Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 52

Be Forewarned

This feels vaguely like a political statement, a call-to-arms, or a scared-straight warning

Disquiet Junto Project 0650: Doppler, Interrupted

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.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0650: Doppler, Interrupted
The Assignment: Record a piece of music in which a passing siren blossoms into something else entirely

There is just one step this week:

Record a piece of music in which a siren — such as that of an emergency vehicle — passes by, across the stereo spectrum, from left to right, but as it passes through the center, it transforms into something else entirely, and that sound continues to evolve as it proceeds to the right and eventually fades into the distance.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0650” (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-0650-doppler-interrupted/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long does it take to pass, and what happens after?

Deadline: Monday, June 17, 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 650th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Doppler, Interrupted — The Assignment: Record a piece of music in which a passing siren blossoms into something else entirely — at https://disquiet.com/0650/

TWiS: Elephant Talk

▰ ELEPHANT TALK: Quite remarkably, it appears that elephants may very well have individualized names. “‘They have this ability to individually call specific members of their family with a unique call,’ said Mickey Pardo, an acoustic biologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and an author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.” That’s from the New York Times article () about the Nature article, which notes the following conclusion: “if non-imitative name analogues were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution.” And yes, as with so much such news these days (such as the marvels being unearthed — “unsea’d?” — about whales), the work involves artificial intelligence: “To decode these rumbles, Dr. Pardo and George Wittemyer, a professor of conservation biology at Colorado State University and chairman of the scientific board for the nonprofit Save the Elephants, analyzed 469 vocalizations made by family groups of adult elephant females and their offspring recorded at Amboseli National Park and the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya.” 

▰ LISTENING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE: Nick Sowers, a friend, recounts in an op-ed for archpaper.com how as an architecture student he visited Japan and had his ears opened to the role of sound in the design of buildings: “In the year following my building science course I visited Nijo Castle in Kyoto, Japan, home to Ninomaru Palace, a building housing a series of large tatami-floored rooms where shoguns would meet with advisors and visitors. Long hallways of bare wood floors surround the rooms and connect the outermost public spaces with private interiors. There is no way to walk on the specially attached boards without triggering them to squeak or ‘chirp.’ Our professor explained that the sound of the floorboards served as an ancient ninja proximity alert system. The legendary floors became known as the uguisu-bari, or nightingale floors.” There is far more about the topic in Nick’s article, so be sure to read it in full before drawing any conclusions. “Each visual component of architecture has a sonic counterpart,” he writes. “Think about a programmatic study, for example. Through the lens of sound (even our metaphors cannot escape the visual bias), we can have meaningful conversations about user groups, demands on space which are time-based, and ideal adjacencies among building users.”

▰ RING RING: Earbuds may have gone into overdrive, according to an NPR report: “According to the World Health Organization, over 1 billion young adults, ages 12 to 35, are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss due to ‘unsafe listening practices.’ By 2050, the WHO predicts that 1 in 10 of us will experience ‘disabling hearing loss.’” A study, done in coordination with Apple, has revealed “that 1 in 3 participants are exposed to excessive noise levels.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) … Also part of that University of Michigan study was analysis of tinnitus; via the Verge: “More than 77 percent of people who participated in a big Apple-sponsored study have experienced tinnitus at some point in their lives, according to preliminary data. Around 15 percent say they’re affected daily by tinnitus, perceiving ringing or other sounds that other people can’t hear.” More work is ahead: “The study could ‘help develop new products to optimize your hearing experience and reduce the likelihood of hearing loss.’”

▰ BUZZ OFF: One type of pollination is called “buzz pollination” (which means “bees use vibrations to remove and collect pollen from flowers incidentally fertilising them”). A fellowship is available (UK students only) for the study of buzz pollination, seeking to answer questions such as “What is the relationship between vibration properties (amplitude, frequency, and duration) and pollen release and fruit quality across different varieties of soft fruits?” and “What are the properties of the vibrations used by buzz-pollinating bees while visiting experimental plots of different varieties of soft fruits?”

