Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 66
April 3, 2024
April 2, 2024
April 1, 2024
Listening but Not Listening
I have a white noise app on my Mac laptop that helps me focus. I noticed it doesn’t have “on” and “off” modes. It has “play” and “pause” modes. Apparently it’s never “off.” You will always listen again. If you’re not listening, you are simply preparing to listen.
As of this writing, these are the available sounds:
Airplane
Beach
City
Crickets
Fan
Fan 2
Fan 3
Fire
Ocean
Pier
Rain – Light
Rain – Heavy
Rainforest
River
Shower
Thunderstorm
Wind
Wind Chimes
Blue Noise
Brown Noise
Pink Noise
Violet Noise
White Noise
I use the “airplane” noise mode, myself. I’ve become so accustomed to its tonality that I’ve been known to use it while on airplanes, which is ironic given that I usually use noise cancelling headphones on planes to block out the actual airplane noise. This is to say, I both eliminate the sound of the plane and then pipe in the artificial sound of the plane. The action is, from one perspective, the sonic equivalent of tearing out your backyard and laying down astroturf. Though of course, it’s nothing like that.
As for the other options, I appreciate the cicadas, but it mostly makes me think of camping, which is not on my personal list of ideal situations. I’ll take a non-reclining coach seat on an airplane over camping.
Of the “color” noises, I occasionally opt for brown, which is essentially airplane noise reduced to a mathematical formula. Brown noise is the airplane noise of a low-polygon simulation of flight.
One thing the app lacks is café chatter — better yet, café chatter in a language I don’t understand (which would be any language other than English, though I’m coming up on a year-long streak in Duolingo German, so who knows). Perhaps chatter will come with a future upgrade.
March 31, 2024
Looking Up
For better or worse, my ideal aesthetic
March 30, 2024
Scratch Pad: Wall Text, Text Notes, Email Deluge
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’m trying to look at art at museums before I read the wall text. Trying. Certainly spending more time on art than text. Speaking of which, the Day Jobs group show at Cantor/Stanford is excellent, all about how work and art interacted for various people: Warhol, LeWitt, Kruger, Kilgallen, Pindell, etc.
▰ Safari has been slow as molasses so I’m giving the Brave browser another go
▰ I’m back in the “single text file” phase of the to-do list carousel, which cycles through Apple Notes -> spreadsheet -> various dedicated apps -> single text file -> Apple Notes -> etc.
▰ Email these days is like tribbles performing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. My inbox was well over 1,300. A stupid use of time, but I winnowed to 80 these past few days. Those 80 will take time. (And this doesn’t count promotional emails filtered automatically to folders and, thus, bypassing my inbox.)
▰ “Old timer, tell me again about the olden times when you got so much email spam over night that by the time you were done deleting your first batch in the morning more had arrived? And how sometimes it took a third round before your workday could really begin?”
▰ Stoked for any signs of an RSS resurgence: 404media.co.
▰ I appreciate a synthesizer module that can set the BPM as low as .5 — that is, one beat every two minutes. Kudos, also, to this device for granting new life and purpose to old MIDI controllers (notably the Novation Launchpad and the APC Mini). It’s the Crosspatch Triggerpad.
▰ The second we learned the German word for balloons in Duolingo, I knew a question along these lines would eventually be asked.
▰ I’d say my studies of 7th chords have taken a step back but that’d be a half diminished chord which is the most confusing to me of them all and that’s me trying (and probably failing) to make a music theory joke and I’ll be here all week
▰ I find myself sitting in an electric car, currently turned off, listening to exactly the sort* of music that might make a passerby think the car is running
*slowmo granular synthesis
▰ Heaven is a place
▰ Interesting to see the New York Times add the “Listen” option to the main nav within its mobile app. Not sure what this means for the standalone NYT Audio app. Seems like these don’t use AI/machine voices, which may explain why there’s a lag between breaking news and what’s available to listen to.
After I posted this online, an interlocutor on Mastodon provided another publication’s example:
“The swiss online magazine Republik (republik.ch) has a interesting approach. All texts are immediately available for listening via text to speech, but they also follow up with a version recorded with professional voice artists. You can set a notification for when that version is available. Like this (I assume) they manage to establish listening to their articles as a “standard service” and at the same time maintain and value the premium experience of a professional voice.”
And, continuing on this theme, New Scientist has its own approach to audio, which seems mobile-only (or perhaps mobile-first). I’m still sorting it out. For the time being, publications are exploring audio, but there is no industry standard.
