Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 469

Disquiet Junto Project 0059: Vowel Choral Drone

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 early evening, California time, on Thursday, February 14, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 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 0059: Vowel Choral Drone

This week’s project involves the human voice. You will create a choral drone from three samples that you will create with your own voice. This project requires a single die, or the digital equivalent.

Here are the steps in the project:

Step 1: Roll a die three times (or three dice once) to determine which vowels you will use. Depending on your luck, you may end up with two or even three of the same vowel.

1 = A (“a” as in “yay”)

2 = E (“e” as in “bee”)

3 = I (“i” as in “die”)

4 = O (“o” as in “yo”)

5 = U (“u” as in “you”)

6 = Y (“y” as in “Sylvia”)

If you don’t have access to a die, you can use various digital equivalents. This link, for example, will roll three dice simultaneously:

http://www.random.org/dice/?num=3

Step 2: For each vowel that you have been assigned by the dice, record a 10-second sample of you holding that vowel as a constant tone (volume, timbre, note, etc.).

Step 3: Create a choral drone that utilizes only these three sources of audio. You can treat them with effects lightly, but they should be recognizable as the human voice throughout the duration of track.

Deadline: Monday, February 18, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 5 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 “disquiet0059-vwls” 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 59th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/02/14/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Image up top from phonetics.ucla.edu.

The Ghosts of Union Station

Christopher McFall’s Quivering into your blood night radio takes as its subject the movements and echoes of a Kansas City train depot called Union Station, an old landmark whose halls have long been attractive to him. The result is a deeply reverberant music that melds rhythmic drones and more recognizable field recordings, ranging from what appear to be snippets of archaic, jazz-era pop standards, to the motions of individuals within the grand hall. Writes McFall of his focus on Union Station:

I’ve often felt that the echo within the space from the musical backdrop comes across as rather haunting when combined with the sounds of visitors moving about throughout the terminal. So, this environment has served as the foundation for constructing this release.

Tracks originally posted for free download at impulsivehabitat.com, where it is available as both MP3 and FLAC.

The Library Drone

There’s an underlying drone to most large buildings, especially to those that prize a relative approximation of hermetic enclosure. Libraries, hospitals, factories — they all produce noises as a result of their activity, but they also have at their core a root drone, the building’s equivalent of something located somewhere between room tone and soundscape, between the intimacy of a truly confined space and the largely unintended sonic component of the overall location.

The following audio is the HVAC drone in a self-contained study room at a library that I frequent, up at Sonoma State in California, about an hour north of San Francisco, where I live. In person, this drone can have a sheer rush to it, a sense of energy that this recording doesn’t quite capture. It can project the sense of wind, even though this particular room, a small one, like the rest of the library, is entirely still. The result is a matter of disorientation: being alone in a placid space while the sounds suggest you’re at the top of a perilous shaft.

There are some flubs in this audio document, some shifting of a finger on the recording device, and later another finger on a key on a laptop. I could have re-recorded it, but consciousness of the avoided errors would have just had the ear listening for further desecrations. If anything, the odd flub can aid in a field recording of background noise by helping the ear keep the subject in relative focus.

This was recorded directly to the MP3 format on an Olympus VN-8100PC. Photo take on a Nexus 4 and filtered for contrast and affect in the app Pixlr Express.

Track posted for free download at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

The Art of Audio Arts

The Tate Modern has posted almost six hours of discussion from a series of panels about the classic sound art publication Audio Arts, the cassette-based magazine that ran from 1973 to 2006. The panel tracks were originally posted for free download as parts 1, 2, and 3 at tate.org.uk, which is also housing digitized recordings from Audio Arts. The archives include interviews with R. Buckminster Fuller, Lawrence Weiner, Nam June Paik, and Tacita Dean. It’s several months worth of listening. Dive in and please report back.

