Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 481

Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds,” Week 2

Wednesday of this week was the second of the 15 weekly three-hour classes I’m teaching on sound at San Francisco’s Academy of Art (academyart.edu) this semester. Last week’s entry on the first class got a helpful and enthusiastic response, so I thought I’d do it again. As with last time, this isn’t the full lecture, and even less so is it a representation of the discussion, which this week was great; it’s just a quick run through the subjects we covered.

Per the syllabus (PDF), this second class meeting focused on “A Brief History of Sound:”

Overview: We’ll trace overlapping paths through the history of sound, beginning with the human conception of sound, and then exploring the developing role of sound in modern media.

Part I: Celebrity Death

The class starts each Wednesday at noon, and my intention was to begin this one by playing some music, specifically an instrumental version of a Whitney Houston hit. The subject at hand was “celebrity death,” more on which in a moment. The tech failed me (more likely I failed the tech), so I ended up playing the song after the class break, but in the interest of context, this is a video containing the audio:

One of the pleasures of this course is probing my own uncertainties. Last week, the specific uncertainty on which I focused related to the role of sound in the work of JJ Abrams (briefly: to what extent his notable sonic sensitivity contributes to the popularity of his projects). This week allowed me to touch on a question that haunts me: What was the emotional and cultural experience of losing a musician to death before development of recorded music?

Just ponder that for a second. It’s 1750 AD, and your favorite local opera singer or tavern troubadour has passed away unexpectedly. What does it mean that you will never again hear her or his voice? In class we discussed the way a largely oral culture might maintain the singer’s memory — there might be subsequent musicians who sing in imitation of the deceased singer, and new singers might begin their careers by emulating that singer, eventually developing their own styles. These are, of course, things that continue in our own time — there are enough Elvis impersonators and Beatles cover bands to fill Shea Stadium, and so many prominent groups originated deeply indebted melodically, and in other ways, to their forebears. We touched on various related subjects, like where theft and cultural production overlap.

I initially played the instrumental version of the Whitney Houston hit to show how our memories fill in the gap, how we can celebrate a musicians absence in this manner. I then played the opposite, a video that contains the audio of only Whitney Houston singing, minus all the instrumentation. It’s doubly affecting. First there’s the sense of loss — the performance is so emotional, it’s as if she’s mourning herself. Second there are the echoes in Houston’s singing of Michael Jackson, whose own a cappella edits circulated after his early passing (“ABC,” “I Want You Back”):

There’s a lot to discuss on this topic, and the point of these summary posts is to do just that: summarize the lecture points. So, I’ll leave that part for now.

Part 2: A (Very) Brief Timeline

I then displayed the following timeline, and I talked through the nine points. (One thing: I am particularly uncertain about the dating of the early development of human speech ability. There are a lot of divergent takes on this timing. Fortunately for my purposes, the dating doesn’t affect the sequence, whether it’s circa 100,000 or 200,000 years ago.)

In brief, it begins with a consideration of the extent to which we were or weren’t human before we developed hearing and speech, and notes the extensive period between the origins of spoken communication and the introduction of early writing. Of all early physical technology — and I use that term so as not to exclude, for example, language, which is itself a technology — it was the homing pigeon I focused on. I was trying to emphasize an early technology that allowed people to send information faster and further than they might be able to themselves. (Later that evening, a friend suggested the bow and arrow, which considerably predates the homing pigeon, but I’m not certain that the distance a bow and arrow travels makes it as significant a development in communication distribution as the homing pigeon.)

The “oral culture becomes written culture” moment was the focal point of the timeline discussion. I draw this transition primarily from the popular survey Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World (2000) by John Man, who summarizes the anxiety in ancient Greece as this transition was underway. In brief, when we gain the power to record, we begin to forget:

By the way, Man likes this quote; he also employs it in his book The Gutenberg Revolution: The Story of a Genius and an Invention That Changed the World, from 2003. Like Man, we moved from oral culture to written culture to Gutenberg and moveable type. Then we proceeded to recorded sound. (As time got closer to the present, the rapidity of innovations appeared to increase; I trust there is something of an ongoing accelerando, but there’s also the manner in which greater distance makes things appear to be coincidental.) We touched on early recordings (fun fact: the “phonautograph” of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was only intended for recording, not playback) and the telephone. As time marched on, I singled out John Cage’s 4’33, which just had its 60th birthday, because of its centrality to our comprehension of music in the broader context of sound — a subject that is at the core of the first three classes in this course. And we closed on the Mosaic browser, the first visual interface for the World Wide Web, which turns 20 next year. We discussed what has occurred in Mosaic’s wake — Napster, iTunes, HTML5 — but that’s just the point: those flowed from Mosaic.

