Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 67

Email List Migration (Disquiet Junto)

This note — complete with a few minor repetitions I might have dealt with had I had more time — was included in today’s issue of the weekly Disquiet Junto project announcement email list:

As you should by now know, the email newsletter for Disquiet Junto project announcements has migrated from one service provider to another — from TinyLetter.com, which is closing down on February 29, 2024, to Buttondown, about which you can learn more at buttondown.email. 

One nice thing about Buttondown is that I can use my own URL, so the home for the newsletter is now juntoletter.disquiet.com, which means that down the road, should I choose to change service providers again, the newsletter itself can retain its URL. 

Another nice thing about Buttondown is that I can schedule posts to send automatically, meaning that much as this week’s project popped up at disquiet.com/0632 while I was sleeping, thanks to my blog’s powers of automation (it’s on WordPress), so too can I set this email to go out while I’m asleep. I sleep fairly soundly, and now I’ll sleep even more soundly, knowing that I have one fewer chores come morning. I’ve set this one to go out at 6:32am Pacific. We’ll know tomorrow how that has worked out.

A third nice thing about Buttondown is that I have less of a limit on the number of emails I can send out. So, while I promise not to abuse such newfound freedom, I look forward to occasionally sending notes of encouragement or with additional information off the weekly Thursday cycle. This is great.

Nice things, however, are generally balanced by downsides. Which is to say, Buttondown is not free. It’s not terribly expensive, when thought of at an annual rate, but it does cost, and will cost more as the subscriber list continues to grow. I may at some point add a paid option to this list, simply as a way for folks to chip in on the infrastructure costs that support the Junto — and perhaps pay for additional such infrastructure, such as a dedicated web presence, down the road. (In the meanwhile, if supporting the Junto in such a manner appeals to you, you could in the meanwhile subscribe to my This Week in Sound email letter. I’m remembering now that I dislike talking about money, so why don’t I stop there?) 

And that covers it. I don’t think I mentioned that there was an academic article about the Disquiet Junto in the Cambridge University Press journal Organised Sound, and you can read it online. If you have any thoughts, please let me know.

Oh, and we’ve had a new slew of subscribers, so if you have any questions or thoughts, just shoot me an email.

And that really covers it. I hope this email goes out smoothly, and your year is going smoothly, as well. And thanks, as always, for your generosity with your time, creativity, and curiosity. The project instructions appear below.

Best from a chilly — by local standards — San Francisco,

Marc

Disquiet Junto Project 0632: Shear Wind

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just under five days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 2, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 8, 2024.

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 out to the group’s email list (at juntoletter.disquiet.com). Note that this service will change shortly, likely to Buttondown, due to Tinyletter shutting down.

Disquiet Junto Project 0632: Shear Wind
The Assignment: Make the most of the disturbance within a field recording.

Step 1: Consider how when making a field recording, there can be disturbances in it, such as a passing car or plane, or a noise you didn’t notice until you listened back, or a malfunction in the recording equipment. A common such problem is wind shear.

Step 2: Make a recording that has wind shear in it, perhaps by standing in the wind, or recording from a moving vehicle, or through some other technique. Or locate a pre-existing field recording with wind shear, perhaps on freesound.org.

Step 3: Make a piece of music employing the recording you made in Step 2, and make the wind shear a focus of the piece. That is, pay attention to, rather than avoid, this sound that you would likely in other circumstances identify as a shortcoming.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0632” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0632” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0632-shear-wind/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 12, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 8, 2024.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to 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. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 632nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Shear Wind — The Assignment: Make the most of the disturbance within a field recording — at: https://disquiet.com/0632/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0632-shear-wind/

This Week in Sound: “Synchronizing the Bodies and Emotions”

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the February 6, 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.

▰ ONE WORLD IS ENOUGH: “Music can be felt directly in the body. When we hear our favorite catchy song, we are overcome with the urge to move to the music. Music can activate our autonomic nervous system and even cause shivers down the spine. A new study from the Turku PET Center in Finland shows how emotional music evokes similar bodily sensations across cultures,” per a study shared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “People move to music in all cultures and synchronized postures, movements and vocalizations are a universal sign for affiliation. Music may have emerged during the evolution of human species to promote social interaction and sense of community by synchronizing the bodies and emotions of the listeners.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

▰ SOUND AND VISION: An app for the new Apple Vision Pro, inspired by the theremin. (Thanks, Dan Sim!)

