Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 47

Kata, Lesson, Subversion

“Sometimes it turns into a production kata, sometimes it’s a history lesson, sometimes it’s a subversion of muscle memory. It’s just what I need.”

That is Coraline Ada Ehmke on what the Disquiet Junto has supplied. It’s a rewarding summary statement.

Scratch Pad: Sirens, Picks, Wires

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media. 

▰ First passing siren of the week

▰ Inevitably after guitar class I write down a bunch of notes on what I’ve learned, and then the only fool*-proof way to find my pick is to stand up and wait for it to fall to the floor

*me being the fool in this equation

▰ Again, it’s not, in fact, “I Dream of Wires.” It’s: “I was using my modular synth too late and then I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about wires.”

▰ Apparently this artist lived backwards in time (at Stanford Cantor). And yes, as a friend pointed out, kinda love the “a copy of a copy.”

▰ Fun fact: Even when the editor likes your essay a lot and has only made minor edits to it, managing those edits in Track Changes can take a confusing hour-plus. By the end, it becomes the punctuation equivalent of Where’s Waldo.

Six More Strings

New machine in the house

Disquiet Junto Project 0655: Soothing Sounds II

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0655: Soothing Sounds II
The Assignment: Make music for babies.

Step 1: Back in the early 1960s, Raymond Scott released a set of music for infants, titled Soothing Sounds for Baby. We’re going to produce music along those lines. Feel free to revisit Scott’s great collection. (Not one but two Junto participants give birth this month — one did a week-ish ago, and one is due to very soon. We’re doing this project in their honor and with their approval. Perhaps there are other brand new parents in our digital midst, as well. We did a project just like this one way back when we hit the 250th consecutive week, in October 2016.)

Step 2: Compose a piece of music intended for a newborn child, something peaceful as they first experience the world outside the womb.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0655” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0655-soothing-sounds-ii/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. It can take a child awhile to fall asleep.

Deadline: Monday, July 22, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 655th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Soothing Sounds II — The Assignment: Make music for babies — at https://disquiet.com/0655/

The image associated with this project is from an early patent for a pacifier.

‘Sunny,’ Episode 3: Ear Witness

“Shouldn’t you have supersonic hearing or something?” asks the widow of the robot.

That is the question that Suzie directs at Sunny, after Sunny, having been just told not to, goes ahead and opens the door. Suzie (played by Rashida Jones) is a recent widow, Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura) an even more recently arrived robot. The door is the one to the bedroom of Suzie’s son, who may very well at this moment be dead, along with his father, Suzie’s husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima). We have heard about but not witnessed a plane crash that is assumed to have claimed both. Suzie has been grieving inside the child’s room. Sunny, namesake disposition notwithstanding, is pushy, and quite likely did hear what Suzie said, and is simply acting in the owner/guardian’s perceived best interests.

As with its first two episodes, sound remains a key topic in the Apple TV series Sunny, which takes its name from the robot. The two other key sonic moments in episode three, titled “Mmmm, Hinoki,” belong to Suzie’s mother-in-law, Masa’s mother, Noriko (Judy Ongg), who is pushy in her own right. In fact, there is a sense that if Masa is responsible for having originally programmed Sunny, then Noriko may have provided something of an emotional template. In fact, in this episode we see a flashback to Noriko waiting outside Masa’s room when he was much younger, just as we see Sunny now waiting outside Suzie’s. (Masa, we learned in episode two, was a hikikomori — or shut-in — for several years.)

In the first of this episode’s two essential Noriko sonic moments, we see her talking, seemingly to herself, while two of other elderly Japanese women are one room away. The women listen in, as do we. However, to us viewers, it is only when Noriko’s monologue takes a sudden turn that we realize she has not been talking to herself. She might well have been practicing for a difficult conversation, but she is actually engaged in that conversation: she is on the phone — using one of the ubiquitous earbuds that have become a signifier of the near future where Sunny is set — negotiating the details of Masa’s upcoming funeral.