▰ SOUND BITES: Voices Carry: A deep dive into the science of how people might distinguish deepfake voices from real ones. ▰ Head Banned: Ella Glover, in the Guardian, writes about ditching her headphones and learning to really listen. ▰ Star Struck: NASA, back in February, released Listen to the Universe, a half-hour documentary about its experiments with sonification. ▰ Hops to It: The Belgian beer Leffe’s sonic brand draws from its abbey history. ▰ At Play in the Field: Mat Eric Hart, in Sonic Tapestries, writes about exploring the landscape beloved by Cézanne — but through sound rather than painting. ▰ Keeping Score: Are video game companies “leaving money on the table” when it comes to game music? ▰ Multi-Core: Apple announced a lot this week, including Enhanced Dialogue (improving voice isolation) and new approaches to captions, haptic sound in Apple Music, and new “gestures” for AirPods. ▰ Blade Runner: The New York State Senate has approved a “noise tax” on helicopters.

The cover image for this issue is by Bernard Dupont and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Sound Ledger: Noise in Three Cities

38.69: Mean number of decibels in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which has been judged the quietest large city in the United States 

4: Number of decibels the city of Paris hopes to cut as it tackles noise pollution

21,000: Estimated number of noise complaints about aircraft made by one Perth resident over the course of a year

Sources: Oklahoma: insidermonkey.com; Paris: msn.com; Perth: thewest.com.au.

On the Line: Sci Fi, Poetry

▰ SONIC SIGNATURES:

“The roll-out had clearly been long prepared. There were Black Horizon explainers for every level of interest and education: a tranche of science papers and political briefings for the most engaged; documentaries fronted by avatars evoking a century's worth of trusted and beloved science and natural history communicators, their voices carrying digital echoes of Sagan's plosives and Attenborough's aspirates; comic books and animations for children of various age-groups; pictorial leaflets, even, for the dwindling but still globally significant strand-line of illiterates.”

“Sagan’s plosives and Attenborough’s aspirates” — I love it. That is Ken MacLeod in Beyond the Hallowed Sky, the first book in his Lightspeed trilogy. And l love this reminder that included among the sounds of nature are the trademark sounds of the people who tell us about nature..

. . .

▰ PHONE ODE:

"So much past arrives on my screencoupled with soft pings in the pocketstrange temple bellAnd in these images pass chords of facesof which I know next to nothingwhile all fall I ride the 63 line from Moynihan to Rhine cliffalongside passengers slumped with buds in their ears"

That is about a quarter of the poem “I Can’t Stop” by Jenny Xie, published in the June 20, 2024, issue of The New York Review of Books.

. . .

▰ WHALED AT:

“The girl wriggles out of his grasp, stands up straight on tiptoe, and makes a sort of moo-meow sound while doing a slow pirouette. It's her whale impression. I laugh, and she looks at the screen with bright eyes, enjoying the attention. She makes the whale-song again, this time spinning away, her feet slipping on the kitchen floor. The moo-meow fades into the next room.”

That is Robin Sloan writing in his 2012 novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which I reread this past week in advance of his brand new novel, Moonbound, which I picked up at Green Apple Books earlier this evening (after dinner around the corner at Spices). In this scene, the story’s protagonist-narrator is on a video call with someone. The girl is that someone’s daughter. When she learns that the narrator lives in San Francisco, she announces, “I like whales!” Her dad encourages her by asking, “What sound does a whale make, sweetie?”

Murals > Wallpaper

Kenneth James Gibson (synthesizers, arrangements) and Paul Carman (saxophone) have collaborated on Murals for Immersion, a new full-length album. 

The word “murals” both signals the musicians’ intent and ever so slightly risks doing the recordings an injustice. Certainly these slow-paced, jazz-inflected pieces are deeply ambient in nature: They work well in the background, immediately lending a space (or headphones) a lulling sense of slowed time, of patient retreat. The horn parts and the hushed synthesizers in combination bring to mind the Fourth World music of the late Jon Hassell, albeit minus any glitchy effects. It’s all moody haze, all the time, and all the better for it.

Then again, a “mural” isn’t a background in the same way wallpaper is. Wallpaper music and mural music would be very different things. This is mural music in the way it guides the listener over time, its abstractions changing slowly, elements coming and going. It is mural music in the sense of not being overly patterned or repetitive, in not feeling remotely mass-produced, in bringing a deliberate sense of its own presence.

