Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 459
March 14, 2013
#SoundCloud #guestblog #audiobio
Earlier this week I guestblogged over at soundcloud.com about the site’s ongoing audiobio(graphy) project: “Hello Heroes: Audiobiography #4: Auto-Podcast, Song-Navelgazing, Clown Memories, and More.” I highly encourage people to record one.
When we set out to create the #Audiobio project, the goal was to connect listeners with the musicians and sound creators they listen to. Anyone who has had a phone call, or met up face to face with someone they had only previously corresponded with online knows the power that hearing someone’s voice can have — not just at that moment, but in all subsequent communications between them.
The idea of #audiobio is that by hearing the voices of the people whose music and sound we admire, we’ll have a deeper sense of connection to them when we hear more of their work in the future — not just because of what they say (the story of their lives, the goals of their art, and so forth) but how they say it: their voice, their intonation, their temperament.
Audiobiographies will be shared every week so post yours to be featured. All languages are welcome to participate. You can find translations of how to get involved in more than 8 languages here. Here’s round-up #4 from this past week. See all past recaps here.
In the process I singled out four great recent entries, including a guy who does a podcast about himself (“There are lots of shows about famous people,” he says. “This is a show about the rest of us.”) and a woman who thought about her earliest sound memories and came up with clowns.
The audiobio(graphy) project grew out of the SoundCloud Heroes program, which I am happy to have been invited to participate in. The SoundCloud-wide audiobio(graphy) project was the impetus for the 60th Disquiet Junto project.
March 13, 2013
Signal Tapper (MP3)
The latest from the excellent Chicago-based broadcast/podcast Radius may be its most quiet yet. “Recording the Spirit Level” is Dan Tapper’s excursion into “very low frequency”" (VLF) signals. As the site explains:
These signals are generated through electromagnetic fluctuations, or changes in magnetic signals produced naturally by the ionosphere, including lightning strikes and the Aurora Borealis. Collected using a homemade loop inductor, the raw magnetic sounds collide with interference produced by man-made technology to illustrate the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
The result is more akin to the soundscape of remote pond life than to an industrial grid, or perhaps more to the point a shallow pond near a single whirring electrical post. It’s all light glitching, amphibious burps, amid a low-level hum of nuanced communications effluvia.
The great things about listening to Radius, which is organized by Jeff Kolar, is the way each project provides a different aspect of the myriad ways that radio signals can provide the starting point, rather than merely a means to transmit, artistic practice.
Episode originally posted for free download at theradius.us/episode37. More from Dan Tapper at magneticsignals.tumblr.com.
March 12, 2013
Music from Airport Anxiety (MP3)
Anxiety can be self-evident or subliminal, and in either case the essential tension is underlying — not an explicit likelihood but an implicit one. Micah Frank knows something about the way that sonification can, so to speak, amplify the information intrinsic in data, having himself taken data of an earthquake and turned its fierce metrics into noise. More recently, his “Granular Curtis Airport Security at JFK International Airport” appears to use narrow-band filtration, eking out tiny slivers of noise, as a means to investigate the mix of mundanity and tension that characterize the experience of submitting to the transit authority:
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/micahfrank. More from Frank, who’s based in Brooklyn, New York, at micahfrank.com and twitter.com/micahfrank. (Image from flickr.com.)
March 11, 2013
Everyday 8-bit (MP3)
The 8-bit charm of “Kvinnodan” by Alveola Ämting benefits from the sounds out of which it is constructed registering as household objects as much as they do as old-school side-scrolling fun and games. It isn’t just the gee-whillikers buzz of arcade activity, but also alarm-clock beeps and desk-bell rings. There isn’t a lot in the manner of development as it proceeds along its five-minute course, except that the beeping gets a little glitchy at times, its internal structure becoming slowly apparent as the beep is granulated into a series of component parts.
Alveola is based in Härnösand, Sweden. Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/alveola. Track found via a repost by soundcloud.com/super-miracle-dream-team.
March 10, 2013
A Sonic Tesseract (MP3)
Asked about a perceived “thickness” to the soundtrack of his film Eraserhead, the director David Lynch responded to his interviewer, Chris Rodley, as follows: “I’m real fascinated by presences — what you call ‘room tone.’ It’s the sound that you hear when there’s silence, in between words or sentences. It’s a tricky thing, because in this seemingly kind of quiet sound, some feelings can be brought in, and a certain kind of picture of a bigger world can be made. And all those things are important to make that world.”
