Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 465
March 14, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0063: Gregorian-orian-ian
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, March 14, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, March 18, 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 0063: Gregorian-orian-ian
This week’s project involves the role of architectural spaces in the composition of music. It is a shared-sample project that takes a piece of Gregorian chant as its source material.
These are the steps:
Step 1: Download this OGG audio file that contains a recording of monks singing Gregorian chant at the Abbey of Sant’Antimo in Italy:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Step 2: Play back that recording loudly in a highly reverberant space and record it. Your best bet may be a bathroom.
Step 3: Create a new piece of music using the recording you just made as your primary source material. You cannot add any new source material. You can manipulate the audio recording as you please, but restrict yourself to effects that simulate echo, such as delay, reverb, and looping. You may also use the original OGG file, but only in addition to your own recording of it being played back in the reverberant space.
Background: For additional thinking on the role that architecture has played in the evolution of music, this 2010 talk by David Byrne is recommended:
http://blog.ted.com/2010/06/11/how_ar...
Deadline: Monday, March 18, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 4 minutes in length.
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 “disquiet0063-gregorianorianian” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: Consider setting your track in a manner 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 63th Disquiet Junto project at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/03/14/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
The source of this piece is a recording of monks singing Gregorian chant at the Abbey of Sant’Antimo in Italy:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil...
The image of the Abbey is from wikimedia.org.
RIP, Reader?
Google Reader, the great RSS service, is shutting down, it was announced yesterday by Google. I don’t think there is a single web site or service or, on Android, a mobile app that I have spent as much time in as Google Reader, and I can’t really do justice to how essential Reader has been in the collating of material that has, subsequently, appeared on Disquiet.com and in my writing and projects elsewhere. At times people would ask where I’m going on vacation and I’d say, “Google Reader.”
My friend Rob Walker over at Yahoo! News agrees with the hopeful assertion of Marco Arment (Tumblr, Instapaper, The Magazine) that Reader’s end will inspire alternate services, yet I am anxious that the end of Reader will allow short-sighted product managers to ditch RSS from current and future websites. RSS to me is one of the key defining characteristics of the music phenomenon known as the netlabel. In allowing for easy redistribution of material, it is, to me, the very pavement of the Creative Commons, as I touched on in my 2011 list of proposals to new netlabels.
I’ve been looking around this past half day or so at alternatives. Feedly.com is quite lovely and has both an app and a web service, but the absence of an automated alphabetized view is confusing — not just confusing to navigate, but confusing in its absence; based on initial experience, it feels like one of those semi-belligerent UI/UX moves such as Gmail’s initial lack of a delete button, or OS X Mountain Lion’s version of TextEdit.app, in which the unchangeable default when creating a new file is to save it not to your computer but to iCloud. If you find Feedly promising, as I do, and want to promote the implementation of an alphabetal view, this appears to be where you can vote it up. The Feedly app, at least on Android, feels more like a design portfolio piece than a reader-oriented service, but it’s still promising. And it does appear that you can move feed-grouping order around to achieve alphatetization in the Organize tab or just in the left-column view (on the web, not in the app), but that is time-consuming, and why it’s not automated is unclear. At a buck a month, newsblur.com seems reasonable, but I’m just beginning to understand its UI eccentricities. A lot of folks have recommended theoldreader.com; a reader service without an Android app would be a stretch for me, but I’m not entirely against it.
There’s a petition to save Google Reader at change.org that I have signed. I also signed the one at keepgooglereader.com. This is what I wrote at both those sites:
RSS is among the key sources of my research. It may not be valuable for casual reading, but it is essential for information gathering. And information gathering is the basis of much that is published, including casual reading. I understand it may not have caught on with the vast majority, but the vast majority is a worthless threshold to employ as a gauge of utility. I didn’t ask you to save Wave, and I didn’t ask you to save iGoogle. I am asking you to save Reader.
As we await the potential pardon, suggestions appreciated for alternate services in addition to the ones listed above.
#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.