▰ CALL OF THE WILD: “Claiming that everything that sounds like music is music isn’t just circular; it also opens up an entirely new can of worms. Are those sounds that do not sound like human music, then, by default, non-music (or nachtmusik, as [composer Dave] Soldier calls them)? What about the sounds that have similarities to our music but are the result of entirely different processes, such as the rhythmical stridulations of cicadas and crustaceans?” That’s Tobias Fischer writing on the subject of animal music.

▰ QUICK NOTES: Bar None: A lawyer named Lori Cohen, who lost her voice, is using AI to regain the ability to speak in the courtroom. ▰ Shriek of the Week: Great Spotted Woodpecker: “It may prompt a sense of anticipation in the listener — did I really hear that? Will it sound again? Has it gone? And there it is again.” ▰ Out of the Loop: Aside from listing the latest Disquiet Junto music community project, I don’t spend much time on the Junto in this newsletter, but I do need to note this participant’s ingenuity: “I have a lamp that interferes with my guitar-cable-amp loop. So, I decided to cut the guitar out of the loop and just use the lamp, cable, and amp.” ▰ Transistor Sisterhood: The New York Review of Books profiles electronic musicians Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Robo Cop: The FCC may outlaw robocalls that use AI voices. ▰ Sound Barrier: “The [Detroit] Lions broke the sound-level record of the 22-year-old Ford Field four times during the Rams game, topping out at 133.6 decibels, roughly equal to a jackhammer or jet engine.” The record they beat was their own.

On the Line

"I hear the board release, like a sigh. Still can't hear the footfall, but now I can hear the shape of a body in the hall just outside, the shadow in the room tone."

That is Nick Harkaway from his science fiction novel Titanium Noir (2023). I’ve wanted to read something by Harkaway for some time, and news that he’s writing a character based on his father’s most famous character (his dad was John le Carré, the character being George Smiley) led me to finally do so. It may be worth noting that a central figure in Titanium Noir is a literally towering giant of a post-human (it is science fiction) who draws family members close and into the broadly defined business. Perhaps there’s, I dunno, some subtext. In any case, this is one of several sonically expressive moments in the novel. Another key one is when a giant (called Titans) attacks the protagonist with the power of a laugh. 

. . .

"Talking this way is formal, in both senses of the word: formalizing conversation, rendering it visible and tangible, can sometimes make it feel strangely serious."

That is Max Norman writing in The New Yorker about the experience, when interviewing the artist Joseph Grigely, who is deaf, of doing so by writing things down, and thus taking greater pains than were they merely communicating with spoken words. “I found myself weighing my words,” he continues, “choosing not to ask a question that wasn’t perfectly phrased.”

. . .

"As I write this now at my flat in Edinburgh, I can hear the single toll of the tram bell as it heads along Leith Walk. (The ‘ding’ is singular but not resonant. It is a recording of a bell, and there is no tintinnabulation, as Edgar Allan Poe named it, no lingering sound, because the recording cuts it off. The tram bell is like a bad music hall singer, always in the middle of a note.)"

That is Andrew O’Hagan from his recent essay, “Stevenson in Edinburgh,” in the London Review of Books. (The Stevenson is, naturally, Robert Louis Stevenson.)

Sound Ledger (Freesound.org Edition)

40,940: The number of sounds newly added to freesound.org in 2023

237: The number of hours of sound uploaded by the Freesound contributor (username: Philip_Goddard) who added the longest total amount of recordings in 2023

2,961: The number of individual sound files uploaded by the Freesound contributor (username: Hewn.Marrow) who added the most sound files in 2023

Source: blog.freesound.org

Other Minds 2023 Review (Preview)

My review of the last two nights of the 2023 Other Minds festival is in the brand new issue (the one with the Haxan Cloak on the cover) of The Wire. I’ll post the full article online when the next issue of the magazine is published.

The final two nights of the annual Other Minds festival were split between two quite different venues: the tony Taube Atrium Theater, which is secluded deep inside the stately War Memorial building across from gleaming City Hall, and Gray Area, a revivified, hollowed-out, long-defunct movie theater on a commercial stretch of Mission Street. It’s a half hour walk between them, but they are worlds apart. 

Other Minds ran for six nights total, its opening evening dedicated to a screening of a Morton Subotnick documentary, Subotnick: Portrait of an Electronic Music Pioneer. This all occurred in mid-November, from the 14th through the 19th, those dates placing it in neatly between the Recombinant Festival the month prior and the Tape Music Festival, which fleshed out the first week of 2024. The rapid-fire collection of multiple multi-night, international series gave lie to the monotonous death knell that media outside San Francisco keep ringing, whether lasciviously or with rehearsed concern. A testament to longevity and fortitude, the November events marked the 27th festival for Other Minds, which remains overseen by Charles Amirkhanian, who co-founded it back in 1993.

