Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 84

On the Line: War & Poetry

“Screams are rare, but memorable,mirrored in the faces of thosewho do not make them."

That is from a poem, “The Keep,” by Christian Wiman in the November 13 issue of The New Yorker.

. . .

Writing is “the experience of watching what’s happening in the lines as the experience of the sounds and rhythms and the experience of emotions and knowledge that’s gained.”

That is the late poet David Ferry, who died this month at age 99, as quoted in his New York Times obituary.

. . .

"Huge clouds formed in the sky, followed by a strange darkness that rushed toward the horizon, chasing a sound wave so intense that it lasted for minutes, as the sonic boom bounced between the stratosphere and the ocean. The roar of the bomb was deafening. 'It was magnificent, like a hundred thunderstorms coming at us from all directions. It seemed that the heavens would burst. Our ears rang and ached for hours,' said one of the sailors who witnessed it from a battleship at sea.”

That is a description of a bomb being dropped, from Maniac, the new novel by Benjamín Labatut (whose When We Cease to Understand the World is a must-read about the intersection of physics and existentialism).

Sound Ledger: Alexa, Noise, More Noise

46,700,000: Amount in dollars Amazon must pay due to an Alexa-related “speech recognition and natural language processing” patent legal case

65: Targeted maximum noise level, in decibels, in Brussels, where fountains, among other approaches, are addressing with the problem

60: Peak noise level, in decibels (and the lowest in five years), recorded during 2022 Diwali activities (Gurgaon, Haryana, India)

Sources: Amazon (reuters.com), Brussels (archinect.com), noise (indiatimes.com)

Sonic Verbs (Index)

At the end of the introduction to each issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter I swap in a new sonic verb. This index is the regularly updated list of the words I’ve used. If you have a favorite you don’t see here, let me know. I may use it down the road. Thanks.

babble, bang, bark, bawl, bay, belch, beep, blow, boing, bombinate, burble, burr, buzz, cackle, cantillate, cheep, chirm, chirp, chirr, chirrup, chitter, churr, clang, clank, clatter, clink, clunk, coo, crack, crackle, crash, croak, croon, crunch, cry, ding, dong, drone, echo, echolocate, fizzle, gasp, groan, growl, gurgle, hack, harmonize, hiss, honk, hoot, howl, hum, intone, jingle, keen, lub, mewl, moan, mumble, murmur, mutter, nasalize, oscillate, outgribe, plop, plunk, pop, pow, pulse, purr, psithurate , rattle, resound, ring, rip, roar, rumble, rustle, scrape, scream, screech, shimmer, shout, shriek, sibilate, sigh, sign, smack, sneeze, sniff, sniffle, snore, snort, sough, splash, splat, sputter, squall, squeak, squeal, squish, susurrate, swish, thud, tinkle, toot, thrum, thwack, twang, trill, ululate, vibrate, wail, warble, whack, wheeze, whiffle, whimper, whine, whir, whisper, whistle, yell, yelp, yodel, yowl

Birds of Paradise

You might not recognize, due to the relatively sedate background noise of this short recording, just how many cars are in this busy parking lot. This segment was recorded at an outdoor mall in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, where I was struck by the sheer volume, color, clarity, and — foremost — personality of the many birds in a group of short trees at the end of various lanes of parking spaces. If you situated yourself properly, you could focus on the pinging back and forth of a conversation — a squabble, perhaps, or the start of a scheme, more likely — unfolding just out of view. Inherent in the humor of the moment was that the birds did a good job of disguising themselves, virtually indistinguishable as they were from the brush in which they were ensconced. At first, the beeping of a car backing up seemed to violate the purity of their intraspecies communication, but when listening back to the recording, I couldn’t help but note how the beeping seemed to fit naturally amid the bird calls. The birds seemed to, at times, match the tone of the beeping, and at other times leave space for the beeping, so they could talk, as it were, around it. Which is to say: the birds seemed just as cognizant of and, for better and worse, inured to the vehicular noise as are the rest of us.

Photo is a detail of a larger image by Richard F. Lyon (aka Dicklyon on Wikipedia), used thanks to a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

The Sonic Ecosystem of Scavengers Reign

There has been less discussion of the animated series Scavengers Reign on my social media feeds than there should be. In fact, there’s been close to none. The show is absolutely beautiful, riffing as it does on the comics work of Moebius, in particular, as well as that of Katsuhiro Otomo, Geof Darrow, and Ted McKeever, among others — and making good on those influences. It mixes off-world adventure with personal stories in a way that threads them together until they’re inseparable: trying to keep oneself alive on an alien planet turns out to be a great way to sort out what makes humans human. And the series has a fantastic score, one that balances narrative, sound design, and character point-of-view in equal parts. 