Part 3: Gordon Hempton, Audio Ecologist and Soundtracker

The Cage discussion, which we returned to later in the class, led to one of the primary assignments from the previous class, which was a discussion of the documentary Soundtracker (directed by Nick Sherman), whose subject is the audio ecologist and field recorder Gordon Hempton. (The students were required to watch it before the start of class, which gave them a full week.) Hempton says at one point in the documentary, “What’s the matter with me that I could be 27 years old before I started to listen.” The goal of this class, of course, is for everyone to start listening earlier than Hempton did, even if we never achieve his level of ability. We discussed a variety of things, which I’ll summarize very briefly using the following screenshots from the film:

Hempton talks about the “American mantra,” by which he means the second-hand electrical noise pollution that is the backdrop of our lives.

This is Hempton achieving his goal, getting the sound he desired. It’s an awkward moment for viewers because his perception of his art, the act of framing sound recordings, while perfectly normal from a photographic standpoint isn’t widely comprehended from an aural one, what is often termed “phonography.” The portion of him smiling while listening to something we cannot hear makes for an excellent contrast to the famous sequence in Grizzly Man (2005), when we watch the director, Werner Herzog, listening to something he refuses to play for the sheer brutality of it.

One key reason I selected this documentary is because Hempton represents the uneasy tension between perceived “natural” and “manmade” sound, and he speaks eagerly of his time in the city, and has an interesting perspective on trains, whose sound he appreciates. While he refers to a plane as “an off-road vehicle defacing the skies,” he thinks there’s something in a train’s bearing that more comfortably makes it part of the acoustic landscape. He’s quite critical of false sounds used in place of real ones; he says of some nature recordings that use, say, a toilet to represent a mountain stream, or of recordings that selectively edit to cut out passing planes and cars: “Those places don’t exist except in the imaginations of those who sit in the editing suite.” (I also asked the students to make note of the waveform that appears on screen during these title cards. We’ll be talking about visual iconography of sound much later in the course.)

There’s a fair amount of underlying personal tension in the film, too. Why is he no longer with his family? How strongly does his hold to his depiction of people as a “noise source.” Where does his sonic attention originate?

I neglected to show the above slide in class, regrettably. It’s a fine depiction of Hempton’s talent. In the film, that circle starts large and closes in slowly on its subject. It’s an economical presentation of Hempton’s ability to locate and identify sounds.

In light of Hempton and his attention to sound, we also discussed one of the other homework assignments for the week. The first week I had them all write down memories of sounds they associate with Wednesday mornings. This week, as part of their daily sound journal entries, I asked them to write down what they heard. We discussed what was and wasn’t evident — how initial recollections might, for example, have been of loud noises, but how in turn the students found themselves paying attention this morning to quiet ones. Also, we discussed false memories, like things they thought they heard but later realized they couldn’t have actually heard.

Then we took our break.

Part 4: Listening Exercise

The class takes a 15 minute break midway through. As part of an in-class listening exercise, I asked them to take 20 minutes instead, and I instructed them to use five of those minutes to walk the four-block circumference of the school, and to pay attention to what they heard. Our class is in the Academy of Art building at 410 Bush Street, closer to Kearny than to Grant, as depicted on this Google map:

When they got back to the room after the break, I immediately paired them up and had them do a listening exercise. Each pair would walk the four-block circumference, arm in arm. For two blocks, one of them would keep their eyes closed, and then they would switch for the second two blocks. Afterwards we discussed the sense of disorientation, fear, and heightened senses that resulted — not only sound but smell, even elements of touch. They had just walked this same route by themselves, and yet with one sense removed, it was fully new. The classroom couldn’t be much better located for such an exercise. If you walk up Bush to Grant and make a right, you are at the entrance to Chinatown, a commercial block as uniquely sonorous as it is colorful (photo via wikipedia.org). (And thanks to Paolo Salvagione, of salvagione.com, for helping me think of using this exercise.)

Part 5: Three Aspects of Listening (Physiology, Synaesthesia, Perception)

The next part of the class focused on aspects of listening. First, we went quickly over the structure of the ear, mostly to put that aside and talk about broader aspects of the listening experience, such as non-ear sensation (chest, hair follicles), and memory/experience.