The Spaces in Between (MP3)

In an exploration of contemporary poetry, Christian Hawkey focused not on the words but on the spaces in between. The result is an audio track constructed entirely from the times when the poet John Ashbery is speaking but not saying anything (MP3). The track was created from material stored in the PennSound Archive. Here’s some background on Hawkey’s project, which grew out of a 2012 Ashbery symposium:

Hawkey chose to explore his audio archives, or rather, the various recordings of John Ashbery that Pennsound has compiled over the years, beginning with his 1961 reading for the Living Theater.

He became especially interested in listening to the room tone and background noise in all the recordings: the recorded texture of the room, the sound made by the recording device itself, and the non-vocal presence of Ashbery himself (a page turning, lighting a cigarette, sipping from glass of water and swallowing). Working with a friend, the artist Simone Kearney, Hawkey scanned the roughly 45 extant recordings on Pennsound to find, in each one, a clip of “silence” — a brief 3-to-7-second non-vocal moment (longer proved impossible to find) between poems, or between commentary and poems, or between title and poem. They then assembled the clips into one audio file.

It was surprisingly difficult to do this, they found, since most sound engineers remove as much dead sound and background sound as possible, or they snip off the silence at the beginning or end of a reading. Hawkey became increasingly fascinated with this project because it reads a kind of ecopoetics back into the poet’s auditory (and by extension textual) performance: what is normally elided in recordings (background, room tone, noise) is here entirely foregrounded.

Download audio file (Hawkey-Christian_Ashbery-project.mp3)

What makes the work resonate is the opportunity for aesthetic correlation:

Hawkey thinks this is analogous to, true to, aspects of Ashbery’s own aesthetic, where junk speech or everyday speech (that which is often censored from normative “literary” writing) is, in his work, front and center, foregrounded as sociolect, various vernaculars, ideolects.

Track found via jacket2.org and twitter.com/PennSound.

Mark Rushton Podcast (MP3)

One thing due to debut in the near future on Disquiet.com is a podcast. The idea has been in the works for awhile, and I’m hopeful it’ll begin in the next month. Among the models for such a podcast is Mark Rushton‘s fine, long-running series, which recently posted its 57th edition. Rushton is an Iowa-based musician with a keen interest in ambient sound and field recordings, and those impulses are core to the track highlighted in this post, the centerpiece of which is a 17-minute original, improvisatory piece. In addition to the music, Rushton talks a bit about his process, and he recommends some recent listening.

Download audio file (m…onpodcast57.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/markrushtoncom and markrushton.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

Have had Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" running on repeat in my head since Ed Koch's death was announced. ->



You're pretty much assured several interesting conversations at 8am on a Saturday at a supermarket. ->



This weekend the Disquiet Junto is probing Buryat, Navajo, and Zulu for their emotive content: http://t.co/lSzme8ob ->



My interview with almost-90-year-old painter Gregory Kondos is in Feb/Mar issue of @SactownMagazine http://t.co/cEZKYt6a. Print-only for now ->



I like living in a neighborhood where the library has a shelf labeled "New Russian Books." ->



Finished Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners. What of hers should I read next? ->



RIP, Muzak (b. 1934). Well, the name Muzak: http://t.co/zSeofBoo (via @jaschahoffman) ->



I did it. Now 22€ shy of goal. MT @mapmap: Help make it happen for 'The Falling Rocket' http://t.co/VJncxQJD #indiegogo ->



Thank you, Muzak, for announcing name change day before start of course I teach on sounds & branding in media landscape http://t.co/zSeofBoo ->



RIP, Reg Presley (b. 1941) of the Troggs. #wildthing ->



Panel from Guy Delisle's Burma Chronicles: http://t.co/uxrlKoXW ->



San Francisco Tuesday noon siren especially loud today. "This is a test. This is a test of the outdoor warning system. This is only a test." ->



April 6. That's the date on which Christian Marclay's The Clock opens at SFMOMA: http://t.co/VDRdWgWl. Runs through June 2. ->



This week's @djunto project is a netlabel remix. Next week's will involve the human voice again. ->



"Metallica signature" sneaks from Vans. Lars Ulrich pair could be mistaken for "Talking Heads Fear of Music signature": http://t.co/6qOuprkd ->