The New Zealand–based sound artist Jo Burzynska explores the nature of room tone by taking the sounds inherent in the room and playing them back in the room, listening to how the space responds to its own space-ness, how an echo echoes. She recognizes the perceived silence as a misperception, and the result of her efforts is a kind of feedback loop, a sonic tesseract. Under the name Stanier Black-Five, she performed this investigation of space at Silo 6, a highly reverberant location, pictured above, in Auckland as part of the Audio Foundation’s Now! Here! Festival back in December of last year. The excellent Touch Radio series has now posted it online. “All the reverb is natural. No effects were used,” reads an accompanying note (MP3). This is the sound of silence daring the listener to call it silence.
Download audio file (Radio91.mp3)
Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk. The audio was recorded by David Hornblow, the live sound was overseen by Shaun Collins, and Malcolm Riddoch was responsible for the mastering. More from Burzynska at her stanierblackfive.com website. Above photo by David Cowlard. The David Lynch quote is from the book Lynch on Lynch, published by Faber and Faber.
March 9, 2013
Oval, Back from South America
Oval, aka Berlin-based Markus Popp, took an extended working holiday through South America, and we got a 16-track compilation album of him performing with a variety of singers. And, better yet, the compilation, titled Calidostópia!, is free, thanks to funding from the Goethe Institute and the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia. The singers include Agustín Albrieu (Argentina), Dandara Modesto (Brazil), Andrés Gualdrón (Columbia), Maité Gadea (Uruguay), Aiace Felix (Brazil), Hana Kobayashi (Venezuela), and Emilia Suto (Brazil). There are 16 tracks in all, opening with “Featurette,” in which Albrieu sounds a bit like a subdued David Byrne atop a plectrum spectral fantasy committed by Oval. On “Oh!” the pizzicato instrumentation is met halfway by Sutro’s dadaist repertoire of restrained flourishes. Throughout we are reminded just how much the use of traditional band sounds — guitars, drums — has transformed our understanding of Popp’s music. What was once the glitch in the machine has since become a matter of surreal verisimilitude, a music whose challenges are belied by its surface familiarity. (For longtime Popp listeners, the effect of Calidostópia! is quite different from So, the album he created with vocalist Eriko Toyoda, and which retained the deeply digital sensibility of his earlier work.)
This streaming preview set includes brief segments of tracks from the album:
It’s available as both MP3 and FLAC. The latter is 200 megabytes, but well worth the space entailed. More on/from Oval/Popp at markuspopp.me.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
"This was the first time in nine years that 'Hit the Lights' was performed in Brisbane." The beautiful data of LiveMetallica downloads. ->
Hopeful that Spike Lee's Oldboy will be less a remake of the extravagant Oldboy movie and more an adaptation of the restrained Oldboy manga. ->
Sculpture at playground http://t.co/1C4V9sWIWk ->
I wrote about my affection for the new @Wayne_TheTrain album (on @BSHQ) for @csindependent: http://t.co/sYfq79WzJP ->
I'm part of the 1% — the apparent 1% of the TV-viewing population who highly enjoyed the now cancelled absurdity called Zero Hour. ->
The second of two live Autechre streaming events this weekend begins on the hour here: http://t.co/UALlmMg7vl ->
Indeedy. MT @gr3gjsmith: AE mixes = cratedigger paradise. MT @disquiet: Live streaming Autechre event begins shortly: http://t.co/yqL8fMH3yc ->
The room was empty at the time. Now over 100 people have listened to the drone of my doctor's office: https://t.co/89razZ3vOr ->
Tomorrow is week 5 of my sound class. The subject is product design, from the crunch of potato chips to Facebook's new notification burp. ->
You'd think it'd be easier to have a single .txt file accessible through a click on the OS X (top) menu bar. Well, I would. ->
Almost missed the San Francisco Tuesday noon siren but UPS guy opened door to doctor's office just after it had begun. ->
If you're on academia dot edu, I'm at: http://t.co/lEhaBaMe6L ->
There are only 6 films tagged as "sound design" on @letterboxd ->
Bringing the Third Place to the First and Second Places: http://t.co/jh2p54uqmb. Very cool. Thanks, @mrdanielcarter + @colossal in reply to mrdanielcarter ->
I'd like to thank @facebook for introducing its annoying notification beep just in time for my class' week on sound in product design. ->
Nearing-midnight sounds: rumble of clothes dryer, occasional automobile bounding over street temporarily lined with massive metal plates. ->
My Kindle 7" died. May is months away. Someone at Google wants an abstract-sound musician/organizer to beta test the next Nexus 7, right? ->
This week's @djunto will be music for/from sine waves. ->
Indeed. In this case, the waves will be recognizable as such. RT @nynexrepublic: @disquiet @djunto all music is made of sine waves! :) ->
Commitment is changing your default .txt editor. Just moved from TextEdit to Mou. ->
