Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 94

Scratch Pad: Fireworks, Bootlegs, Spock

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others, including Bluesky (disquiet.bsky.social), which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment, and, yes, Threads (threads.net/@dsqt). Today’s Scratch Pad entry went out at the end of the day, because I drove to Stockton and back to attend a comic book convention.

▰ When I was in high school I worked for the school newspaper. One day, a kid said he was gonna start an “underground” school paper. I went to that meeting. It was the same people. This is what every new social media app feels like.

▰ The life cycle of (solo effort) to-do list tools: single text/markdown doc → spreadsheet → wide range of apps → single text doc

▰ If only the annual San Francisco fog cover could muffle the sound of fireworks as effectively as it dims the rumored visuals

▰ Listening to a bootleg of a concert you attended in 1989 and wondering if that was your own voice you just heard amid the cheering

▰ Several people have uploaded their Disquiet Junto tracks this week to Bandcamp, and I thought, “Hey, since I can make a playlist on the mobile Bandcamp app, I’ll do so.” Then I realized I can’t share that playlist with anyone else

▰ Pretty sure that’s the most musicians we’ve ever had in a single Disquiet Junto project: 73. We had 67 on SoundCloud and 6 on Bandcamp.

▰ Strange New Worlds is already my favorite recent Star Trek. Spock getting a noise complaint for playing his Vulcan lute was icing on the cake.

▰ I memed, inspired by the recent episodes of Strange New Worlds:

▰ I remain convinced that most categories of online services are akin either to hair salons, to grocery stores, or to movie theaters. That is, either you choose one service and stick with it, or you have a main one but go to others, or you don’t really care but have some preferences. I think social media has mostly been a hair salon until recently. I don’t think it can persist in movie theater mode, which lately is how things feel. We’ll see what happens next.

▰ Interesting that this whole thing Meta built is built around the assumption you’ll wanna create threads — rather than standalone posts. Or perhaps “threads” is also meant to include conversations. I generally see threads on TUS* as a bonus not the point. But maybe that’s because I work in paragraphs for a living, and single-thought posts feel like a holiday.

*the unmentionable service

▰ The stairway at the Luggage Store Gallery is one of my favorite passageways in the entirety of San Francisco

▰ When you attend a drone noise improv performance, and your phone starts cosplaying like it’s the rogue AI from Person of Interest

▰ It’s weird. The concept of threads on Twitter originated as a user innovation, drawing from pre-Twitter online discussion platforms, and then Twitter built the ability to construct threads into its UX. As of this past week, Thread is now the name of a competing service. On this competing service, even a single post is called a “thread” though by the original definition — the definition at least until the day this competing service went live — a single post isn’t a thread.

Gear Videos for Non-Musicians

Don’t mistake a piece of gear appearing prominently in a YouTube video as a sign that it’s a “gear” video. Think of it, instead, as a potential étude, a study of a particular approach in the form of a piece of music. In this case, it’s Andrew Tasselmyer reworking cello samples in a popular “performance sampler” — that is, a device, here the Octatrack, that can sample audio and that was designed to act on those samples during a live performance, such as this one. There’s always discussion about the “dehumanization” of music due to electronic instruments, processing, software, etc. This concern can be especially an issue in live settings, where the player inscrutably touches a few buttons and might as well, from the point of view of the audience, be doing their taxes. The beauty of a YouTube video is it flips the scenario. The player’s hands are shown close-up, even larger than life, allowing a clear alignment of action and effect, of gesture and sound. The resulting track is a magnificent exploration of held chords, of long tones layered, intertwined, and modulated. You can watch along — or just close your eyes and drift off. (Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Tasselmyer currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a member of Hotel Neon, Gray Acres, and Mordançage.)

Disquiet Junto Project 0601: Hard Six

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four 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, July 10, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 6, 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 0601: Hard Six
The Assignment: Let a roll of the dice determine the relative prominence of various parts of a track.

The project was inspired in part by recent correspondence with Junto participant Robert Precht. More to come in that regard. 

Step 1: Choose six brief segments of sound that you have recently recorded. Or record some new segments now. Either way, select six of them, and label them one through six.

Step 2: Roll a single die for each of the six segments chosen in Step 1.

Step 3: The result of each roll in Step 2 represents the relative presence of that given segment in a finished piece of music. Think about how the pieces might relate to each other. This idea of relative presence can mean whatever you want: frequency of appearance, relative volume, intelligibility etc.