We then moved on to synaesthesia, which I often incorrectly refer to as a “confusion” of the senses, though I mean confusion in a neutral, even positive, way (along the lines of the Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loesser song “Let’s Get Lost”). We discussed the Brian Eno essay on perfume I had assigned for the class (“Scents & Sensibility,” which dates from 1992), and that led to a brief overview of ambient music in the broader context of ambient sound. For a working definition of “synaesthesia,” I employed this description (see below) from the catalog to the excellent Visual Music exhibit that showed in Los Angeles, California, and Washington, D.C., around 2005. (You’ll no doubt note the way the key quote is highlighted. I don’t trust pithy quotes, as I feel they artificially yank something out of context, so I try to display them in the context in which they first appeared, and then talk about that context a little. In explaining this presentation style to the students, I mentioned the classic example of the Stewart Brand phrase “Information wants to be free,” which for a long time was usually quoted without the sentence that originally followed it: “Information also wants to be expensive.”)

And then things came around to the final portion of the class, a discussion of “perception,” which clearly had been the thread running through the entire day’s selection of subjects, from the Greeks’ anxiety about knowledge separated from experience, to Gordon Hempton’s extraordinary ear, to the two listening exercises, and so on. The starting point for this was a selection from John Cage’s book Silence, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year:

Part 6: Next Week’s Assignments

And then I went over the homework for the following week. The structure of the assignments for this course is that some reinforce what’s just been covered and some prepare for what’s about to be covered, while others bridge the gap — and every week, every day really, the students are expected to write in their sound journals. Next week is class number three, which is the final part of the first of this course’s three arcs, the one on “Listening to Media.” The class will take as its subject “The Score”:

Overview: Music and sound in film and television, its purposes, and what we can learn from its history of development.

These are the assignments due for completion by the start of the third class. The Michael Jarrett conversation with Walter Murch is at yk.psu.edu and the Bonnie Gordon piece on Thomas Jefferson is at slate.com. (Thanks to Peter Nyboer of lividinstruments.com for having reminded me about the Murch piece.)

I didn’t expect to do a second of these roundups, but the first one proved useful. Not sure if I’ll do more such posts, but we’ll see. Still 13 weeks of classes to go.

The Prepared Hand (MP3s)

Nils Frahm, the German pianist, is currently on tour. Yesterday he turned 30, and to celebrate he gave a present to his fans: a collection of nine short pieces for free download. Why nine? Because he was playing with nine fingers. Why nine fingers? Because one of them is out of commission. Frahm busted a thumb while bracing himself during a fall, and has several screws — a handful, one might say — to show for it. That’s his thumb up above in the X-ray. The image initially accompanied a single track he’d uploaded to SoundCloud, “Song for 9 Fingers.” The full EP, titled Screws, is highly recommended. It is Frahm at his most intimate. The texture of his instrument, the sound of the piano’s mechanisms, the fundamental physical interactions of his body and the machine, are almost as important to the recorded sound as are the Satie-eqsue melodies he pursues. Key among these melodies is “Me,” which of all nine tracks is the one in which background noises come closest to gaining parity with the foreground music, combining into a rich sonic spaciousness. The attention to detail evidences why the word “dust” carries such meaning for turntablists, beat makers, and crate diggers, and it’s a strong cross-cultural experience to hear those textures embraced by a pianist. There’s an aura of antiquity to what Frahm is up to, a fragility that can be mesmerizing.

I interviewed Frahm recently for the Colorado Springs Independent (“Felt Up”), and talked with him about how his live performances differ from his recorded output, his use of felt in preparing his piano, his favorite John Cage work (“Imaginary Landscape”), and his relationship with the various pianos he encounters on tour. “They have 88 times of the same mechanism,” he said, “and usually one or three aren’t working. I tweak little things, modify slightly. Otherwise, you deal with the character of it, and get in a dialog with a specific instrument.”

Screws EP originally posted for free download, as a Zip archive of MP3s or AIF files, at soundcloud.com/erasedtapes, which also houses “Song for 9 Fingers.” More on Frahm at nilsfrahm.de. Read the interview at csindy.com. Tour dates at erasedtapes.com, his label.

Disquiet Junto Project 0038: Zola’s Foley

Each Thursday evening 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 to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

The assignment was made early in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, September 13, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 17, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0037-asrealasitgets1. (There are no translations this week.)

