Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 79

Death Hags’ 3rd Junto x Bern Podcast

For the November 4, 2023, episode on her listen.camp show, Big Grey Sun 2.0, the L.A. musician/producer Lola G. (aka Death Hags) played tracks from the third of three Disquiet Junto projects that participants did this year in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern, as well as some of her own music. The theme of this project, number 0599, Minimal(ish) Blend, was: Make a piece of music that combines self-contained minimalist parts.

This is the playlist from “Big Grey Sun 2.0 / 04th November 2023,” which is hosted at Death Hags’ mixcloud.com account:

Death Hags — “There Is a Full Moon Tonight”Death Hags — “Sun Still Standing”LazenbeeIndustries — “leadhills”Death Hags — “Dance Around the Fire (remix)”Gerard Paresys — “Blend”Death Hags — “Monster Lullaby (instr.)”Krakenkraft — “Emerging Flavours”

Scratch Pad: AI, Duolingo, Celtic Frost

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. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media. 

▰ One reason I was terrible in foreign language in school was my inability to not think. I couldn’t turn off my brain and just listen/speak. Duolingo’s been a learning experience: how much my progress improves when I stop thinking and just act. This has, in turn, positively impacted my guitar lessons.

▰ My current tab management approach is that once every month or so I click the wrong thing on Safari and they all disappear and I have no idea why

▰ Here in San Francisco, autumn has cosplayed as summer for Halloween.

▰ My voice recorder had what I thought to be some stray thoughts from yesterday in it, so this morning I fed the file into a speech-to-text tool — which then produced this. Turned out the audio was a few phrases I’d recorded at the end of guitar class that I’d forgotten about.

Would have been sort of amazing if it had actually identified the pitches and so forth.

Tired: speech to text

Wired: audio to guitar tablature

▰ Just here to note that Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium remains an absolutely incredible album

▰ Looking to 2024, I wanna to spend more time doing less. The Disquiet Junto Slack was something I spent too much time thinking about. So the Slack has been renamed and is now run by a crew of regulars; I’m just a citizen there now. Feels freeing after 7 years. Of course, the Disquiet Junto continues.

▰ I pretty much live in my RSS reader and it’s clear that several blogs I follow are now plumping up their “content” with AI-written blather on various topics — some time-sensitive, others evergreen. The result is generic mush. They’d be better to just post the AI prompt in the form of an outline. The worst are the ones that appear to be the work of people who want to be known as “writers” or “thinkers” or “authorities” but don’t actually, you know, wanna write or, for that matter, think.

▰ Spent most of the afternoon at the Apple Store, where people wander in with shards of glass taped to bits of wire and bent scrap metal, requesting speedy assistance

Music School

Despite appearances, Duolingo Music isn’t currently offering turntablist lessons

Disquiet Junto Project 0618: Burying the Lede

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, November 6, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 2, 2023.

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).

Disquiet Junto Project 0618: Burying the Lede
The Assignment: Turn old news into new music.

Step 1: Locate an old news article, the less dramatic perhaps the better, from roughly 50 years ago. Try to find something local to where you live now or have lived.

Step 2: Use a text-to-speech tool to convert the article to audio. There are numerous such software applications, and no doubt discussion in the Junto thread on llllllll.co will yield suggestions should you require one.

Step 3: Set to music the voice recording that resulted from Step 2. A length of two and a half to five minutes is recommended. Use an article sufficient to that length — you may end up not using the entire text. As the piece goes on, have the voice slowly get subsumed by the music, until by the end the voice is no longer intelligible — perhaps not even audible.

Note: In case the word isn’t familiar, a “lede” is “the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story.”

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0618” (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 “disquiet0618” (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-0618-burying-the-lede/

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. It will largely be determined by the length of the text you select.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 6, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 2, 2023.

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 618th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Burying the Lede (The Assignment: Turn old news into new music), at: https://disquiet.com/0618/

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-0618-burying-the-lede/

The Slack of the Disquiet Junto (2016 – 2023)

Looking ahead to 2024, I knew I wanted to spend more time doing less. As I pondered various means to accomplish this goal, one item in particular revealed itself to me. I’ve decided that a dedicated Disquiet Junto Slack is something I’ve spent too much time thinking about as its admin. I wanted to stop feeling the burden to do so. At a practical level, administering the Junto Slack took very little effort or time. However, knowing it was out there, and feeling responsible daily for it, was an identifiable distraction I could bring to a close. 