▰ I’m testing out a friend’s work-in-progress VCV Rack modules (they are very cool), and there’s a humorously complicated workaround to get unofficial modules into one’s laptop software without Rack overwriting them. I wonder if there’s a more efficient process for testing that we’ve got going.
▰ The March 29 New York Times Strands puzzle (“Pardon my French!”) was especially fun
▰ It’s a likely sign a new service isn’t going all so well when you get a “You’re off the waitlist” alert regarding a list you never signed up for in the first place
▰ I finished two graphic novels and a sorta-comic this week. I very much enjoyed Travis Dandro’s Hummingbird Heart, a memoir about the adolescent experience of cascading loss after death ruptures a family, in turn rupturing friendships, all right on the cusp of adulthood, the arrival of which is its own source of loss, as well. I read the first volume of Radiant Black, a fairly standard superhero origin story. Not sure I’ll continue with the series but we’ll see. And my friend Gene Kannenberg, Jr., has produced a remarkable thing, a pop-up book, Here Comes Charlie Brown!, that takes the four panels of the very first Peanuts book and turns them into three dimensions. The volume, published by Abrams, with a cover by Chip Kidd and packaging (including a wonderful spine) by Shawn Dahl, both cherishes the source material and investigates its literal and emotional depth. Gene is credited with “paper engineering,” the best job title no one told us about in grade school. And while the physicality of the book is tremendous, I especially appreciate Gene pointing out the unique qualities of the colors he elected to employ: “I have taken the liberty of adding color,” he writes, “but with digital equivalents of coloring techniques used in comic books and Sunday comics supplements in the mid-twentieth century.” It’s a fantastic object, this book.
March 29, 2024
5 End-of-Week Links
▰ Open Book: Nothing: John Cage and 4’33” is the title of a forthcoming children’s book about John Cage, written by Nicholas Day and illustrated by Chris Raschka. It comes out on April 2, 2024, from Neal Porter Books. Says 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.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ Palm Pilots: “When a distraction force (such as pulling on a finger) is applied, the ambient pressure in the surrounding tissues, which is equal to the air pressure surrounding the body, keeps the joint surfaces together until the force is big enough to overcome this. A vacuum is then suddenly formed in the joint space when the bones pull apart as far as the ligaments and capsule allow.” The New Scientist explains why popped knuckles can be so loud.
▰ Dark Side of the Moon: Gizmodo.com: “International space agencies and private companies alike are racing to the lunar surface, hoping to establish a permanent presence on Earth’s natural satellite that would propel them to farther celestial pitstops. All that increased activity on the Moon may affect the unique radio silence on the lunar far side, an ideal location for radio telescopes to pick up faint signals from the cosmic past.”
▰ AI EQ: Founded in 2021, the Hume AI company (hume.ai) has raised $50M for its conversation AI, which involves “emotional intelligence,” such as recognizing “when users are finished speaking” and generating “vocal responses optimized for user satisfaction.”
▰ Sonic Recall: Tristan Louth-Robins has a lovely six-panel comic on his blog about sonic recall and the evolution of his listening.
March 28, 2024
Disquiet Junto Project 0639: Path Ways (4 of 3)
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 0639: Path Ways (4 of 3)
The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways.
These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully. Originally this trios sequence of projects would have ended with the completion of the trios after three consecutive weeks. However, those went particularly well, so let’s see if we can push it a little further.
Please note: You needn’t have participated in any of the prior Junto projects to participate in this one.
Step 1: In the previous project, we completed musical trios. Project 0638 was the third of three consecutive projects. In the first one, 0636, musicians recorded solos. In the second, 0637, musicians took those 0636 tracks, nudged them to the left side of the stereo spectrum, and then added their own music to the right, forming duets with a hole in the middle. In project 0638, other musicians introduced a third track down the center of the 0637 recordings, completing the trios. You can revisit the music via the blog posts disquiet.com/0636, disquiet.com/0637, and disquiet.com/0638, and you can follow the forking paths through the related Google Drive spreadsheet.
Step 2: The goal of this project is to rework the material that accumulated over the course of the previous three projects. There are two main ways to go about this. One is to simply choose one or more tracks and remix, combine, mash-up, or otherwise transform them. The other is to move on to Step 3.