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). The project is one in a foreseen series being done in conjunction with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker. The exhibit will run at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan from November 15 – December 22, 2012. More information on the exhibit at apexart.org. The list of featured participants in the exhibit is: Kelli Anderson, Conrad Bakker, Beach Packaging Design, Matt Brown, Steven M. Johnson, Last Exit To Nowhere, MakerBot Industries, The Marianas (Michael Arcega and Stephanie Syjuco), Angie Moramarco, Oliver Munday, Omni Consumer Products, Staple Design, U.S. Government Accountability Office, Ryan Watkins-Hughes, Marc Weidenbaum/Disquiet Junto, Shawn Wolfe, and Dana Wyse.

Disquiet Junto Project 0038: Zola’s Foley

This project is a follow-up to last week’s. Last week, for the 37th project, we focused on pure, unadulterated field recording; the project was to “record sound from a large retail space, preferably a department store.”

This week, for the 38th project, we will create an “artificial field recording.” That is, this week we’ll make something that to the listener appears to be a field recording, but is in truth entirely constructed. The aim carries over from last week: the finished audio should appear to be that of a large department store.

Background: The goal for this project is twofold. In the immediate sense, it is to explore foley techniques from film and television sound, in which noises are employed to suggest other sounds (i.e., a bicycle bell suggests a cash register, layered and echoed footsteps suggest a crowd, a doorbell suggests an elevator).

The project, however, has broader intentions. It’s being undertaken in association with the exhibit As Real as It Gets, organized by Rob Walker. The exhibit draws from Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), published in 1883, which depicts life and commerce in a massive department store in Paris. As Real as It Gets will run at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan from November 15 – December 22, 2012. Sounds produced for this Disquiet Junto project will be considered to be played in the gallery as part of the exhibit, and will also be made available to Disquiet Junto participants and other musicians and sound artists for subsequent projects related to Walker’s exhibit.

There are also plans for a Disquiet Junto concert at Apex Art on Tuesday, November 27, in conjunction with the exhibit.

This is Apex’s initial, brief description of the upcoming exhibit: “As Real as It Gets gathers fictional products, imaginary brands, hypothetical advertising and speculative objects, devised by artists, designers, and companies. We resist commercial material culture as inauthentic, phony, and less than legitimate, but should we? Presenting the marketplace as medium — while supplies last.”

Walker is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and Design Observer, and the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House: 2008) and Letters from New Orleans (Garrett County Press: 2005). Walker co-founded, with Joshua Glenn, the Significant Objects project.

Deadline: Monday, September 24, 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 “disquiet0038-asrealasitgets2” 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 in association with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan (November 15 – December 22, 2012):

http://apexart.org/exhibitions/walker...

More on this 37th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/09/20/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Photo of Émile Zola via wikipedia.org.

The Lathe of Brooklyn (MP3)

The great Touch Radio podcast has uploaded audio from just a few days ago. The concert in question was a show at Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Eleh was the headliner, and the opener was Lary 7 (pictured above in a photo of the event from Touch). Charactertistic for the Touch Radio series, there’s close to no information about the event provided. What there is is half an hour of increasingly violent chafing, noises of mechanisms in action, echoed in a reverberant space. Fortunately, a lengthy New York Times review of the Eleh show allowed a parenthetical reference to Lary 7′s opening set: “The opening act was Lary 7, a New York artist who used a lathe-cutter onstage to record the hum and buzz of the machine itself onto a black disc; and then played back the recording with a tonearm. It was process-oriented, less spiritual and much less attractive as sound.” Irritation, it appears, is in the ear of the beholder (MP3).

Download audio file (Radio83.mp3)

The concert was one in a series of events celebrating Touch’s 30th anniversary. Advance word of the show was at issueprojectroom.org. Recording originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk. More on Touch’s 30th anniversary at 30.touchmusic.org.uk. Here’s to hoping that the Eleh part of the evening gets a post-concert opportunity for an audience.

Two at a Drone (MP3)

There’s no immediate telling if at the 2:26-minute point along the 10:57-long timeline of “C Drone,” when the higher-pitched, more sinuous drone emerges from a thicker, more burr-like drone, one of those in particular can be attributed to He Can Jog (aka Erik Schoster) and the other to Nomad Palace (aka Nate Zabriskie). It’s a duet, a collaboration, per the track’s title (Schoster inserts a “with Nomad Palace” parenthetical after the “C Drone”), but beyond that, little is made clear. Both musicians live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and are two thirds of the band Cedar AV (the missing piece being Nicholas Sanborn). They have plenty of collaborative performance experience between them, and thus the apparent parts within “C Drone” could just as likely be the result of their mutual efforts, not simply an expression of their simultaneous performance. Either way, it’s a strong piece. Schoster in his brief note calls it a “drone /not-drone,” which is apt — it’s more of a series of drones, from oh-so-quiet, to richly patterned, to a cicada frenzy, sewn into something that progress like a piece of program music.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/hecanjog. More on Schoster at hecanjog.com. More on Zabriskie at nomadpalace.net. More on Cedar AV at cedarav.org.