“Tonio Between Two Poles” uses an echoing motif. The track is stately (imagine an alpenhorn muffled by distance), and like much of the record, it suggests a kinship to drone music while being far more complex than mere tones for their own sake. “Above Suicide Peak,” another highlight, appears to borrow its name from a location near Idyllwild Pine Cove, where Gibson lives. It takes extended pauses between echoing saxophone parts, letting the ear get accustomed to quietude before surfacing again. The whole record is worth exploring in depth. Don’t just relegate it to the background.

https://kennethjamesgibson.bandcamp.com/album/murals-for-immersion

One of My Favorite Bookshelves

Scratch Pad: Voice Menu, Gray Goo

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ The voice-menu phone tones for the hearing impaired are my new jam

▰ People gesticulate so much in internet video ads (which I always have on mute), I regularly think they’re targeted ads for Theremins

▰ It’s 2024, meaning you can be doing chores while listening to an audiobook and then a voice from your phone interrupts to say things like “A phone number with a 503 area code has liked a message from a 213 phone number,” no other information. Then the audiobook begins again. And it’s just normal.

▰ So far every day this week has felt like Friday. That is the start of summer.

▰ The most surreal experience of the morning was trying to type the word “accelerationist,” a word my computer’s autocorrect kept pushing back at, as if it were trying to, I dunno, tell me something

▰ Responding to a friend’s query, I chose a song I liked, the title of which shared initials with my name: Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” I asked ChatGPT to identify a three-word title, to fold in my middle name (Aaron). It just made up a song by the Kinks that doesn’t exist, “Meet Again Wednesday,” and tried to pass it off as real.

▰ Yes, given the past decade’s increased proliferation of music PR via email I’m not exactly excited at the prospect of unedited AI-generated one-sheets arriving at an ever-escalating pace

▰ I love when I recall a topic for which there are, essentially, just a handful of options, and once upon a time I felt quite strongly in favor of one of them, and then years later all I recall is the topic, not which specific option I believed in at the time

▰ That thing where some piece of software you use a lot suddenly has a consistent error after an upgrade and then the same day as the upgrade an x.x.1 upgrade arrives, and the issue isn’t listed in the upgrade notes, and yet nonetheless magically the issue is gone once you do the upgrade

▰ Nothing says someone on the video conference call is using their YubiKey quite like when a string of characters along the lines of “sjdjsijfosdkfoisdjkd” pops up in the chat

▰ I finished reading one novel (Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a re-read in advance of Moonbound) and one graphic novel (Challengers of the Unknown, the sequence by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale) this week.

This Week in Sound: Loud Food & Cage for Kids

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the June 7, 2024, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ 1. LOUD FOOD
The impact and mitigation of restaurant noise

The Washington Post (gift link) has an excellent, lengthy interactive/multimedia article on the role of sound in restaurants, with an emphasis on the impact and mitigation of noise. Some key takeaways:

“Noise was the most cited complaint in Zagat’s last Dining Trends Survey in 2018.”“the average noise level in restaurants may not be shooting up”“Some acousticians believe we simply became used to quieter surroundingsduring the pandemic, which could make us more aware of loud environments”“Experts are advocating for standards that would not only alleviate customer complaints, but also protect the health of patrons and staff members.”“a vibe that’s either kind of industrial or cool” may explain how modern restaurant design has contributed to the noise issue“Alcohol blunts our hearing,” which may explain “why intoxicated individuals talk louder”“People with autism spectrum disorder have both a higher sensitivity to noise and difficulty in filtering background noise”Hearing difficulty differs from hearing loss: “Age also plays a role in cognitive processing, with older people finding it more difficult to switch attention from one speaker to another”“sound treatment is about 2 to 3 percent of a new venue’s total building costs”

The article also covers SoundPrint, an app (iOS, Android) I’ve mentioned previously: “The app’s developer, Greg Scott, has been looking at data collected from about 14,000 active monthly users from more than 6,000 restaurants during the past four years, and he’s optimistic venues are not getting louder. According to Scott’s data, the average decibel readings in restaurants have been below 77 … for the past two years.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ 2. TALK (SORT OF) LIKE THE ANIMLAS
A classroom exercise on human/chimpanzee distinctions

