to preserve something (image and information via addictivetips.com).

Data Floodlights: Footage of Ryoji Ikeda’s masterful “test pattern [nº5],” which was on display from June 8 through July 1 of this year at Carriageworks carriageworks.com.au in Sydney, Australia:

Flickr-tronica: The photo below of Brian Eno introduced me to the Flickr stream of Oz Villanueva, who is a prolific professional photographer of, among other things, live performances. Amid his massive trove are great shots of Markus Popp (aka Oval), Lisa Gerrard, Alva Noto, and Deadbeat

Code Blog: Diary of a coding intern at bandcamp: bandcampintern.wordpress.com

Bambaataa Arch-live: The “live archiving” of Afrika Bambaataa’s record collection: blouinartinfo.com

Estranged Love: Matmos covers Bow Wow Wow covering the Strangeloves’ “I Want Candy,” rewriting it about NSA leaker Edward Snowden; streaming video at avclub.com.

Music for Cyphers: Computer-music event at Bletchley Park’s National Museum of Computing the last weekend of July: tnmoc.org.

Listening at MoMA: The webpage for the forthcoming Soundings: A Contemporary Score exhibit has gone live: moma.org; it runs from August 10 through November 3, 2013.

A Softspot for Transitions (MP3)

An extended drone opening gives way to loungey, way downtempo beat. It swells and lulls, each segment an act of quietly desperate minimal techno, but shuffling by at a rate that keeps the ear alert throughout. As the two-minute point nears, there’s a snippet of a comedy bit that provides the otherwise instrumental work with its title. It’s “softspot” by letterfounder. The comedian is Doug Stanhope, who’s identified in a brief liner note, which states: “samples doug stanhope, adolf noise, scuba gear, a heating vent, a jet engine (and spray paint cans via 2nerd at @2nerd).”

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/letterfounder. More from letterfounder, who’s based in Maine, at letterfounder.bandcamp.com.

Beat Machine Beat (MP3)

Pissoir, who identifies himself simply as Benjamin from Ohio, has uploaded a slow rage of video game noise, its beat a trenchant, martial, steady rhythm that is, as it proceeds, accented here and there with triple-time filigrees, semi-automatic weapons fire, hi-hats that might be made of cellophane, and countless other resplendent noises. The track is titled “Solip,” and the post notes that it is a teaser. For what? We’ll have to wait to see. Also mentioned is that it was produced in iMaschine, the iOS “beat sketch pad” apple.com. Recommended to listen on repeat.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/benjamin.

Icelandic Broadcast Residue (MP3)

A running tally of favorites among the year’s daily Downstream entries thus far this year would certainly include the kalima feedback raga mentioned early last month, and also this transporting field recording from Iceland, documented by Aino Tytti and just posted at the Touch Radio website (MP3). Titled “Hellissandur Mast [GRD 7970],” it is a deep, quiet drone, the result of contact microphones capturing resonances, both physical reverberations and broadcast residue.

Download audio file (Radio96.mp3)

Here’s Tytti’s description of what it entails:

The remote Snaefellsness Peninsula in Iceland is home to the tallest structure in Western Europe. A transmitter built originally in 1963 as a long-range, low-frequency (LORAN-C) navigation system and now used for longwave public radio purposes.

During a recent sound recording trip to Iceland, i was fortunate enough to gain access to the transmitter facility and able to take a series of field recordings, using an array of contact microphones attached to the mast and supporting guy wires.

Several of these recordings were particularly arresting, capturing the structure as it radiated a myriad of constantly shifting harmonic progressions, in response to the hot Icelandic summer sun and strong icy winds blowing in from the nearby Snaefellsjökull glacier. These two extremes combined caused rapid expansions and contractions in the 200-700metre steel support wires and core mast, to produce a spiralling, ever-changing, kaleidoscopic drone.

Of particular note as well, during a quiet point in the recording, my microphones started to pick up the audio of the longwave radio transmission. A graceful violin solo for 3 minutes, before the sun broke through the clouds and caused the structural resonance of the mast to increase once more, drowning out the radio with a music of the structure’s own making.

Particularly beautiful is the notion that there is an ever-changing and constantly-in-flux sound emanating from this structure; an unbroken music, in direct response to its environment, which has been playing in constant form for the last 50 years. The sounds captured here represent a snapshot in time taken on the 15th June 2013, the specifics of which have never been, and will never be, repeated.

Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk. More from Tytti at ainotytti.com. Photo by Peter Caeldries.