1998 Digital Frippertronic Experiment (MP3)

Ken Mistove has uploaded a 1998 experiment in live looping. He explains that his intent was to replicate Frippertronics — in other words, “ealtime performance using looping.”

He explains in some detail:

The looping was done in Max/MSP recorded direct to disk. The only “mastering” was fades and normalizing. It was a simple patcher that I feel gave great results at the time. I wrote the patcher on a dare. An aquaintance asked if I could reproduce Robert Fripp’s live system from the mid/late 90′s (Soundscapes). I barely scratched the surface of what RF was doing. The patcher was four 60 seconds loops with an audio switcher/mixer in front of the delay lines. The four delay lines where set to unique times. I changed patches on the D-50 and routed the output to various delay inputs.

The result has the composition-through-accrual feeling of Fripp’s work, especially the way slight variations in metric sensibility get subsumed into the haze of background as subsequent layers are added on. The major distinction is less the specific material that Mistove draws from than the variety. Mistove culls from a wider array of sonic items than Fripp, who tended to work from a single guitar. Mistove, too, elected to use a single instrument, a Roland D-50 synthesizer, but the collective sounds have significantly less of a sense of common flavor. That isn’t to critique the piece. Quite the contrary, the divisible nature of the elements lets several linger in the ear far longer than they might have otherwise.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ken-mistove. More on Mistove, who’s based in Simi Valley, California, at kenzak.com.

Not Drowning, Composing (MP3)

There is an unattributed introduction to Leaving in Waves, Clayton Alpha‘s recent album of gestural ambient-infused music. The collection of 10 tracks is a mix of plaintive low-energy melodic lines, often drawn from what appears to be classical-music source material, and lightly filtered field recordings, the point of origin unclear but the natural elements firm and persistent. The album was released earlier this week for free download by Panda Fuzz, which is a netlabel, which means that it specializes in MP3s. For this reason, the reference to “needle drops” in the following paragraph excerpt from the introduction is largely metaphorical:

Abstract music is just that; abstract. The artist can make suggestions, in titles and artwork, but in the end, the listener holds all the power. Once the needle drops, or the headphones slip on, the creator can only hope that they’ve done their due diligence in getting what they need across, be it as abstract of concrete as they like.

While there are no dropped needles in the process of listening to Leaving in Waves, there appear to have been some in the album’s making. Most of the tracks employ slowed down orchestral cues or languorous piano lines. The sampling occasionally takes on a physical property. Key among the tracks is “A House Out of Reach,” in which the minimalist piano part is rendered weather-beaten by association with the fog bank of field recordings that subsume it (MP3). Furthermore, the part is presented as if on a wobbly turntable, the warped vinyl having an ebb and flow like the surf.

Download audio file (06-a-house-out-of-reach.mp3)

Get the full release of 10 tracks at pandafuzz.com and via archive.org.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