Step 4: Record a piece of music in which the relative presence of the segments chosen in Step 1 correlate with the results from Step 2.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0601” (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 “disquiet0601” (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-0601-hard-six/

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.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

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, July 10, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 6, 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 601st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Hard Six (The Assignment: Let a roll of the dice determine the relative prominence of various parts of a track), at: https://disquiet.com/0601/

The project was inspired in part by recent correspondence with Junto participant Robert Precht. More to come in that regard.

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-0601-hard-six/

TWiS Listening Post (0006)

This went out today as a weekly bonus — a thank-you to people who financially support This Week in Sound. It’s a supplement to the free Tuesday and Friday issues: an annotated playlist of recommended music. I wrote about (1) a drone by Bell Mechanical, (2) a preview of an album by Alfredo Costa Monteiro, and (3) a video by Modular Beat.

“Low-Frequency Ripples in the Fabric of Spacetime”

▰ IN A PICKLE: “Sports can produce all kinds of unpleasant noises: referees’ whistles, rancorous boos, vuvuzelas. But the most grating and disruptive sound in the entire athletic ecosystem right now may be the staccato pop-pop-popemanating from America’s rapidly multiplying pickleball courts. … The sound has brought on a nationwide scourge of frayed nerves and unneighborly clashes — and those, in turn, have elicited petitions and calls to the police and last-ditch lawsuits aimed at the local parks, private clubs and homeowners associations that rushed to open courts during the sport’s recent boom.” I love when sound pops up in areas I know nothing about, and sports is high on that list. That quote is from a New York Times story. For more, check out the “pickleball sound mitigation” website, pickleballsound.com.

▰ SHOP TALK: If you’re a fan of The Repair Ship, then you know Steven Fletcher, the multi-bespectacled clock specialist and all around wise tinkerer. What you may not know is … well, check out this video, in which he divulges some sonic intrigue from the set. And then check out the follow-up video. (And if you don’t know the show, do give it a try. It’s a testament to craftsmanship, to the emotional power of mementos, and to decency. And sometimes they work on alarm clocks and jukeboxes.)

▰ BASS IS THE PLACE: “Astronomers have detected a rumbling ‘cosmic bass note’of gravitational waves thought to be produced by the slow-motion mergers of supermassive black holes across the universe. The observations are the first detections of low-frequency ripples in the fabric of spacetime and promise to open a new window on the monster black holes lying at the centres of galaxies.” This builds on prior observations: “Until now, though, scientists have only been able to capture short ‘chirps’ of gravitational waves linked to mergers of black holes or neutron stars only slightly larger than the sun.” The image below is a widely circulated interpretation of the phenomenon by artist Aurore Simonnet for NANOGrav, or the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves. (Thanks, Neil Stringellow!)

▰ AIR FARE: The New York Times took a necessary look at the dangers of noise pollution: “A growing body of research shows that this kind of chronic noise — which rattles the neighborhood over 280 times a day, more than 105,000 each year — is not just annoying. It is a largely unrecognized health threat that is increasing the risk of hypertension, stroke and heart attacks worldwide, including for more than 100 million Americans.” The noise in that example is of passing jet planes. “Scientists believe that pronounced fluctuations in noise levels like this might compound the effects on the body. They suspect jarring sounds that break through the ambience — recurring jet engines, a pulsating leaf blower, or the brassy whistle of trains — are more detrimental to health than the continuous whirring of a busy roadway, even if the average decibel levels are comparable.”

