Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 74

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.

Disquiet Junto Project 0631: In a Silent Waveform

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 5, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 1, 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 tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). Note that this service will change shortly, likely to Buttondown, due to Tinyletter shutting down.

Disquiet Junto Project 0631: In a Silent Waveform
The Assignment: Take one held tone and make it dance slowly.

There is just one step to this project: Take one held tone and make it dance slowly.

As with any Junto project, interpret as you see fit.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0631” (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 “disquiet0631” (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-0631-in-a-silent-waveform/

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 5, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 1, 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 631st weekly Disquiet Junto project, In a Silent Waveform — The Assignment: Take one held tone and make it dance slowly — at: https://disquiet.com/0631/

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

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0631-in-a-silent-waveform/

This Week in Sound: “How Owls Achieve Silent Flight”

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 30, 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.

▰ CLONE WARS: “Your group should set up a password for situations where you need to confirm identities over the phone. Let’s say it’s ‘raspberry beret.’ If you get a call from a loved one in trouble, you can say, ‘Look, there are scams, and we talked about this — what’s the password?’ The password should be something familiar that’s easily remembered but not associated with you online. A family joke can be good. You don’t have to be strict about them getting it perfect—you’re not verifying their nuclear launch code authority.” —Glenn Fleishman shares advice for avoiding the trap of voice deepfakes.

▰ FRINGE SCIENCE: Science still has much to learn about how owls fly so silently: “Previous studies have found a link between noiseless flight and the presence of micro-fringes in owl wings. These are referred to as ‘trailing-edge’ (TE) fringes. These appear to be the crucial factor in quiet owl flight. … ‘Despite many efforts by many researchers, exactly how owls achieve silent flight is still an open question,’ says senior author Professor Hao Liu from the Graduate School of Engineering at Chiba University in Japan. ‘Understanding the precise role of TE fringes in their silent flight will enable us to apply them in developing practical low-noise fluid machinery.’”

▰ QUICK NOTES: FM Blues: A radio station, WERA 96.7 in Arlington, Virginia, has been playing lofi beats on loop non-stop since the start of December 2023, due to delays in the station’s relocation. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Long Now: A “639-year organ performance” of a work by John Cage continues apace in Germany. (Thanks, Alan Bland!) ▰ Water Log: Sonar may — keyword: may — have discovered the remains of Amelia Earhart’s plane. ▰ In Sync: A musician and sound designer waxes rhapsodic over the moments when the two blend. ▰ Ah Om: A friend of one of the creators of the Buddha Machine shares some stories about their development. ▰ Ear Witness: Shazam can now identify what song you’re listening to while you have headphones on. ▰ Good Fences: A lovely blog entry, complete with ample photography and audio examples, by Sean Julian on making “vibration recordings,” in which he listens to fences. (Thanks, Grant Wilkinson!) ▰ Cold Truth: These date back to September of last year, when the Clean Arctic Alliance launched a campaign about underwater noise pollution:

I only had room for one of these in the issue, but here’s a second Clean Arctic Alliance infographic:

On the Line: Physics, Design, LightSound

“Deep neural network for learning wave scattering and interference of underwater acoustics”

Sometimes science is, to the rest of us, abstract poetry. The above is the title of a research paper to be published in the Physics of Fluids journal about an innovation “that harnesses the power of AI to accurately model how sound waves travel underwater [and] could help reduce the impact of noise pollution on marine life.”

. . .

"To find sources of real sound of people in pain is convincing, and the credibility of the sound you use is so important because you can fool the eye much more easily than you can the ear."

That is Oscar-nominated sound designer Johnnie Burn talking to Salon’s Gary M. Kramer about the production of the Holocaust film The Zone of Interest, based on a Martin Amis novel.

. . .

"This device isn’t just for a blind or low-vision person. It could also be a tool for a person that engages with data differently."

That is Harvard astronomy lab manager Allyson Bieryla talking to National Geographic’s Stephanie Vermillion about LightSound, “a smartphone-sized device that translates ambient brightness into sound.”