Doing my part to support the economy. MT @jmmy_kppl: i walked through a shop because @djunto told me to. http://t.co/eN31Qfrn #
"Don't you got any Christmas music?" "This is Christmas music." #
Morning sounds: refrigerator hum, quiet buzz of distant traffic, passing bus. #
3 sonic documents of consumer space so far in @djunto #37 Simi Valley Target, Dorset Primark, Manhattan Macy's: http://t.co/lSzme8ob #
Cloud sync means four devices on your desk near-simultaneously signaling a calendar event. #
Interesting standoff between networks and Apple about network IDs. Did record companies ever balk at the absence of a label field in iTunes? #
The faces are so all familiar in the trailer to Spielberg's Lincoln that it looks like an exercise in anachronism cosplay. #
Nix that. Per @nynexrepublic (@disquiet "I would not be surprised to learn of a Hello Kitty taser"), confirmed existence thereof. #
Maybe if I put Hello Kitty stickers on my Zoom H4n, fewer people will mistake it for a taser. "I'm a field recordist. We mean no harm." #
It helps that the dual microphones on the Zoom H4n look like deathray devices from a James Bond movie starring the Micronauts. #
Gauging quasi-objective sound-recording quality is not exactly in my skill set, but man does this Zoom H4n sound good. #
"Pre-Raphaelites trailer." #
There will be a Fringe episode titled "Transilence Thought Unifier Model-11." That is all. #
Week 1 of the sound class I'm teaching, with videos, syllabus, an in-class exercise, and other documents: http://t.co/Havc3p4m #
The 37th weekly @djunto project is now live: http://t.co/XdREURGZ + http://t.co/NUE8q5zC #
I had a blast teaching about sound (in the media landscape) yesterday. I kind of want it to be next Wednesday already. #
Ghost bus. #
RIP, composer, scholar (Cage, Young, Zazeela), and Internet early-starter William Duckworth (b. 1943). via @seatedovation #
Watermarked pre-release copies means critics must have more confidence in publicists than publicists have in critics. #
This week's @djunto project is the first in a series related to this: http://t.co/s0pnaRgn. Details to follow. To start: field recordings. #
Funny if auction of Eric Clapton's Richter, "Abstraktes Bild (809-4)," meant painter henceforth more associated with him than Sonic Youth. #
Yeah, fog horns still at it in the morning. I hope no one ever comes up with a better-than-fog-horn solution. #
Sounds like the fog horns are pulling an all-nighter. #
Dinner: rainbow chard, chicken habanero sausage, jasmine rice. Soon as the kid's asleep: (last night's) Sons of Anarchy season premiere. #
Overly invested in this S.H.I.E.L.D. show being Marvel's answer to @brubaker's Gotham Central. #
Class homework: watching Gordon Hempton documentary (Soundtracker), reading Brian Eno essay on perfume, starting semi-daily sound journal. #
In class showed main, alt-earth, and retro-'80s versions of Fringe opening credits; also: classic/corny and real-sound Kit Kat commercials. #
Exercises from today's sound class: journal entry (listening in/to the classroom; no speaking); sonic memories of average Wed. morning. #
Best part of Apple event is watching @gewang + @dizzybanjo reactions. in reply to gewang #
Sound Class, Week 1: sound journal, Oliveros (Deep Listening), Schafer (soundscape), JJ Abrams, Fringe, clairaudience, Kit Kat, sonification #
This lineup of David Byrne / How Music Works conversations is pretty amazing: http://t.co/oBbszw0l #
Nearing-midnight sounds: dishwasher, magazine being paged through, typing, light electric whine. #
What in two decades will be the term for implemented skeuomorphism nostalgia? #
While reading @Richard_Kadrey's Kill the Dead over lunch, I made thick red chili for dinner. I think its boiling is what Hell sounds like. #
Digging the elegant literalism of the cover to Nate Silver's forthcoming book on predictions, The Signal and the Noise: http://t.co/tmkvlheL #
Reddit confuses me. Why's there a link to a 50th anniversary Kind of Blue video (i.e. from several years ago) on the home page? #
Thanks, whichever municipal worker made the crosswalk audio signals at 25th and Geary phase out of sync. #
Turn corner, hear choral music: massive midweek funeral at neighborhood Russian Orthodox Church, its steps lined with singing parishioners. #
Tuesday noon civic siren in San Francisco on 9/11. #
If you need a question mark you haven't sufficiently formulated your sentence. #
This morning's wake-up call: Tyondai Braxton remixing Philip Glass: http://t.co/KQ3MZQei #
Man, the 36th @djunto project is nearing 50 entries, bringing total tracks to over 1300, total participants to almost 250. #
Last night's Alphas (on SyFy) continued with the infrasonic plot thread. #
This coming week's Disquiet Junto project will be pure field recording, a first for the series. #
Information flows through this. http://t.co/17dj3wNr #
The fogpunk mythology of the Richmond District: Gundam Sutro on the hill and bleating mecha whales in the bay #
Not a speaker. (Domestic steam vent.) http://t.co/up2OpbSc #
The Clyfford Still–themed @djunto project more active than I'd expected. Over 40 abstract works derived from Bach, with half a day to go. #
RIP, Bill Moggridge (b. 1943), IDEO cofounder: http://t.co/Uu6dYDCo #
SFEMF has been great, but after 4 nights in a row, I think I am skipping night 5 for some family time. #
A great SFEMF night. I think I've gone every year since returning in 2003 from New Orleans, except 2010, when my kid was born 2 weeks early. #
Loud Objects (Perich, Flanigan) at SFEMF tonight: the perfect counterpoint to last night's Basinski. Wires in lieu of tape, solder vs decay. #
Tonight @SFEMF: C/Kluster's Moebius, serial inventor Richard Lerman, Loud Objects (Perich/Flanigan), Cheryl Leonard (rocks/contact-mic star) #
Man, first @naotko and soon (on 9/23) @mapmap. Soon half the @djunto will have met up with @robert_henke. Excellebt. #
Clearly when someone getting "a spot in the U.S. Open Men's Final" deserves a @nytimes email alert the world is at peace & all's well. #