Step 3: Choose one 0636 track, a solo, that yielded more than one 0638 trio. (These are highlighted in light blue, or maybe it’s teal, in the leftmost column of the spreadsheet.) Trace the various routes that 0636 track took. Perhaps it also led to some 0637 tracks that never went any further. Perhaps there are various 0638 versions based on varied 0637 versions. In any case, record a piece of music that lets the listener experience the branching paths that the original 0636 track took over the course of the three phases of the trios project sequence. Clearly you will be using a linear form to represent variations, so how to achieve that will require some compositional ingenuity. But you’re up to the task.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include either “disquiet0639remix” (if you follow the loose rules of Step 2) or “disquiet0639paths” (if you follow the more specific rules of Step 3) 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-0639-path-ways-4-of-3/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is entirely up to you.
Deadline: Monday, April 1, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.
About: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/
License: It’s required for this sequence of projects 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 639th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Path Ways (4 of 3) — The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways — at https://disquiet.com/0639/
Disquiet Junto Project 0639: Center (4 of 3)
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 0639: Center (4 of 3)
The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways.
These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully. Originally this trios sequence of projects would have ended with the completion of the trios after three consecutive weeks. However, those went particularly well, so let’s see if we can push it a little further.
Please note: You needn’t have participated in any of the prior Junto projects to participate in this one.
Step 1: In the previous project, we completed musical trios. Project 0638 was the third of three consecutive projects. In the first one, 0636, musicians recorded solos. In the second, 0637, musicians took those 0636 tracks, nudged them to the left side of the stereo spectrum, and then added their own music to the right, forming duets with a hole in the middle. In project 0638, other musicians introduced a third track down the center of the 0637 recordings, completing the trios. You can revisit the music via the blog posts disquiet.com/0636, disquiet.com/0637, and disquiet.com/0638, and you can follow the forking paths through the related Google Drive spreadsheet.
Step 2: The goal of this project is to rework the material that accumulated over the course of the previous three projects. There are two main ways to go about this. One is to simply choose one or more tracks and remix, combine, mash-up, or otherwise transform them. The other is to move on to Step 3.
Step 3: Choose one 0636 track, a solo, that yielded more than one 0638 trio. (These are highlighted in light blue, or maybe it’s teal, in the leftmost column of the spreadsheet.) Trace the various routes that 0636 track took. Perhaps it also led to some 0637 tracks that never went any further. Perhaps there are various 0638 versions based on varied 0637 versions. In any case, record a piece of music that lets the listener experience the branching paths that the original 0636 track took over the course of the three phases of the trios project sequence. Clearly you will be using a linear form to represent variations, so how to achieve that will require some compositional ingenuity. But you’re up to the task.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include either “disquiet0639remix” (if you follow the loose rules of Step 2) or “disquiet0639paths” (if you follow the more specific rules of Step 3) 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-0639-path-ways-4-of-3/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is entirely up to you.
Deadline: Monday, April 1, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.
About: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/
License: It’s required for this sequence of projects 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 639th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Path Ways (4 of 3) — The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways — at https://disquiet.com/0639/
March 27, 2024
In Advance of Disquiet Junto Project 0639
This went out to juntoletter.disquiet.com subscribers just before noon Pacific on March 27:
One nice thing about having moved to Buttondown for these Disquiet Junto project emails (from TinyLetter, which was shut down just over a month ago by its parent company, Mailchimp) is that I can send more emails than I used to be able to.
Previously, sending one email each week kept the list just under the maximum that the account was capable of. I promise to not start sending out emails willy-nilly. It’s just nice to have the freedom to communicate a bit off-cycle, solely to the extent that it serves the projects and the Junto community.
All of which is a lead up to a simple request: please make sure, if you did tracks for project 0638, that they are downloadable (whether you posted to SoundCloud or to YouTube). This was stated in the 0638 instructions. I mention this here because project 0639 will build on project 0638. This recent sequence was initially planned to be a three-part project, but with the option to extend it further if it went well. Suffice to say, the past three projects went very well, indeed.
The official project instructions for 0639 will go out in about 11.5 hours, shortly after midnight California time tomorrow.
March 26, 2024
Day … Groundhog Day … Groundhog
I’m excited to have a short piece on Groundhog Day, one of my favorite movies (and, perhaps just as key, one of my favorite stories), in this series alongside some friends and writers I admire. It’ll be rolling out on hilobrow.com over the next few months.
Check out the announcement post.