Apparently the Green Arrow (excuse me, Arrow) got Steve Aoki to DJ the opening of his new club tonight: http://t.co/eEvgPPMT ->



Day one of the new semester of the course on sound in the media landscape that I teach. ->



Overview here: http://t.co/Havc3p4m. MT @gr3gjsmith: Tweet is useless w/o syllabus! MT @disquiet: Day one of the course on sound I teach. ->



In past 24 hrs Muzak changed name, Swiss Beatz joined Monster, Metallica debuted Vans line, Apple sold 25th billion song. In time for class. ->



New restaurant in my 'hood (Richmond District, San Francisco) run by folks who own Chinatown dim sum spot City View. That is promising. ->



Been very much on my mind. MT @vuzhmusic: This suggests to me Vine is @djunto-ready “@snooksarmy: Beats By Fire #loop http://t.co/WRO2yyku” ->



RIP, Paul Tanner (b. 1917), last living Glenn Miller alum; played theremin on Beach Boys' " Good Vibrations":… ->



Instructions for the 58th Disquiet Junto project have gone to the email list, which now has 409 members: http://t.co/f2a6ojd6. ->



The 58th @djunto is a netlabel remix of Endless Ascent. Details at: http://t.co/XdREURGZ + http://t.co/mMpNLxNR. Deadline: 11:59pm Monday. ->



OS X Mail.app is a much more powerful program than its documentation or UI want you to think it is. ->



The writing on my Disquiet site dates back over 20 years, yet I only just used the word "scrotum" for the first time: http://t.co/yUBVOH6y ->



If you're in Berkeley on Sunday or early this coming week, the work I did with @salvagione @boondesign @sfcb will be at the Codex book fair. ->



300th active member is 1st timer. MT @Icarus_Descent: Icarus Descent's 1st contribution to @djunto: https://t.co/D9w21Zz8 #ambient #drone ->

Olfactory Artifice

This coming Sunday in Berkeley, California, the Codex International Book Fair will open, and among the showcased works is Paolo Salvagione’s wunderkammer One for Each, which he produced as the 2012 artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Center for the Book. A book-as-object, it contains five individual pieces, each in is own drawer and aligned with a different sense (hearing, taste, etc.). In the course of my ongoing series of collaborations with Salvagione, I wrote supporting texts, which were printed on letterpress and are contained within the One for Each box. I previewed the sonic-related essay (“Sound and the Tactile Ear”) here back in October of last year, when the work had its in-progress debut at the Center for the Book. I wrote a sixth document in advance of Sunday’s debut of the finished work; this new document contains a series of three brief descriptions of the scents employed in the smell-related drawer of Salvagione’s One for Each. Below are images of the PDF rendering of the document, which is being printed in advance of the show:

And here is the text of my scent-related essay from One for Each:

“Smell and the Threat of Action”

Can liquids be thought of as sleeping soundly — or do they lie in wait?

These tidy vials contain especially intense odors — they hold in a liquid state things generally thought of as vapors. They are condensed odors awaiting the enlivening act of dispersal. They are unassuming trinkets — trinkets loaded with potential energy.

The liquids are bottled here in small glass containers, elegant objects whose refined contours, whose economical dimensions, whose almost entirely transparent presence, belie what they are capable of. Only a tiny cotton ball keeps them from virtual invisibility, and its inherently cloud-like appearance suggests it as an illustration of vapor itself. Dropped on the floor, any one of them could clear a packed room in a matter of seconds. They’re a glass menagerie of disruptive action.

Take a whiff. What are those smells, what have they in common? It’s musk. In other circumstances, the collective odors might even be said to reek. Musk is, of course, the smell of exertion, of anxiety, of sweat, of fear — of exhilaration.

That word, “musk,” isn’t so unlike the vials themselves; it’s a familiar enough term whose common usage serves to mask its more salacious provenance. What is culture but an opportunity for humankind to subsume its animal nature in everyday normalcy, routine, in ritual, in language? The word “musk” is said to derive from the Sanskrit for “scrotum.”