Human Automation (MP3)

Much electronic music involves rules-based systems, algorithms that process input and produce output. These processes can be sequenced or nested or run concurrently or mixed with other approaches. Justin Buckley of Berlin, Germany, has acknowledged this aspect of his work by applying rules, in an external manner, to his own efforts as a composer. He’s selected four different “methods for writing music” and he rotates through them, producing one piece of music each week. The four methods are: modular improvisation, notation, field recordings, and live looper. He describes these in detail in the notes to “Calhoun’s Universe 25 [rotating-processes-looper],” which as its integrated tag suggests was the result of the “looper” process.

The noisily blippy digital conflagration that is “Calhoun’s Universe 25″ resulted from the following approach:

A noise source was used to create semi-random sequences, which you hear at the beginning of the track, which was then used to ‘fill’ Ableton’s live looper plugin, which in turn became the very repetitive loop at the heart of this track. More controlled randomness is then layered over it all, plus some other elements to give it some interest.

The track was posted for free download at soundcloud.com/justin-buckley.

“Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds,” Week 1

Wednesday of this week was the first of the 15 weekly three-hour classes I’m teaching on sound at San Francisco’s Academy of Art (academyart.edu) this semester. I thought I’d take some notes here as the class proceeds.

I opened with an exercise, shown above. For the first 15 minutes no one spoke. Instructions were posted for the students to write down all the sounds they heard, and to write down sounds that came to mind as being normal for a Wednesday morning shortly after waking. (They’re now keeping a sound journal, and will for the remainder of the course. During next Wednesday’s class we’ll compare what they wrote down about actual sounds that morning versus those they had recalled from memory during the first class session.)



Here, by way of example and reprinted with permission, is one student’s response to the first half of the exercise:

And here is the same student’s response to the second half of the exercise:

Then, after that silent opening period, I provided some initial background on the concept of a “sound journal,” drawing from, among other sources, Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice and R. Murray Schafer’s conception of the soundscape. I looked over the notes the students had taken, and referenced how some of them had written “ceiling fan” while others had written “whir of ceiling fan”; I pointed out that only the second is an actual sound, and emphasized that over the course of the course we’ll develop strong vocabularies to describe sound, as well as faculties to interpret sound and to develop creative pursuits involving sound. The path I laid out in a document I’m not reproducing here, just in the interest of relative concision, went as follows:

Hearing → Listening → Discerning → Describing → Analyzing → Interpreting → Implementing

Then I talked through the 15-week syllabus, which breaks into three sections: three weeks on “Listening to Media,” seven weeks on “Sounds of Brands,” and five weeks on “Brands of Sounds.” Here’s a PDF of the syllabus; the text is large because this is the document I prepared to project on screen in the classroom. And here’s the core text of the syllabus, trimmed a bit for this post:

“Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds”

ADV 499-30: Special Topics: Sound Branding

Syllabus

Part 1/3: Listening to Media

Week 1: Listening

Overview: This week serves as an introduction to the course and to the cultures, theories, and practices that it explores.

Week 2: A Brief History of Sound

Overview: We’ll trace overlapping paths through the history of sound, beginning with the human conception of sound, and then exploring the developing role of sound in modern media.

Week 3: The Score

Overview: Music and sound in film and television, its purposes, and what we can learn from its history of development.

Part 2/3: Sounds of Brands

Week 4: The Jingle

Overview: History of that corniest and, yet, most essential aspect of brand sound: the song that depicts a product and/or brand.

Week 5: Product Design

Overview: How sounds are part of products, from the self-evident (alarm clocks, start-up sounds on computers) to the less so (electric cars, motorcycle engines, food).

Week 6: The Recording Session

Overview: We’ll visit a recording studio and learn about how professional sound is recorded, who the decision-makers are in a production, the many steps that go into the recording process, and the kinds of decisions that are made during a recording.

Week 7: Retail Space

Overview: How music is an essential part of the construction of retail environments, from shopping to restaurants.

Week 8: Tools

Overview: An introduction to tools that anyone can use to do basic sound production.

Week 9: The Public Voice

Overview: We’ll look at the human voice as a sonic element (in contrast to it being simply an execution of copywriting).

Week 10: The Explicit and the Implicit

Overview: We’ll look back at the various threads we’ve explored thus far, and discern two key types of branded sound: the explicit reference and the implicit reference.