Just to be clear, the Junto Slack wasn’t a fraught space, not at all. Quite the contrary, it became a nice virtual water cooler for a range of people whom I enjoy connecting with on a regular basis. However, as supportive and enjoyable as the conversations there generally are, I still felt a distracting sense of duty: checking in more often than I really have time for, considering the flow of conversation, wondering if newcomers feel welcome given how developed the relationships of the longtimers have become, and so on. 

I figured the best thing to do was to no longer have a Disquiet Junto Slack. The Junto itself, I should note, isn’t a prominent topic on the Junto Slack, as things have turned out. There is far more active project-specific Junto discussion on the browser-based lllllllll.co BBS, and on various social media (for example Mastodon on and Instagram, not to mention comments on SoundCloud). The Junto Slack matured into more of a hang-out — which is great. I just didn’t want to be the (virtual) landlord any longer.

I raised my thoughts with the some of the “regulars” on the Junto Slack, and we decided to do two things: (1) change the Slack’s name (to Echo Chamber), so it is no longer tied directly to the Disquiet Junto; (2) institute a small committee of admins, so the duties don’t fall on any one individual. That switchover was finalized on November 1, 2023. The URL for Echo Chamber is: i-am-sitting-in-a.slack.com.

A few key points:

1: The Disquiet Junto, which has been around since January 2012, is doing fine. Not having a Junto Slack has nothing to do with the Junto’s ongoing activity.

2: I am doing fine. This change has nothing to do with my health, my work, or the state of my life in any sort of concerning way.

3: I’m going to remain an “admin emeritus” on the renamed Echo Chamber Slack — at least as long as the newly installed committee of admins will have me.

Major thanks to everyone who has participated in the Disquiet Junto Slack over the years, and to the admins who are shaping Echo Chamber into its own thing.

This Week in Sound: “Alternative Venues for Their Sonic Battles”

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the October 31, 2023, 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.

▰ DRIVE ALL NIGHT: “About a year ago, people there began gathering for so-called siren battles — a homegrown subculture in which members of Pacific Islander, or Pasifika, communities in New Zealand compete to see who can play music the loudest.” My memory of freshman year of college was rival factions playing Bruce Springsteen and Talking Heads out dorm windows; in New Zealand, it can come down to Celine Dion versus Celine Dion, apparently. “The police said that among other measures, sound testing was being completed at various locations around the city, and that the authorities were working with siren clubs to explore alternative venues for their sonic battles.” (Gift link: nytimes.com)

▰ CAT SCRATCH FEVER: There’s new research out that suggests a cat’s purr may be less emotionally meaningful than we’d thought: “closer to a snore than a voluntary muscle spasm” — that is, “more like a snore than a smile.” However, the jury is still out, and the critiques have teeth: “The article’s conclusions have sparked some controversy. Biomechanical engineers interviewed by Science claim that the experiment was limited to verifying the functioning of the larynx in isolation, without taking into account the complex systems of a living cat, which they feel represents a significant oversight. Scientist David Rice, for instance, compared the research to removing the mouthpiece of a wind instrument and then analyzing the noise it produces independently from the context of that instrument.”

▰ GHOST STORY: “In a new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers … used the ghostly finger setup to probe another kind of hallucination: hearing voices. They found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was a lag between the push of the button and the rod’s touch than when there was no delay. … The findings suggest that the neurological roots of hallucinations lie in how the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, the researchers said.” Here’s to more sound studies of sounds that don’t actually exist. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ IN THE AIR TONIGHT: In his book The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology, author Tobias Dengel makes a case for voice control not just at our desks and in our cars, but in the cockpits of airplanes: “When voice becomes a major interface in airliner cockpits, a new tool for preventing such disasters will be available. In traditional aviation, pilots receive commands like ‘Cleared Direct Casanova VOR’ or ‘Intercept the ILS 3’ via radio from dispatchers at air traffic control. After the pilots get this information, they must use their eyes and hands to locate and press a series of buttons to transmit the same commands to the aircraft. In a voice-driven world, that time-wasting, error-prone step will be eliminated. In the first stage of voice adoption, pilots will simply be able to say a few words without moving their eyes from the controls around them, and the plane will respond.”