The other Noriko sonic moment occurs about halfway through the episode, when we again see her in the midst of a form of communication that is initially opaque. She has just finished a call, again using her earbud; it is one among many such calls she is making to inform people about Masa’s funeral. Then, as she straightens a small stack of paper, she freezes, almost as if she has remembered something disturbing, or even had a stroke. An instant passes speedily, and it only becomes clear that she has herself received a call when we hear her say, partially in Japanese and then in English: “Call: Do not answer.”

That inbound call, however, appears to connect nonetheless, and Noriko’s practiced facade drops. She pulls out the earbud, slamming it to the table. Interestingly, while we didn’t hear the call — hence the earlier ambiguity — we do hear the connecting tone, perhaps simply to reinforce what is happening, or perhaps because the earbud is no longer in Noriko’s ear. More likely it’s the latter, because throughout Sunny thus far, earbuds (both during in-person instantly translated communication and during phone calls) are depicted as societally embedded mediators of interactions between humans. (Recall how in episode two, we see Suzie and Masa on their first date, and he declines her suggestion that she use an earbud’s translation feature to make it easier for him to speak to her; we know Masa knows something is up, because he doesn’t want a device to come between them.) This TV series clearly has the unintended impact of technology as one of its subjects, and the earbuds serve as a focal point, as an example of how much such an impact plays out at a daily level — and that the robots, like Sunny, are just part of a larger problem. What’s at the root of it, exactly, we don’t yet know.

One sensory side note: the episode takes its title, “Mmmm, Hinoki,” from a different sense other than hearing. The word hinoki is Japanese for cypress, a scent that is being discussed at the opening of the episode. Now, as far as we know, robots can’t smell. The aficionado of hinoki here is a violent crime boss — which is to say, just because the enjoyment of smells may remain the unique province of living things (in contrast with robots), a refined sense of smell itself isn’t necessarily a sign of any actual underlying humanity.

Another sensory side note: we also know that Sunny the robot can experience inebriation, not through drinking but through digital psychedelic patterns displayed on large video screens.

In Ed Park’s ‘Dream’

It is safe to say I am enjoying Ed Park’s novel Same Bed Different Dreams:

After the move to Dogskill, GLOAT replaced most of its management team with Directed Reality “You Be You” modules (hence D-R U-B-U), which, among other things, removed emotion from the equation. Workflow was stabilized, so that goals were attained on time. GLOAT’s high attrition rate was mostly due to the inability of new hires to get used to receiving critiques from a piece of software, no matter how lifelike. The smallest hiccup in the voice synthesizer or flaw in the image could shatter the illusion, reminding you that there was no one behind that mask.

TWiS Sound Bites

Little bits from the July 12, 2024, issue of my this Week in Sound email newsletter. I’ve been working on a revised format for the overall issue. Still doing so.

Hum Dinger: An Indian village is shaken by unidentified sounds: “Amit Jirange, a geologist with the Sangli GSDA, told TOI: “We found no sign of any seismic or sub-surface activity that eventually leads to tremors. The possible explanation we thought of was the release of the air trapped inside dried-up borewells.” ▰ Public Speaker: Are people ditching headphones more and listening to devices out in the open? ▰ Sound of Money: Noise from crypto mining apparently out of (regulatory) control in Texas. ▰ Sonic Weaponry: Updates on the Havana Syndrome investigation. ▰ For Eyes: A Chinese robot aids the blind with reportedly 90% accuracy. ▰ Pedal to the Metal: The 99% Invisible podcast covers John Cage’s extremely long organ composition. ▰ Bird Brain: The June 7, 2024, Rhymes with Orange comic strip by Hilary B. Price had my number. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

On the Line: Marsh, Motorcycle, Blackbird

▰ RIVER SONG:

“London is out there, not muted, but blurred into a saltmarsh soundscape. The sense of being surrounded calls to my drowsy mind a line in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are: ‘That night ... the walls became the world all around.’”

The Country Diary in the Guardian is “the oldest newspaper column in the world. This is Amy-Jane Beer writing not from Crook, County Durham, or North Hertfordshire, but from River Roding in London. 

. . .

▰ FULL CYCLE:

“‘I ride an 1800cc BMW,’ Sahara said. ‘Of all the BMWs, this one has the highest displacement and the engine makes the nicest, boldest sound.’Kaho didn’t say anything. I couldn’t care less what you ride — a BMW motorcycle, a tricycle, or an oxcart — she silently muttered to herself.”

