Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 481
September 21, 2012
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.
September 20, 2012
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:
Photo of Émile Zola via wikipedia.org.
September 18, 2012
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.
September 17, 2012
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.
September 16, 2012
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.
September 15, 2012
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
"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. #
September 14, 2012
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.
September 13, 2012
“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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0037: Store Recordings
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 0037: Store Recordings
This project is the first in the Disquiet Junto series to focus on a pure, unadulterated field recording — or, in this case, a “store recording,” as you’ll see. Many of the previous Disquiet Junto projects have used field recordings as their source material, either audio created by the participants, or a shared sample created by a third-party.
For this project, you will record sound from a large retail space, preferably a department store. You will select a section of that recording that you find to be inherently exemplary, and that segment will be your project entry for the week. There will be no editing, no processing, no producing, per se — you may, if you choose, do a slight volume increase at the opening and decrease at the closing.
Background: The goal for this project is twofold. In the immediate sense, it is to explore field recordings as an end unto themselves, as an opportunity to document the world in sound.
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 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 exhbit.
There are also plans afoot for a Disquiet Junto concert at Apex Art in late November 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 17, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 3 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 “disquiet0037-asrealasitgets1” 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/2012/09/13/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