Sound Ledger: Deepfake Forensics

250: Length in milliseconds of the segments employed to identify details about the headline-making deepfake of U.S. president Joe Biden

155: Total number of segments employed in the forensic effort

122: Number of text-to-speech engines (and other technological tools) included in the research data set

Source: pindrop.com.

Speak, Memory — or at Least Instapaper

I’ve been trying out various apps and services that facilitate the collection of browser-based documents. I don’t need much in terms of long-term collation, mostly items on a week-by-week basis, mostly for my This Week in Sound newsletter. Instaper is a leading such option. There are also: Pocket, synced bookmarks (I’m a longtime user of pinboard.in, just shy of a decade), and the Read Later panel in the Safari browser, amomg numerous — some days it feels like countless — other options.

These tools have their pros and cons, their pluses and minuses, and they have their idiosyncrasies. Some, including Instapaper, allow you to hear a document read back to you — what’s referred to as “text-to-speech.” What struck me in particular about Instapaper is the voice implementation (perhaps archaic, as text-to-speech goes) and also an aspect of the text-to-speech interface, which displays the following:

It shows a pair of headphones next to the the word “Speak.” The headphones icon suggest one listens, which is appropriate. The word “Speak” suggests — and I say this at the risk of, you know, jumping to a conclusion — that the user speaks, which is counterintuitive. Why, I ask, doesn’t this show headphones and the word “Listen”?

Complicating the scenario further is the phrase “Speed Read” directly above. This is, in fact, an especially idiosyncratic function within Instapaper. What it does is flash the words, one at a time. For some people this is apparently a means for reading quickly. For others it might feel like being a subject of brainwashing in A Clockwork Orange.

In any case, what matters is that the appearace of “Speed Read” above “Speak” gets confusig, because “Speak” is the tool that reads to you, and “Speak” in fact does have a submenu that lets you adjust the speed at which it reads to you. You can see how this can become not so much confusing as concerning. Odd incongruences can taint an interface and, by extension, a product.

There’s a thing about utilities like Instapaper, and I think of it as the “if only” factor, for every app has its little shortcomings: if only it was cheaper, if only it didn’t have a subscription cost, if only it had folders, if only the fonts appealed to me, if only it worked offline, if only it were cross-platform, and so forth. If Instapaper didn’t have this text-to-speech feature, I might not have missed it. Since the app has the feature, I find myself factoring my relative satisfaction with the implementation into my decision-making in terms of adoption.

I have a lot of friends who swear by Instapaper, and several of them didn’t even know about or at least don’t use the “Speak” function. It all comes down to personal habits, but personal habits in aggregate are a powerful force in the development and evolution of interface norms. It’s somewhat difficult to imagine that the word “Speak” next to a pair of headphones will become the universal symbol of text-to-speech. Note, above, how the New York Times, which recently launched its own audio-specific service, signals the same feature on its main website. And below is how The New Yorker, on its website, which has actual humans (not digital facsimiles toiling tirelessly syllable by syllable) doing the reading, highlights the availability:

And no, I still haven’t decided on an option. But such is digital life.

On Repeat: Birdsong, Iceberg, Cello

I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ This is a live performance reworking of sounds from the forest, emphasis on the birdsong, by Mark Harrop, aka UMCorps, based in Cornwall in the U.K. He employs various techniques on “Endless Woodland,” like pitch-shifting as well as the re-insertion of samples from the original material, turning the source audio into something cinematic, a combination of the everyday and the psychological experience of an imagined scenario.

▰ Heejin Jang’s new album, Human Iceberg, is the score to a collaborative project by that name that teams her with writer Lim Jina and visual artist Lee SunHo on what sounds, from the description, like a science fiction fable about climate change. Jang scored the project, expressing various settings, from the melting of an iceberg to technological failures to seemingly supernatural occurrences. While there are atmospheric moments, it gets loud; as Jang says on her Bandcamp page’s bio: “I make something noisy.” More at instagram.com/humaniceberg.official, best viewed on a laptop or desktop computer. Jang is based in Seoul, Korea.

https://heejinjang.bandcamp.com/album/human-iceberg

▰ Henrik Meierkord’s cello, sounding like it’s deep in cavern, combines on “Warum” with the samples and tape work of Marco Lucchi, moaning swells that turn the piece into a sort of conversation between the instruments. Meierkord is based in Sweden, Lucchi in Italy.