The “silently” carries a nice amount of weight in this moment from “Kaho,” a Haruki Murakami story in the July 1, 2024, issue of The New Yorker.

. . .

▰ SOMETHING BORROWED:

"Music scaled a heightPast fire escapes, so that I heardA tune that scored itselfAcross the paper sky: a birdPerched on the tree's top shelf"

That is from “Blackbird at Dawn,” a poem by A.E. Stallings in the July 18, 2024, issue of the London Review of Books.

Scratch Pad: Polyrhythms, Fonts, Obsidian

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Afternoon trio from grumbling tummy, squawking crows, and the distant rumbling of internal combustion vehicles

▰ Vehicular polyrhythm of a car alarm going off and then the owner causing it to emit additional bleeps during ongoing failed attempts to sort out which button sequence turns off the car alarm

▰ I love that “fun” is a font category on my computer’s OS. Somewhere there’s a typographer thinking: “My font’s friggin’ fun. Why the heck isn’t it on that list?!”

▰ I didn’t expect, when I started using Obsidian, that I’d use its native daily notes, since I’d already been compiling my own into monthly docs. But I’ve switched. This is about as big a change to my note-taking as I can recall in many years. And it’s great. One tip: I recommend adding the abbreviated day of the week (YYYY-MM-DD-ddd) to the file name so they’re more easily identifiable. It really does help me to understand some notes when I consider the day of the week they were written.

▰ And another Obsidian thing: tables. The recent(ish?) upgrade makes them so simple to use, and now I find myself using them all the time: for little to-do lists, to organize key points, to correlate related information. The ability to move rows and columns manually on a whim is fantastic.

▰ Not sure when I became a person who pre-orders books fairly frequently but I’m a person who now pre-orders books fairly frequently. Recently: the new Robin Sloan (Moonbound), the imminent China Miéville/Keanu Reeves (The Book of Elsewhere, related to the Brzrkr graphic novels, which I read earlier this year), and the later-this-year Neal Stephenson (Polostan). Which makes me realize: as much non-genre stuff as I read, I’m not “following” non-genre writers as way I once did. Dunno. Just sort of observing my own reading trends. Currently really digging Ed Parks’ Same Bed, Different Dreams and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Yes, she’s dead. I know.

▰ The YouTube video recommendation algorithm generally has my number (or numbers: synthesizers, guitar tutorials, non-comedic TV/movie previews, comics/scifi/literary author interviews, gadget news), except it persistently exhibits an impression that I’m interested in Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa

▰ Who ruled that YouTube videos need to be lit like they were filmed on a Virgin Airlines flight?

▰ How many videos are in your YouTube “watch later” playlist? I’ve got 2,070.

▰ Obsidian-heads: I’ve begun using the inter-file linking, which is quite remarkable (like how files names update within docs). However, I worry that if I use that, I’m locking myself into Obsidian (which runs contrary to its plain-text appeal). Are such links more “portable” than I think they are?

▰ Happiness is waking up to a photo in your email inbox of a sneak peek of a CD insert featuring liner notes you wrote

▰ Reading: apparently I haven’t registered here some of the books I’ve finished reading recently, not since June 8. I’ve read a lot, but just — well, not “just,” but relative to how much I’ve read it feels like just — finished three novels, or a novella and two novels. The novella: The Jade Setter of Janloon by Fonda Lee, set in the world of her excellent Jade trilogy. I hope she puts out one of these every year or so forever. Then Moonbound (more on which this coming week) by Robin Sloan, whose Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore I re-read in advance of this coming out. And then Max Barry’s Lexicon, which has a lot in common with R.F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (they’re both about language as a form of magic), which I read earlier in the year. Currently working my way through a bunch of books, of which I’m likely to finish Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams and Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World first. But we’ll see.

The Intimate Sound Technology of ‘Sunny’

The new TV series Sunny, from Apple, stars Rashida Jones as an apparent widow in Japan, her husband and son having disappeared during a plane crash. I say “apparent” because as of this writing we’re two episodes in and very little is certain. Jones’ grieving character, Suzie, is left alone in the family’s Kyoto home until a robot, named Sunny, is delivered by a colleague of Suzie’s husband. The robot is quite advanced, nudging the story from our own Roomba-and-Alexa present to something slightly further into the technological future — along the lines of WALL-E meets Severance. 