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America has a piece (its title is, in part, “What’s special about human speech?”) introducing differences between humans and chimpanzees, in the process exploring why it may be that humans have speech and chimpanzees do not: “For example, modern humans are unique among primates in having lost the vocal membranes of the larynx during human evolution.” The numerous graphics in the article show differentiations between how people speak alongside data on a “home-raised” and “speech-trained” chimpanzee, named Viki. This example shows the relative clarity of a human speaking the word “cup”:

The article is by William P. Shofner, Associate Professor of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. Shofner details an exercise from a course he has taught since 2021 that “provides students with important insights into the anatomical differences between humans and chimpanzees related to vocal production.” It covers aspects of chimpanzee vocalization focused on the mouth and larynx, and also notes genetic matters and neural circuitry. While scientific, certainly, it’s not difficult to follow.

▰ 3. CAGE FOR KIDS
A splendid new children’s book

Nothing: John Cage and 4’33” is the title of a new book for kids about the composer John Cage and his most famous work. It was written by Nicholas Day and illustrated by Chris Raschka and came out in April from Neal Porter Books. Said Day in an interview with Publishers Weekly: “I think Cage is kind of the most open — especially late Cage — and, to use the word joyful, open-spirited of a composer. And that’s part of why 4’33” works so well as a question for children to start with, right? Because it’s this thing that can feel alienating to people who have had more contact with the world, but if your experience with the world is still fresh, the questions that 4’33” asks seem intuitive and perfectly natural.”

Reactions to the book have been overall positive. “Twice, the word nothing is scrawled in cursive on a double-page spread featuring just that word, giving readers space to pause and absorb the concept,” notes Julie Hakim Azzam in a review (Azzam is assistant director of the MFA program in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University). And in the School Library Journal, Kirsten Caldwell wrote: “Children will be encouraged to discover what music means to different people and to explore the silence. The watercolor illustrations bring this story to life in their whimsicality, but they do not trivialize the event or aftermath.” 

And of course, that isn’t John Cage on the book’s cover. That would be David Tudor, who premiered 4’33” on August 29, 1952. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ 4. AN AI ROUNDUP
It might as well stand for “audio intelligence”

Once upon a time, concern about nanotechnology focused on the concept of gray goo, a “a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario” in which the Earth would be covered by rapidly reproducing machines. With artificial intelligence, a parallel concern might be the sheer onslaught of news. These are just a few of the many recent sound/voice/audio-related items: 

Nature reports on the proposed use of large AI datasets to diagnose depression. One can only imagine the privacy impact, were this used during, say, job interviews or on dating services.Stable Audio Open is an open source text-to-audio model for generating up to 47 seconds of samples and sound effects.The US Justice Department declined to make public recordings of the president’s recent testimony, stating that “releasing the audio could ignite an artificial-intelligence-powered deepfake frenzy.”Actors Paul Skye Lehrman and Linnea Sage are suing an AI company (New York Times gift link) they say reportedly cloned their voices without their permission. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)A political consultant in the US who used deepfakes in robocalls faces a $6 million fine and political chargesAI is now able to be used to separate distinct Indian classical instruments, for use in film and music productionFliki is a “Text to Video editor featuring lifelike voiceovers” Underlord is “a toolbox full of AI gadgets that make obvious edits and fix lousy audio.”ElevenLabs (which was in the news earlier this year as the tool used for making political deepfakes) has a service that lets you “Generate any sound imaginable from a text prompt”

Disquiet Junto Project 0649: Concerto for [ ]

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.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0649: Concerto for [ ]
The Assignment: Write a piece of music informed by the concerto form

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the concerto form. For example, consider the idea of having a soloist amid a larger instrumental setting, and of having a three-part structure that goes fast, then slow, then fast again.

Step 2: Needless to say, you needn’t necessarily record a piece of classical music, but employ what you know about concerto form in a new, original piece of music.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0649” (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-0649-concerto-for/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. It’s need not be symphonic.

Deadline: Monday, June 10, 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 649th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Concerto for [ ] — The Assignment: Write a piece of music informed by the concerto form — at https://disquiet.com/0649/