Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 59

“Some Time Back”

I was talking, some time back, with a friend of mine about my fascination with buffers in the making of music, with the way digital memory access has become a normal function of sound production. One doesn’t simply play the sound of the moment, with the pluck of a string or the touch of a key on keyboard; one can reach back into the recent past and play something that has already occurred. Furthermore, if we gain a sense of ease in that prior moment, we can linger there, essentially inhabit that pre-moment moment for the length of the performance, and occasionally reach into the future to play that which has, in effect, not yet happened.

My friend, Mahlen Morris, has been developing virtual synthesizer modules for the freely available VCV Rack program. He does so under the splendid name Stochastic Telegraph. He got to thinking about what we were discussing, and began crafting not just one module but a suite of (currently) four modules that can be combined as one sees fit in order to create the memory-access tool of that best suits one’s imagination.

This video is a test run I made of Mahlen’s new tools. The source audio is a sample from a sample set by Lullatone, just a glistening tonal loop that plays on repeat. (It’s the first track off their Bowed Glockenspiel sample set, released back in September 2021.) That loop, 49 seconds long, is housed in that narrow little module to the left of the module labeled Memory. Memory and the five modules to its right are the ones that Mahlen is developing.

In a brief and far from comprehensive summary:

“Memory” contains the audio“Depict” shows the waveform that represents not just the recording but the play heads (left hand horizontal lines) and record heads (right hand horizontal lines)“Ruminate” accesses and plays the audio (there are three modules doing that work here)“Embelish” is the record head.

Even though I have checked in with Mahlen during his development work, I am still myself in the early stages of using these, so I am probably describing some of this incorrectly. (And they are capable of far more than I do or describe here.)

In this video, two of the play heads, the red and blue ones, are traveling at twice the speed of the third play head, which is yellow. This creates an octave gap. For the first 30 seconds, that’s all that is happening. The Embellish module (the purple line on the right side) is recording to the buffer continuously from the Lullatone sample, and those three heads (red, blue, yellow) are accessing it in different ways. The lowest pitched of the play heads, the yellow one, is in “bounce” mode, meaning it plays backwards when it reaches the top. The others start again at the start — though to be clear, the buffer here isn’t constant; it’s being written over from the sample, which itself is looping.

At 30 seconds, I click the start button on the trigger sequencer, called “Algorhythm,” and it plays a simple eight-bar beat in which the third and sixth beats are silent. Each triggered moment causes the red bar to briefly play. Previously it was playing continuously; henceforth it will just play for a split second when triggered. Because it’s always accessing the same source sample, just in different places, it ends up producing a little melody where all the pieces are in tune with each other.

At 1:08, having set a melody of sorts into motion, thanks to the rhythmic consistency, I hit the random button on the Algorhythm module, which makes the remainder of the piece more abstract than what came earlier.

That’s it, three stages of the source audio: first the playback heads on their own, then the introduction of those precise little notes, and then the further randomization of the rhythmic appearance of those notes.

The other modules employed are rudimentary. “Clock” sets the pace. “RND” is a random trigger that sets where the little red play back head lands. “Push” sets the sample running (the player loops continuously — or, in the module’s compressed terminology, “cycle”s it continuously). The “Mixer” combines the three stereo channels. The “Audio” sends the sound out my laptop’s speaker. And the “Record” let me record this video.

Mahlen’s modules aren’t available yet, but they will be soon.

Haring 1984 Boombox

A Keith Haring boombox illustration from 1984, displayed as part of the Urban Art Evolution exhibit at the Nassau County Museum of Art through July 7, 2024

Scratch Pad: NY(C), Diploma, Block

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.

▰ I was in New York for the past week — a few days in the city, then out on Long Island for family time — and thus I posted very little to social media. Back in San Francisco now. I’ll catch up with some items in the coming week.

▰ If keeping a journal is a struggle for you, I can’t express how much it helps to make a list of topics at the end of the day, just before bed — a list of words or phrases (events that occurred or ideas on your mind) that the next morning you can flesh out into brief (or not so brief) commentary. I will either jot these down or record myself stating them as they occur to me.

▰ This is the paragraph from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography/memoirs that focused my thoughts on what eventually became the Disquiet Junto music community:

▰ Always looks like a record album to me:

▰ I’ve been reunited with my high school diploma, which means I’ve been reminded of the ever so slight distinction between how the r and c in my first name are depicted. And no, despite this typeface’s appearance, I was not raised in Germany during the early 1800s:

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep by Lawrence Block, several of whose Matthew Scudder novels I read recently. This one, while also the sort of crime story that fits in a back pocket, was more whimsical. The conceit that the main character can’t sleep didn’t seem to matter much to the story, except as a way to explain on occasion why he happened to be able to be awake, but made for occasional interesting asides. I may read the sequel.

Cage & Comics

Went on a trip, managed to purchase only two books

Disquiet Junto Project 0641: Re-re-re-re-revise

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 appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0641: Re-re-re-re-revise
The Assignment: Take an old track and make it better.

Step 1: Listen through some of your recent recordings.

Step 2: Choose one you think would benefit from being updated.

Step 3: Revise the track you selected in Step 2.

Step 4: Document the changes you made in Step 3, how you came to conceive the changes you wanted to implement, and how you achieved them.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0641” (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-0641-re-re-re-re-revise/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, April 15, 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 641st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Re-re-re-re-revise — The Assignment: Take an old track and make it better — at https://disquiet.com/0641/

Into the Distance

On the Grid

Grid of oscillators in the structure of a building’s air conditioners

Ambient : Sounds

Did a little record browsing. This section is from Paradise of Replica on Grand Street in Manhattan.

Infrastructural Snore

The phone’s microphone doesn’t do justice to the experience of how being in this hotel room means being immersed in the building’s HVAC drone, the way the tonal utterances of the multi-story edifice cycle over and over, and how with each new cycle there is a brittle whir like an infrastructural snore. But it’ll do.

Scratch Pad: Belew, Dissonance, Roden

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.

▰ Kinda wish sleeping laptops snored

▰ Adrian Belew was great as David Byrne for the Remain in Light tribute. I imagine he’ll be at least as good as Adrian Belew.

▰ My guitar teacher, stating what should be patently obvious to me: “So, we can agree this chord is more dissonant.”

Me: “Er, not if you listen to the music I do, apparently.”

▰ Step 1: I use Chrome.

Step 2: For privacy I’ll use Safari. A few things run better in Chrome.

Step 3: Safari’s slow. I try Brave, but it’s not great with sound. I’ll use Safari and Chrome, too.

Step 4: I try Firefox, but I’m too busy to tweak all its privacy stuff. Now I have four browsers going.

▰ I spent the morning scanning documents related to comics I edited in the 1990s, which led to me using an ancient device called a staple remover. For lunch I wanted some lentil soup, and the pull-top broke, so I had to use a can opener. I swear the day won’t end before I am required to fax something.

▰ Just listening to an old Steve Roden album in the car while it rains