▰ ROBOT RANGER: Yes, yes, the “AIs can solve [Problem X]” stories can be a bit much and a bit repetitive, but if you drill down sufficiently, some can hold water: “To prevent the loss of wildlife, forest restoration is key, but monitoring how well biodiversity actually recovers is incredibly difficult. Now though, a team has collected recordings of animal sounds to determine the extent of the recovery. However, while using these sounds to identify species is an effective way to monitor, it’s also labour intensive. To overcome this, they trained an AI to listen to the sounds, and found that although it was less able to identify species, its findings still correlated well with wildlife recovery, suggesting that it could be a cost-effective and automated way to monitor biodiversity.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)

▰ QUICK NOTES: Orange Alert: Around Lewiston, Maine, before the mass shooter was caught, consideration was given to delaying rifle hunting season: “The presence of hunters and the sound of gunfire could disrupt the search, distract the police, cause frightened residents to make additional 911 calls and potentially put hunters in harm’s way.” ▰ Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is that of a bird called the Curlew: “Curlews emit a range of shrill, characterful noises. The easiest to recognise is the one that we use to name them: a high, far-carrying ‘cor-leee’.” ▰ Flight Club: Ed Jong (author of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us) reports from Australia, making the case that the country is “the birthplace of birdsong.” ▰ Wheels of Steel: Meet “the de facto DJ of the Netflix picket lines,” Evan Shafran: “Every morning, he drives 15 miles from his apartment in Shadow Hills to Sunset Boulevard and sets up his subwoofer in front of the company’s headquarters.” ▰ Color Me Impressed: New firmware for the Teenage Enginering OB-4 speaker: “the latest OB-4 update adds the ‘noise’ function to disk mode. listen to white, brown and pink noise — constant ambient sounds that can induce calm and focus by masking distracting sounds, in or outside your head.” (And the Washington Post perchance has a helpful colored-noise explainer — thanks, James Britt!.) ▰ Hare Raising: Plot of the upcoming horror film Rabbit Trap, starring Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, and Jade Croot: “When they accidentally make a field recording of a mystical sound never before heard by human ears, a strange child enters their lives who gradually untethers them from reality.” ▰ Save the Horn: The radio telescope in Holmdel, N.J, credited with discovery of evidence of the Big Bang will not be moved due to planned senior housing on the site: “an agreement between town officials and [the real estate developer] seemed to augur the end of the cosmic controversy.” ▰ Hear, Hear: Gene therapy could restore hearing in some children.

On Repeat

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

▰ The second in the ongoing “diary” series from the French label Sonic-dialogue is out, and it’s a lovely set of dreamy demos by Aldrin, aka Oslo-based musician Øystein Dale Svendsen.

https://sonic-dialogue.bandcamp.com/album/diary-2

▰ Gorgeous muffled piano study from the Bell Mechanical.

▰ I’m an enormous fan of Nils Petter Molvær, the Norwegian trumpet player, and yet I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him play live solo for a full concert until I witnessed this fantastic hour-long video — of course, he’s only solo to the extent that you don’t grant performer status to his battery of inventive electronic processing.

On the Line

“One of my very favorite sounds in the world is made by split-flap displays, also known as Solari boards after a well-known manufacturer. The 'screen' shuffles to show each of the letters and numbers in a row of text, pauses to show the information, and then shuffles again — clickety-clickety-clickety — to reflect updates.”

That is from Deb Chachra’s excellent new book, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. This is one of my favorite sounds, as well. (Note: the “clickety-clickety-clickety” is italicized in the original, but the formatting here doesn’t allow for it.) In a manner of speaking, this book is Deb listening to the world’s hum.

. . .

“I find music a useful distraction. A focus tool. Keeps the inner voice from wandering.”

From the trailer to director David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Killer, the words spoken by the title character, played by Michael Fassbender, screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, from a series of graphic novels by writer Matz and artist Luc Jacamon. As I’ve written here many times, some of the most evocative writing about sound can be found in thrillers about spies and killers, because they must listen carefully both to get their work done and to survive.

. . .

“You knew that part of what was bothering him was the noise; his hearing wasn't as good as it used to be, probably from all the loud machines at his work, and he didn't like to have to turn up the television, whose speaker distorted when the volume got too high.”

That observation is from John Darnielle’s novel Devil House, which I’m enjoying. I’m reading a few too many books at the moment, but I’ll return to normal mode (three tops: one paper, one ebook, one audiobook) soon. Or soon-ish. Darnielle is the musician who goes by Mountain Goats, and it’s no surprise when sound and song surface in this book.

Sound Ledger: Leaf Blower Edition

90: Common maximum decibel level of leaf blowers

45: Decibel level of a new “ultra quiet” model called the Whisper Aero

50: The number of feet from which it is 40x quieter than ordinary leaf blowers

Source: techcrunch.com

The Heavens

Another shot from Saint John the Divine in Manhattan where I attended a fantastic choral concert a couple weeks ago