If there’s a tension at work, it’s the anxiety intentionally inherent in the clinical presentation. A Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities, presents itself as a collection of wonders. But if wonder is understood to be a form of power, then in some way that power must strain in captivity. The tension at work here is the gap between exertion and containment, between the acts these smells suggest and the tidy nature of their display.

Do these odors, seemingly sedate in their liquid state, so refined in their small glass enclosures, sleep soundly — or do they plot escape? Why not open a bottle and come to your own conclusion?

Here, for some referential reading, is a transcription of Brian Eno’s 1992 essay “Scents and Sensibility,” in which the ambient pioneer discusses his interest in sound. It is, per chance, part of this week’s reading assignment for the course on sound that I teach at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

The design of the above card is by Boon Design (boondesign.com). More on the Codex event, which runs from Sunday, February 10, through Wednesday, February 13, at sfcb.org and codexfoundation.org. More on One for Each at salvagione.com.

Harmonic Transference of Porcelain and Water

The musician’s experiment is often the listener’s best experience. Free from the anxiety of a final work, the test run is ready to fail and, in the process, to surprise. In addition, the test run by its very nature locates a unique common ground between musician and listener: inexperience. Case in point is “Tomoko Sauvage – Making of a Rainbow (Sasanamix),” a reworking by Naoyuki Sasanami of Tomoko Sauvage’s “Making of a Rainbow.” The original, from the Sauvage album Ombrophilia (2009), is a study in tonal percussive patterns; the album’s brief liner notes list its constituent parts as “water, porcelain bowls, hydrophones, condenser microphones, metal wire and wood spoons.” Sasanami toyed with the “Rainbow” in the process of trying out some new features in the latest edition of the popular music production tool Ableton Live. Here’s Sasanami’s take, which appears to take harmonal components of the original as their own subset to be tweaked:

Sasanami’s was posted for free download at soundcloud.com/naotko. Check out the original (streaming only) at soundcloud.com/tomokosauvage. The above image is a detail of the cover of Ombrophilia, available from tomokosauvage.bandcamp.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0058: Endless Commons

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 early evening, California time, on Thursday, February 7, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 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 0058: Endless Commons

This is a shared-sample project. Create a single new piece of music by employing the selected material (see below) of each the following three tracks. All three were initially released on the netlabel Endless Ascent, and were posted to the Internet with a Creative Commons license encouraging derivative reworking. Please only use this material; you can transform in any way you choose, but do not introduce any new source material.

1: The 30 seconds of “Materia Lucida,” the title track of a release by Kirill Platonkin and Jarguna:

http://www.endlessascent.com/ea023/ea...

2: The second 30 seconds of “With a Wimper” off Exuviae’s album The Sum of Zero:

http://www.endlessascent.com/ea019/ea...

3: The final 30 seconds of “02″ off Illuminoscillate’s album Solar Wave Phase:

http://www.endlessascent.com/ea018/ea...

We’re doing this to pay thanks to the open-minded Endless Ascent, which not only releases its music for free download but also employs the Creative Commons license that allows for derivative works. There are hundreds of netlabels out there, but only a small percentage allow for reworking. These occasional Junto netlabel remix projects are intended to promote reworking as itself a means of music distribution.

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

Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 5 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 “disquiet0058-endlesscommons” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: For this project, your track should be set as downloadable, and allow for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

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

This Disquiet Junto project was done as a celebration of the efforts of the Endless Ascent netlabel, and to support its employment of licenses that allow for derivative works. These Junto netlabel remix projects are intended to promote reworking as itself a means of music distribution. This track is comprised of three pieces of music, all originally released on Endless Ascent: “Materia Lucida,” the title track of a release by Kirill Platonkin and Jarguna, “With a Wimper” off Exuviae’s album The Sum of Zero, and “02″ off Illuminoscillate’s album Solar Wave Phase. More on the Endless Ascent netlabel, and the original versions of these tracks, at http://www.endlessascent.com/.

More on this 58th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/02/07/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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