The sound of Scavengers Reign is especially important because so much of the series is near-silent, just people (and machines, one in particular) against a landscape. And I mean truly “against” a landscape, as in pitted against. Scavengers Reign concerns itself considerably with the complex ecosystem of a planet on which human survivors of a spaceship mishap find themselves stranded. By the time we meet the characters, many have learned, no doubt the hard way, which local life forms are edible, which can serve a functional purpose (flashlight, salve, matchstick, luggage), and which are predatory or otherwise life-threatening. 

The sequence in this video occurs when a botanist named Ursula witnesses a strange, brief cycle of life in a dense forest. The music begins as a droning bit of fantasy scene setting: as much the music of the moment as a depiction of the dreamy state in which Ursula finds herself. (The Shakespearean sense of forest transformation becomes more evident in a subsequent episode.) The initial whirring might as well be the sound of the plant gestating the odd little, short-lived character whom we encounter. By the time a vocal part arises, the audience is as fixated as Ursula is, and there is no disconnect between the operatic singing and the tiny life we watch play out its solitary purpose (an intricate act of pollination) in almost an instant. This is one such bit among countless on Scavengers Reign. About midway through the series there is a duet, sung between one of the humans and an increasingly sentient robot, that is quite special. It’s a great moment when a show this sonically astute makes music part of the story. Highly recommended.

Scratch Pad: Bosch, Buddha Machine

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. 

▰ Received an album press release via email in Welsh; now waiting for my eyes and brain to reset

▰ There’s a moment in an episode of Bosch: Legacy when a real estate agent describes a house as having a “Spanish tinge” and Bosch doesn’t proceed to make a Jelly Roll Morton comment. This seemed especially out of character.

▰ Naturally, after my recent realization that I need to try to think less while practicing guitar, I returned to finger-picking

▰ I can be a tad self-conscious about words I’m concerned I use too often, so I was a little surprised to recognize that “accrual” hasn’t been in the title or the description of any of the 618 Disquiet Junto projects to date. That changed with the 619th project.

▰ Oh, cool — nice to be name-checked by Wired and Michael Calore regarding the return of the Buddha Machine.

▰ I don’t, myself, listen to Rob Lowe’s podcast, but a friend does, and apparently in the episode with Duran Duran’s John Taylor, Lowe talks about the lyrics to “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and Taylor brings up that there’s “another” song by that title, and that it has probably Robert Fripp’s best guitar solo

The Old Web

I emailed with a friend this morning, maintaining a longtime asynchronous and attenuated conversation.

I posted a music composition proposal online this morning, and two people have already uploaded music in response, with many more responses to come.

I sent out an email newsletter, and several people I have never met replied with interesting input on related topics I previously knew nothing about.

I sent a post to an email list, and read replies to other posts.

I read semi-personal, semi-professional writings online by individuals whose perspectives and work I find interesting, alerted to their publication by my so-called feed reader (née RSS).

The old web isn’t dead. It’s still there. The old web is a persistent weed that grows in the alley behind the shopping mall that is the modern web. Some recognize that weed as a healthy vegetable. The old web is a conversation that takes place quietly while countless others are busy blathering as loudly and quickly as possible. The old web is right there, in plain sight. The current old web is in some ways larger than the old old web; a problem is that the modern new web is, indeed, even so much larger. 

The old web isn’t dead. It’s still there. You do have to look for it, though. And it helps to participate, too.

Disquiet Junto Project 0619: Beat Accrual

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 13, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 9, 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 0619: Beat Accrual
The Assignment: Rebuild a complicated rhythm from scratch.

As is generally the case with any instructions, it’s best to read all the way through before beginning.

Step 1: Create a complicated beat (define “complicated” as you see fit). Keep track of the individual parts.

Step 2: Record a track in which the beat from Step 1 slowly accrues over time. For example, break the original beat into its constituent parts and then add one at a time, repeating the arrival of each addition for four beats (assuming you’re doing the project in 4/4). That’s just one way to accomplish this.

Also: You might adorn the beat with other elements while it’s accumulating, or after, or you might simply leave it on its own.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0619” (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 “disquiet0619” (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-0619-beat-accrual/

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, November 13, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 9, 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 619th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Beat Accrual (The Assignment: Rebuild a complicated rhythm from scratch), at: https://disquiet.com/0619/

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-0619-beat-accrual/

TWiS: “Known in the Trade as ‘Chirpers’”

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the November 7, 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.