The 62nd @djunto project has begun at http://t.co/DYQtwPTLgO + https://t.co/eK4AFScM6I and it's gone to the http://t.co/ABeKP0V8GQ e-list. ->
My café observation of the day is that laptop entropy leads people to Facebook while iPad entropy leads people to the app store. ->
Sweet! MT @Schemawound: I can't tell you how many times I got told that while helping put this together: http://t.co/mGFnT8d5Ga ->
Being retweeted by your friend's teenager is a proud moment. ->
It is not a good thing that SXSW produces more email PR than the Grammys do. ->
Sonic resources: MT @analogue01: For anyone who needs sine waves for this week's @djunto: http://t.co/WN6ooZmzDd ->
Not a speaker: http://t.co/yaLWGWzGrv ->
The more remote of two listening posts in neighborhood playground: http://t.co/rSAUrxcqF6 ->
There is a certain beauty to an ebook at night, the only light in the otherwise dark room, glowing text suspended in midair. ->
Listening to Jeff Beal's House of Cards score while typing alone at home. My paperclips and stapler are conspiring against my coffee cup. ->
Music made from a trio of sine waves: https://t.co/Pm87dAjR7z. Already 4 tracks in the latest @djunto project, #62. ->
Giving @ThisIsMyJam another go. I remain http://t.co/I6hBjhsl7O over there. ->
An open form letter to publicists (and to bands/coders/artists who serve as their own publicist): http://t.co/7GtcWqj3Bk. ->
As a longtime Richmond District resident I'm sad to learn that @haigsdelicacies' Clement Street store is closing. #hummus #muhamarra #dolmas ->
Apparently #muhamarra is a far less frequently used hashtag than either #hummus or #dolmas. ->
Finding more people on @vineapp to follow than @appdotnet. But I guess I'm less picky about visuals than conversation. I'm @disquiet on ADN. ->
Exploring the sonic potential of @vineapp: http://t.co/KBrmDS4jod. Featuring several loops by @MattCBarlow. #vrone ->
Gotta love a test-to-speech service that mispronounces "transliterate." ->
“I promise to take good care of you” is what I find myself saying when I install a ROM. Got my gen 1 Kindle Fire running Jelly Bean 4.2.2. ->
March 8, 2013
Drone + Video = Vrone
The app called Vine facilitates the easy production of six-second audio-video clips. It has managed to locate an entertaining parallel between tweets and animated gifs, between short outbursts of self-expression and the hypnotic splendor inherent in repetition.
My first Vine post (I’m @disquiet on Vine) was of a 7″ single playing on a turntable, specifically a 7″ that was a compilation of locked grooves, short loops in which the record needle gets stuck and plays forever. The length of the loop and length of the video do not quite match, and the seam is all too evident, but it was a fun experiment, especially because it used an old nifty bit of loopy pop culture to test out a new nifty bit of loopy pop culture:
(The compilation 7″ in question was released in 1993 on RRRecords. It features pieces by Big City Orchestra, Controlled Bleeding, Randy Greif, Jim O’Rourke, Gregory Whitehead, and 95 other contributors. View the full track list at discogs.com. There’s a picture of it at deadformat.net.)
Matthew Barlow has posted several items on Vine that are musical in nature — that is, they emphasize the audio as equal to if not over the visual. That is in contrast with the majority of Vine posts, in which the sound is often just the ambient noise of whatever happens to have been going on when the video was shot. Note that outside of the Vine app itself, Vine loops come up muted, requiring the listener-viewer to opt to turn up the volume. One example of Barlow’s exploration of Vine’s sonic potential is this bit of wind chime, which can be thought of as an especially early version of endlessly looping music, though of course its structural complexity makes those sounds more varied that a locked groove. When looped to six circular seconds, the distinction becomes less meaningful. Barlow ingeniously uses multiple seams between short segments of clips of the wind chime to make the overall length of the clip less self-evident than it would have been with a straight single shot:
The core of Barlow’s Vine experiments have tended to focus on a balance of visual and drone. He’s tagged them many things, including #lofi and #loop and #experimental, but foremost is the neologism #vrone. It is a useful term, not only because it suggests a new form, but because the word #drone on Vine is mostly of small flying objects.
Here is an example of his efforts:
And here is another:
Better yet, use vineviewer.co to pull up the results of the #vrone hashtag, and listen to (as of this writing) three of Barlow’s pieces playing simultaneously.
More from/on Barlow, who is based in Asheville, North Carolina, at twitter.com/MattCBarlow and matthewbarlow.bandcamp.com. More on Vine, which is currently only available for iOS, at vine.co and itunes.apple.com.
Postscript: Shortly after this was published, Barlow informed me that the term #vrone was suggested by the musician Sima Kim.
Form Letter
On any given weekday, my inbox contains 100 or so new emails before I wake up, and I get up early, around 6am, California time. By the end of the day, when I go to sleep, usually around midnight, if I haven’t managed to delete any emails, my inbox will easily have 400 in it.