The Taube show featured works by composers Neil Rolnick, Bora Yoon, and Eivind Buene performed respectively by pianist Geoffrey Burleson (with support from Rolnick), Yoon herself (with visuals by Joshue Ott — whose Thicket app I wrote about a lot back in 2010, including an interview with his collaborator on it, Morgan Packard), and the Friction Quartet. The Gray Area show featured Carl Stone in collaboration with Japanese vocalist Akaihirume.

Less < — > More

Excellence in interface design. I should mention: this is a real guitar pedal (it’s the Dead Bat from Audio Alchemy). You place this device between a power source and an analog pedal and it simulates a drained battery. Well, that’s how it is described. What it does is steadily reduce the power that is sent to the analog pedal — to “choke” or “strangle” or “starve” it, just to mention a few of the less than tasteful metaphors I’ve encountered. I’d guess there are fluctuations inherent in an actually dying battery, especially as it nears the end, that are more random/interesting/chaotic. I’m just getting started with this one. I’ll report back. So far I’ve tried it with an analog tremolo pedal, and it worked quite nicely. Which is to say, it sounded horrible — in a good way. I want to try it on a delay pedal. I’m wondering what the most complicated / sensitive analog pedals there are that I might apply this to.

In a Word

Scratch Pad: Rain, Plex, Browser

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.

▰ A ringtone went off that I’ve never heard before and now I am, apparently, living in a very boring movie scored by Vangelis

▰ I’d record the rain but mostly you’d hear the cars

▰ Listening to the album The Gamble by Nonkeen in the rain which is redundant since The Gamble always makes me feel like it’s raining. (Nonkeen is the trio of Frederic Gmeiner, Nils Frahm, and Sepp Singwald.)

▰ I’ve seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve seen a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe. But I’ve never — until today — seen a web account security feature that directed me to wait an hour and to then log back in from the same browser on the same computer.

▰ Perhaps for the best, YouTube doesn’t tell me the combined playing time of the currently 2,008 videos in my “watch later” playlist

▰ The irony of receiving 75 advance notices about upcoming albums and not hearing back with audio for the one you’ve taken the time to prioritize and reach out about

▰ I’m loving Plex as a personal cloud jukebox, but I still can’t sort out why sometimes it takes 10 minutes for it to recognize an album I’ve added to the hard drive, and other times it can take an hour. I think I have all the scanning settings correct, but that remains the case.

▰ Wishlist: I do wish Plex had iOS widgets. Are there third-party Plex players with additional features that I should know about? Thanks.

▰ Somewhere out there is the sound designer who worked on the episode from the 7th season of The West Wing in which Alan Alda’s character, having shaken too many campaign-trail hands, eases his pain in cold water from a bathroom sink, and the depressing room tone of the tile-lined lavatory is perfect

▰ There will eventually be an entire field of science dedicated to how a Nintendo DS can hold its charge for so long when just sitting in a drawer untouched

▰ January 2024 closes with new albums from both Abdullah Ibrahim (age 89) and Philip Glass (age 87), both pianists. So inspiring.

▰ In addition to my paper notebooks, I keep a single text file (.md, actually) open on the left side of my laptop screen, into which I drop stray thoughts. It can reach upward of 30K words before I break it into segments and store/utilize them as intended. Today I’ve got it down to just under 4,000. (Whew. Got through all of it. Have a good evening.)

▰ Your favorite web browser if you’re on a MacBook and own an iPhone and find Safari has gotten sluggish? Been trying Brave, Edge, Arc, and Firefox, currently leaning toward Brave. Thanks.

▰ Talking about Macs on their 40th anniversary: I got my first Mac freshman year of college. I had a TRS-80 before it, all of high school. First thing I did on my Mac was to recreate in MacPaint the inner sleeve of King Crimson’s album Starless and Bible Black. I had the Mac for another five years.

▰ I remember the first person to show and explain an MP3 player to me, and I remember the first person to rip and burn a CD (a mixtape, not a one-to-one duplicate) in my presence

▰ I think sometimes I could ditch social media with a subdomain (on disquiet.com) or a new site. It’d be something slim and static, like blot.im. You could follow me via RSS and respond via commento.io, or on your own site, which I could follow via RSS. That’d be a nice simple social media, or NSS. (And, per correspondence on Mastodon, maybe maybe webmention.io for webmentions?)