There is an array of unfamiliar gadgetry in Sunny, from ambiguous handhelds to textile-like product design, and sound is a factor in many of the interfaces. Yes, there’s no small irony to this being an Apple production, all the more so given how fraught some of this technology’s presence is, at least as far as Suzie is concerned. (The series is based on the novel The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan.)

In the first episode of Sunny, the emphasis is on a secondary device, an earbud translator, which lets Suzie, who doesn’t speak much Japanese, participate more freely in society than she might otherwise. The show, which grapples with various forms of new technology, has moments when unintended consequences surface, such as when someone accidentally overhears Suzie and then admonishes her for speaking within earshot while they still have their earbuds in. This happens, as well, with Suzie’s mother-in-law, a fierce yet sympathetic Judy Ongg, and the moment marks Ongg’s character as more stranger than relative.

In the second episode, we witness the meet-cute moment between Suzie and her husband, Masa, who may or may not be an inventor of the robot Sunny and its ilk. At one point Masa, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima (who was fantastic in the movie Drive My Car, by Ryusuke Hamaguchi — who has his own intense relationship with sound in filmed narrative), struggles with the correct English words for something he wants to express, and Suzie reaches for her earbuds to make it easier for him to communicate. 

They’re both damaged people. Masa has emerged from his own dark period, whereas Suzie seems to be just now entering her own. Masa stops Suzie from using the earbud, and it’s a touching moment. We see that Masa would rather risk being seen as ineloquent than have their fledgling relationship get mediated by technology. (Maybe he knows something she doesn’t.) I don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say it’s a double effort on his part, in this scene, to be seen as struggling — and that his concern about technology rubs up against what we at least seem to know about him in the story’s present tense. Again, this scene is their origin story, set a decade earlier.

And then there is, also in the second episode, Suzie’s other main relationship so far — not the one with her nuclear family or her somewhat distant mother-in-law, but the newly arrived robot, Sunny. With Suzie’s husband and son out of the picture, so to speak, most of Suzie’s relationships are with women (there’s also the bartender Mixxy in the first episode), of which Sunny appears to be adjacent, as is de rigueur, problematic as such e-gender modes may be, for domestic virtual servants (not least among them, Apple’s own Siri). At the end of the second episode, Suzie and Sunny end up next to each other in bed — it’s not sexual — and the following brief conversation occurs:

Suzie: “Are you breathing?”

Sunny: “Just a sound effect. I thought you’d like it. I can stop.”

Suzie: “No. I like it.”

Now, Sunny was introduced to us, and to Suzie, as primed for Suzie as her user. There are lingering questions as to whether Masa himself was part if not of Sunny’s overall development and design, then at least of its optimization and personalization for Suzie. In this moment, though, it is not a third party, but Sunny itself/herself who is doing the interpersonal-alignment fine-tuning: adjusting tone to match the needs of not just her interlocutor but, for all intents and purposes, her owner. (The character is voiced by Joanna Sotomura.) It says something about their interaction that Sunny can employ a term as purely functional as “sound effect” without negating the realism of its/her own seeming humanity. 

. . .

VOICE ACTIVATED
On the topic of voice, technology, and culture — more items:

▰ AI Tolerance: There’s an actual robot bartender — combining, as it were, two of Sunny’s characters — by a company called Cecilia.ai

▰ Chat Trick: The in-the-works higher-end Alexa, called Remarkable Alexa, may be in jeopardy if it can’t deliver results. 

▰ On Background: Google’s Gemini assistant/service/chatbot may have an always-on mode, stoking privacy concerns, based on a peek at the underlying code that revealed “a string that mentions a ‘background_mode.’”

▰ Speaker Box: The Mayo Clinic reports the “first known successful total larynx transplant.”

▰ Logic Branch: Mat Eric Hart wonders “What Sounds Do Trees Make?” — opening with a quote from Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory: “they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.”

This originally appeared in the July 12, 2024, issue of This Week in Sound.