Part 3/3: Brands of Sounds

Week 11: Iconography

Overview: What sound looks like, how it is depicted visually.

Week 12: Social Networks

Overview: How music functions in online social networks.

Week 13: Digital Retail

Overview: How music is sold online.

Week 14: Equipment

Overview: How music equipment is sold.

Week 15: Selling an Album, Selling a Band

Overview: Why is music PR so broken?

Sound is both a practical and a metaphorical pursuit in this course. The students are from the Academy of Art’s advertising department, many from the strategy/planning course of study. Sound is an essential part of contemporary culture, and knowledge of it will help them make their way. But in addition, the role of sound today has distinct parallels to current perceived methodologies in marketing — among other things, the pursuit of and attention to silence and to everyday noises in contemporary sound studies overlaps tellingly with marketing strategies that recognize that advertising is no longer about being the loudest, brashest message, that attempting to drown out the competition isn’t sufficient. That’s an overly simplistic description of what I’m after, but then again this is a blog post about a class that lasted almost three hours and served as the introduction to a 15-week course.

Just before the mid-class break I showed the opening credits to the TV show Fringe and talked about the sonic emphasis and themes in JJ Abrams’ work (Fringe, Lost, Alcatraz), like how the Philip Glass–style minimalism theme song in Fringe correlates with certain cultural avenues (Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, Steve Reich’s Three Tales), and how some Lost elements found their way into Alcatraz (the torque of the Lost opening sound cue, the way the gates closing on Alcatraz sound like the mechanical rattle of the smoke monster on Lost), and how all three shows employ the turntable as a symbol of nostalgia and memory. (I forgot to mention how Dr. Rosen in Alphas, not a JJ Abrams show, keeps old Yes prog rock on vinyl in his office, in what appears to be a nod to Fringe‘s Dr. Bishop, who is also a Yes fan.)

Then we took a 15-minute break.

The rest of the class focused on roughly 20-minute segments, mini-lectures as examples of the sort of classes that we’d be having. This first class was very much about immersion, about the breadth and depth and variety of the culture we’ll be exploring. Taking a visual cue (and one term) from the opening credits of Fringe, I displayed a page of terms that might be unfamiliar to some of the students; the goal wasn’t for them to understand them today — the goal was to project ahead to the end of the full 15 weeks, when they might be able to employ these and other terms and concepts fluently:

I showed the opening credits again of Fringe and then showed two variations on the Fringe opening credits (the red-tinted one that signals the alternate Earth, and the retro-1980s one that was used once during a flashback episode), and talked about how the culture of playing with a brand theme rather than feeling the need to stick to it like a cemented mantra. I used that as an opportunity to talk briefly about other TV/movie touchstones as initial examples of sonic ingenuity: Walter Murch (American Graffiti, The Conversation), Southland (drama without score), M*A*S*H (sitcom without laugh track), The Social Network (underscoring). We’ll be spending the full class during week three to talk about developments in sound in cinema and television.

Then we watched four commercials for the candy Kit Kat: one (dating from before the “Gimme a Break Jingle”) that included the sound of the Kit Kat bar snapping at the very end, then an early collection of multi-genre interpretations of the Kit Kat jingle, and then two recent versions of the Kit Kat jingle where all the sounds are derived from the “real world.” In these latter two commercials, the jingle is performed with snaps of the candy, and keyboard typing, and other noises. We discussed how that is both an example of creative use of field recordings, and of how creative execution links back to the brand (the sounds all were from either eating the candy or from people’s work, tying it all back to the idea of “taking a break”). Then we talked briefly about examples of strong brand associations with music: Honda (its sponsorship of the Civic Tour), Apple and iTunes (and its predecessor in the “TV ad as indie-radio tastemaker,” Volkswagen), and Starbucks (which in its music sales is essentially selling the atmosphere of its stores).

Then we focused briefly on “sonification,” with examples of sonified data about pollution (a recent experiment in the Caldecott Tunnel in the Berkeley Hills, via baycitizen.org), and the wonderful sonification of the NYC subway at the mta.me website:

Then went over the homework assignment for next week: (1) watch Gordon Hempton’s Soundtracker documentary (it’s streaming on Amazon for $2.99), (2) read Brian Eno’s essay about perfume (“Scents and Sensibility,” from the July 1992 issue of the magazine Details), and (3) start a sound diary. Here’s the trailer for the Hempton video:

I don’t know if I’ll be doing these roundups every week, but it seemed helpful to do one at the opening of the class.