▰ STREET LIFE: I’ll for certain be reading Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London by Charlie Taverner. This is from John Gallagher, writing in the London Review of Books: “The presence of hawkers shaped the streets of London. Their barrows and stalls might block the traffic, especially when they set up in busy places – on bridges, for instance. But they are best remembered for their sound. Hawkers were the voice of many cities – the travel writer and historian James Howell advised 17th-century tourists on the continent to keep their windows open when lodging at an urban inn so that they could hear the cries of the town and better understand how it worked and the language its people spoke. Samuel Pepys, not averse to a street snack himself, owned a huge print that contained little sketches of the street sellers of Rome with the texts of their cries appended. Those ‘cries’ remained an object of fascination (and sometimes of revulsion) across the three centuries covered by Taverner. A slew of musicians and artists competed to capture the sights and sounds of hawking. Orlando Gibbons composed a madrigal in the first decades of the 17th century based on the cries of London, featuring the overlapping calls of traders selling ‘new lilywhite mussels’, ‘hot mutton pies’, garlic, samphire, ‘fine Seville oranges’ and ‘ripe cowcumbers’. In the years before industrialisation and motorised transport, the voices of those who walked the streets touting produce were especially audible, even as the ambient volume levels of city life rose and rose. Some street sellers hired prepubescent boys whose shrill tones could be heard above the din; they were known in the trade as ‘chirpers’.”

▰ RUMBLE SEAT: “[Deaf filmmaker] Ziervogel and sound design supervisor Daniel Pellerin shaped the sonic landscape for the indie Canadian film [Finality of Dusk] with increased bass and rumble to allow Finality of Dusk to not only bridge the hearing world and the Deaf world but also to allow deaf moviegoers to feel the film vibrating through their body in their seats.”

▰ GET SMART (ROOM): On the one hand, the idea of distinct pockets of silence in a single shared space is remarkable. On the other, the tools required to accomplish it are not insignificant — maybe comically so? “A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has developed a shape-changing smart speaker, which uses self-deploying microphones to divide rooms into speech zones and track the positions of individual speakers. With the help of the team’s deep-learning algorithms, the system lets users mute certain areas or separate simultaneous conversations, even if two adjacent people have similar voices. Like a fleet of Roombas, each about an inch in diameter, the microphones automatically deploy from, and then return to, a charging station. This allows the system to be moved between environments and set up automatically. In a conference room meeting, for instance, such a system might be deployed instead of a central microphone, allowing better control of in-room audio.”

▰ SAFE HARBOR: “Over the past decade, a curious invention has spread across Europe’s northern seas. It’s called a big bubble curtain, it works a bit like a giant jacuzzi, and it helps protect porpoises from the massive underwater noise caused by wind farm construction. A very large, perforated hose is laid on the seabed, encircling the wind turbine site. Air is pumped through, and bubbles rise from the holes to the surface of the water, forming a noise-buffering veil.”

▰ EAR WITNESS: Smart glasses are developing technology to assist the blind and those with poor vision to better navigate the physical world: “the smart glasses described in the study create distinct sounds known as ‘auditory icons’ when an object enters the device’s field of view that convey its identity and location to the user.” (More details in the research document.)

▰ QUICK NOTES: Social Animals: “Rats seem to emit ultrasonic squeaks of happiness just because they are in the company of another rat.” ▰ After the Fire: NPR on how “restorers are making the Notre Dame Cathedral sound the same after restoration.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus — and for the following two, as well!) ▰ Cave In: NPR on “the Great Stalacpipe Organ,” or “the largest musical instrumentin the world.” ▰ Red Alert: And how the sounds of Martian quakes are helping scientists understand its core. ▰ New Jack Swing: The new 24” iMac joins a short list of Apple products that support high-impedance headphones. ▰ Funny Girl: No doubt by now you’ve heard that Barbra Streisand, frustrated that Siri mispronounced her name (“It’s Strei-sand like sand on the beach”), says she called Apple CEO Tim Cook and asked him to change it. ▰ Paper Cuts: Kindle Direct Publishing is working on a system to automate audiobook production“using virtual voice narration and synthetic speech technology.” ▰ Fearless, and Therefore Powerful: Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, Google, and MIT teamed up to create 5,000 AI-voiced audiobooks from public domain works by Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and William Shakespeare, among other authors. ▰ Next Generation: LeVar Burton, famed for encouraging literacy with Reading Rainbow, now is teaching sonic literacy with a 10-episode podcast called Sound Detectives. ▰ In the Wind: “Leaf blowers produce a low-frequency buzz that ‘allows loud sound at harmful levels to travel over long distance and readily penetrate walls and windows.’” ▰ Radio Face: The “matchmaking” of pairing a celebrity reader for an audiobook.

Image of Stalacpipe Organ by Jon Callas from Wikipedia, used thanks to a Creative Commons license.

On the Line: The Wind and the Waves

“I have this curiosity about whether we can tune into the wind, or give it a voice. What can the wind tell us?”

That is the artist John Grzinich speaking with Philip Oltermann for The Guardian on the topic of Grzinich’s sound installations, which are large, nylon-stringed Aeolian harps.

. . .

“Men assigned to islands deemed too dangerous for their families spoke of unbearable loneliness, exacerbated by the moan of the foghorn and the ceaseless crashing of the waves.”

That is Dorothy Wickenden writing in The New Yorker about lighthouse keepers.