Scratch Pad: Rain, Lullabies, Emoji

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 day has begun with what sounds like fake rain from a YouTube channel, too perfect to be real, though that’s probably just the result on my part of a combination of drought-induced confusion and too much research about field recordings

▰ Since you’re wondering, guitar class went well. It’s a small thing for most people learning music, but for me being able to transcribe a melody from an old-school Disney flick, sort the key, and guess at some chords felt nice. Been deep in “Stay Awake” and, now, “Baby Mine.”

Just to be very clear: I am taking guitar lessons, not giving them. :)

▰ I’m looking forward to listening to your next drone album but fair warning my microwave has really been upping its game. May be an end-of-life cycle for the machine, revisiting its hits with diminishing energy but greater depth.

▰ My only Oscars comment is a question about the best score category: will the dead guy and the elder statesman split the codger vote and thus given one of the other three the win?

▰ A consequence of studying lullabies for guitar practice is that, as with any song you play over and over (and over), they get lodged in your head. These being lullabies, then you spend the rest of the day trying not to fall asleep to the sleepy-time earworms playing endlessly in your mind.

▰ Next up in guitar practice, after “Stay Awake” and “Baby Mine”: transposing “Easy Living” to match a Chet Baker recording — a natural transition, Baker being lullaby incarnate

▰ Just proofed some liner notes I wrote for an upcoming album. Had no idea how cool the graphic design was going to be, how appropriate to the material, nor how large the tape cassette booklet. I’ll share when it’s out (or getting closer to the release date).

▰ The city got a reprieve from rain for good behavior so I did open the window this morning, first thing. In came dog barks, a passing bus’ rumble, and the inimitable hum of a driverless electric car (steadier than most humans manage). Well, the barks were persistent but my brain eventually muted ’em.

▰ There’s an emoji for taking a look that’s two eyes . The closest listening approximation is one earso I guess we’re listening in mono. There’s an ear with a hearing aid, which is inclusive and may come to suggest a broader array of mediated listening. There’s a deaf symbol . And of course .

▰ Sometimes I find things on last.fm that seem to make no sense, and then they end up being recordings that haven’t been announced yet, let alone released, but someone somewhere had been “scrobbling” embargoed recordings

▰ Probably old news for some people but it’s pretty great to use a secondary device, like an iPad, as a music player, and direct the sound to play through your MacBook (my M1 Pro has amazing sound). You can keep an eye on what you’re playing, and keep your laptop screen reserved for working.

▰ I recently set up a Mac Mini as a Plex jukebox and it has totally transformed how I listen to music. I’ll detail how I set it up in a proper blog post soon.

(And yes, I realize the concepts both of listening to MP3s/equivalent and of writing a blog post seem antiquated to some, but so be it.)

▰ Finished reading one novel this week, my third of this year: Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours, maybe his best and I’ve read ’em all. It’s in the Slow Horses world and will mean more if you’ve read them but it also stands on its own. It dials back the humor slightly, and the action is less slapstick. One moment in particular made the hair rise on my arms. Herron cares more for words than most writers of thrillers, spy or otherwise. Meanwhile, I’m still working slowly through an ancient Oulipo novel, and I restarted one I’d begun from Steven Soderbergh’s list of what he read last year.

▰ Finished reading three graphic novels this week: two more volumes of Minami Katsuhisa’s The Fable manga (5: The author sure keeps stacking the deck against the guy, but then again that’s the point; 6: It gets both darker in some of the incidents and lighter in tone at other points. Minami, the illustrator-author, starts to introduce incredible two-page spreads, and the depictions of action, especially hand-to-hand, really take off), and Kingdom by Jon McNaught: Wow, just wow. Incredibly beautiful, graphically intense, not-quite-wordless, onomatopoeia-packed depiction of a family vacation in which both very little and quite a bit happen. If M.C. Escher and Eric Drooker had a baby, the kid might hope to draw like this.

Sounds and Thoughts About Sounds

The top bar is a recording of some music for a project. The bottom bar is a recording of some freeform speaking toward an essay about the project.