▰ My inbox was several times more full than usual this morning, meaning it’s Bandcamp Friday. And that doesn’t count the folder I have most Bandcamp email automatically sent to, bypassing the inbox. And the folders I have most publicity email sent to, also bypassing the inbox.

▰ I’m fairly certain a new USB will hit the market in the next month, since I just replaced what I’m pretty sure is the last cable I had that required a dongle

▰ In the process of switching the Disquiet Junto project email announcement newsletter over to Buttondown, because TinyLetter is being shut down. On a positive note, I’ll be able to send out emails more often. On a negative, it does cost something. But so be it.

▰ On the one hand, this album I’m listening to is totally relaxing. On the other, I may be overdosing on tremolo.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, my fourth of the year: Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica. In some ways, Aesthetica is as harrowing as Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, in part because it was more realistic, in part because it focused almost entirely on one person (with others as collateral damage), and in part because of its aligning need with numbness. I’d heard of the author’s prior book, and read this debut novel after seeing it on Steven Soderbergh’s list of what he’d read in 2023. I stopped 15% of the way through, took a breather, and returned to it.

▰ Finished reading three graphic novels this week: Greg Rucka and Mike Henderson’s The Forged, Volume 1: Not my favorite Rucka, but aspects of the art kept my attention. Among the best parts, visually, was the depiction of communications and monitoring, the sort of data visible on the head-up displays of the mecha characters appearing, in turn, within the comics panels. Volume 7 of Katsuhisa Minami’s manga The Fable. And the initial collected edition of Tom King and Elsa Charretier’s Love Everlasing, which turns the eternal promise of romance comics into a curse. The first volume doesn’t particularly come together, but there’s more meta where this came from, so I’ll be reading volume two for sure.

Music from Fraught States

This short essay was part of the set of liner notes commissioned for the Audio Obscura album Music for Airports in the Age of Climate Change, released today, Friday, February 2, 2024. Design by David Barrington.

Brian Eno recorded his secular psalm to the protracted liminal state of mid-journey — that is, the album Music for Airports, released back in 1978 — for a very different world than today’s.

Flying — or, more to the point, preparing to fly as well as lingering afterward — is no longer a placid, refined, out-of-body experience, nor for at least a generation of travelers has it ever been.

Flying — by which we’ve always meant not merely the time spent airborne, but also when engaged in the overall multi-stage process of air travel — is no longer widely viewed as an extended moment filled with opportunities for reflection and, alternately, anticipation.

Flight is, quite the contrary, fraught — and inherently so.

The host of causes for this significant cultural shift in attitudes are numerous, ranging from the existential (air rage, terrorism, disease) to the practical (cramped quarters, cost, privacy).

All of which concerns pale in comparison to the stated focus of the return trip that Audio Obscura has embarked on to Eno’s original work: climate change.

For what once was a weightless experience is now freighted with the matter of carbon emissions, among various other environmental factors.

The result of which is that the time-passing wait for a flight is no longer inherently a form of enforced stasis.

Instead, the wait is, for many, a ticking clock, its second hand echoing on an epochal scale; it is a countdown to rising temperatures, to rising seas, and to the impact they will have not just on humanity, but on the planet as a whole.

Like much science fiction — and what was Music for Airports other than a work of very-near-future science fiction, a concept album about technology’s ability to elevate humans not just physically but philosophically — Eno’s long-ago vision is now a portrait of an alternate future, one from which our present, nearly half a century on and well into the subsequent millennium, has irreparably diverged, tragically so.

Our present is one in which the damage incurred by travel is as easily assessed as — if less easily addressed than — the calorie count on a box of chocolates.

And yet …

And yet, for all that anxiety, the tension that fleshes out Music for Airports in the Age of Climate Change is seductive, meditative, and even comforting in its own way.

Built from field recordings, digital effects, new music, and copyleft creative reuse of pre-existing takes (composting being apropos), the new album summons up its own form of reflective state. The voices of flight alerts combine with glitchy textures to layer not merely apprehension but also experienced aesthetic factors onto the original work — and in those additional facets, Audio Obscura finds new sources for philosophical consideration.

Where the original was leavened by bits of “Frere Jacques” courtesy of pianist Robert Wyatt, a nursery rhyme this modern retelling isn’t, not by a long shot — but nor is it trafficking in fear-mongering or catastrophe porn. Audio Obscura instead finds beauty in the fraught, loveliness in the tension, and peace in the tight quarters.