This is the current stage of the form letter template that I occasionally send out in reply to queries for coverage of a particular band, album, song, video, sound app, gallery exhibit, and so forth:
Hi. I don’t reply much to PR correspondence, even directly from musicians/coders/artists.
There’s simply too much of it, often as many as 400 emails per weekday.
The best way for me to state the situation is as follows: I receive an enormous number of inquiries for me to write about music/sound, and I listen to — I consume/absorb — as much as I can without doing what I’m paying attention to the disservice of being too casual about it. I then write about what I find interesting. And I write about something I find interesting every day, often more than once per day.
Important note: I pretty much focus my writing on “technologically mediated sound” — ambient music, sound art, sound design, sound in the media landscape, experimental classical, hip-hop production, that sorta thing. And I write very little about what would traditionally be considered a “song.”
Feel free to send me email (with any related materials, such as MP3 files, as links, not as attachments). Just please don’t take it personally, or even read into it any reflection of my (dis)interest, if and when I don’t respond.
And yes, this is a form letter, as is 99% of the PR I receive.
Best,
Marc
Cues: Glass House, Lucier’s Audiobiography, Prelinger’s Manifesto, …
¶ Glass House Music: Via NPR, video of Julianna Barwick performing a haunting layering of her vocals at the famed Glass House of Philip Johnson in New Canaan, Connecticut:
The conjunction of her music and this place brings to mind the influence of transparent residences on John Cage’s conception of sound. This is from his book Silence:
“The glass houses of Mies van der Rohe reflect their environment, presenting to the eye images of clouds, trees, or grass, according to the situation. And while looking at the constructions in the wire of the sculptor Richard Lippold, it is inevitable that one will see other things, and people too, if they happen to be there at the same time, through the network of wires. There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”"
¶ Talking Book: In a review of Alvin Lucier’ book Music 109 (Wesleyan) at lareviewofbooks.org, Dave Mandl gets to the heart of the document — that it is more history than musicology, and more personal history than history: “What exactly determined the set of people and compositions Lucier chose to discuss in his book — or, for that matter, in his lectures? … The most likely answer is also rather mundane: Lucier probably chose this particular group because it’s the circle of people he happens to have been involved with.” Not, to suggest, that there’s anything wrong with that.
¶ Borrower Be: Rick Prelinger’s essay “On the Virtues of Preexisting Material” is essential reading, especially for folks interested in the conceptual framework of the Creative Commons. This is the outline of his self-described “manifesto”:
Why add to the population of orphaned works?
Don’t presume that new work improves on old
Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
Dregs are the sweetest drink
And leftovers were spared for a reason
Actors don’t get a fair shake the first time around, let’s give them another
The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
We approach the future by typically roundabout means
We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
Access to what’s already happened is cheaper than access to what’s happening now
Archives are justified by use
Make a quilt not an advertisement
It’s at contentsmagazine.com.
¶ Sine Table: This is the workbench of someone developing sine waves for musical use:
It was posted by Jeff Kolar as evidence of his work on the current, 62nd Disquiet Junto project. On a simpler note, if you’re participating in the project, making music from sine waves, this browser-based oscillator may be of use: onlinetonegenerator.com, as recommeded by Karl Fousek (karlfousek.com).
In Brief: ¶ The February compilation of Creative Commons music from the nx series includes a dozen tracks from the 59th Disquiet Junto project, “Vowel Choral Drone: musicnumbers.wordpress.com. It was compiled by Miquel Parera of Barcelona, Spain, who is at twitter.com/computerneix. (Hat tip to Larry Johnson (soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1).) ¶ Got word this morning that the Stephan Mathieu project at indiegogo.com was officially fully funded. ¶ The firm Arup, whose ambisonic activity has been a subject here, has further expanded its acoustics endeavors with the integration of the firm Artec (artecconsultants.com, arup.com). ¶ Both the Saturday and Sunday Autechre live sets from last weekend are still streaming as archival recordings at mixlr.com/autechre. ¶ Rob Walker, good friend and the organizer of the apexart exhibit that hosted Disquiet Junto music last year, has taken a new gig as a news columnist at Yahoo! (news: mediabistro.com). In his first column he lays out why the whys and hows of gadget-land are more deserving of focus than the whats — that is, than the gadgets themselves: “I won’t be doing is joining the race to post images of and quote press releases for the latest gizmo. To me, what’s really interesting about technology isn’t technology—it’s what people choose to do with technology, for better and for worse.” ¶ This section had been called “Stems,” for the partitions in the contemporary electronically mediated recording process. Before that it was called “Tangents.” Now it is called “Cues.”