▰ FOOD NOISE: We know about COVID’s sometime impact on smell and taste. How about losing your sense of “food noise” due to drugs like Ozempic, an obesity medicine? As it turns out, “food noise” isn’t noise like crunchy potato chips. It’s more like mental noise, shorthand for people who can’t “stop thinking about food.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ QUICK NOTES: Line of Fire: It’s well into fireworks time as I type this, but here’s a reminder that fireworks can serve up psychological harm to veterans and pets alike. ▰ Going Under: If you’re wondering about the underwater acoustics angle on the horrifying OceanGate disaster, then check out this Twitter thread.(Thanks, Philip Sherburne!) ▰ Up Up and Away: If the Audium ceiling in the piece below strikes your fancy, definitely check out the “hanging concert hall,” or Sonic Sphere, at the Shed in New York. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Do Panic: The Shriek of the Week is the Green Sandpiper — “a loud, panicky chooweet or choo-wit-wit, repeated over and over.” ▰ We All Scream: CBS Mornings covered the widely deployed “Wilhelm scream” the original recording of which was recently discovered. (Thanks, Daniel Raffel!) ▰ Bird Roll Call: Volunteers documenting all the birds in Acadia National Park. (Thanks, Rich!) ▰ World Music: I was happy to see that Janet Cardiff, one of my favorite contemporary sound artists, recommended one of my favorite books, Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World; I trust she enjoyed the part about Erwin Schrödinger’s misophonia. ▰ Any Wheels Bad: The Croatian city of Dubrovnik has banned wheeled suitcases due to “locals irritated by the click-clack noise [on their] cobbled streets.”

Sound Ledger

500: Number of noise complaints submitted by just one Queens, New York, resident (quite amazingly, the person’s last name is “Detering”)

30: Number of years it took for a recently observed “‘cosmic bass note’ of gravitational waves” to pass by Earth

25: Percent of polled Texans near crypto mining operations who expressed concern about noise pollution

Social Recordings

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been experimenting with posting brief field recordings (audio and video) on Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. Part of this is just a matter of feeding the algorithm. There’s some value to making the sort of social media you want to see in the world. Part of this is just social engineering — you’ll attract and disinterest the parties you’d want to, respectively. Part of it is functionally algorithmic: to some degree, the systems will send you material related to what you yourself do. By putting out field recordings, the boomerang that is the algorithm may send some back. Part of it is just getting a sense for how such material functions in social media: how does relative silence, the quiet noise of daily life, as expressed in field recordings, sit within the largely exaggerated modes of Instagram and TikTok? How do captions, hashtags, and location IDs — not to mention the decision-making inherent in framing and editing — shape the otherwise mundane material?

I’ve been doing these for 30 seconds each. That is long enough to encourage spending the time, and short enough — especially for people not accustomed to listening to everyday sound — to not discourage engagement. It’s long enough to allow for some variation, and short enough to allow for choosing start and end points that isolate the underlying tone of a given space and time.

Audium Audience Chatter

The Audium is a longstanding space for experimental, immersive sound in San Francisco. The venue was originally housed in an old building in the Richmond District, opening in 1967 after over a decade of planning and one-off performances, and it has been closer to the City Hall area, on Bush Street, since 1975. The Audium’s small auditorium has no windows. When the concert begins, the lights are fully turned off. Aside from dimly glowing arrows on the floor that direct toward the exit, it is pitch black; you can’t see your own hands, let along the person seated next to you. I attended an evening concert there on Saturday, July 1: a revisitation of a 1969 work by cofounder Stan Shaff (the other founder was Doug McEachern), with Shaff’s son, David Shaff, performing. The piece was an hour long. It consisted of mostly real-world sounds — sirens, horns, bells, balloons, traffic — being moved around the room’s 176 individual speakers, and transformed in the process: filtered, slowed, garbled, dissected. In addition, one heard fantastical abstractions and bits of found media, what seemed at times like soundtracks to TV shows and commercials. There was a 10-minute intermission halfway through the concert. I shot this short video during the break as part of my ongoing series of 30-second field recordings (I’ve been posting these vertical videos at instagram.com/dsqt and tiktok.com/@disquiet.com). I’m always interested in chatter when the combined verbalization transcends communication and becomes a matter of texture, tonality, and rhythm. I was especially keen here to witness whether the specific circumstances in any way impacted the way people spoke, both individually and collectively — did they perhaps hear themselves, in this tiny room, as source audio for an intimate, spatial performance like the one we were all there to experience?

Scratch Pad: Bandcamp, Fireworks, X-rays

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others, including Bluesky (disquiet.bsky.social), which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment.

▰ “This person called, but left an empty message”

The digital silence of unanswered robocalls

▰ The AudioMoth field recorder had its first multi-day overnight in the backyard, and the resulting 1080 files were, thankfully, automatically divided into three different folders, one for each day.

▰ I was doing some research that led me back to some ancient issues of Scientific American, and came across some excellent home-audio fear-mongering in an advertisement about turntable care.

Person: “Oh, you like sound. You must love the Fourth of July, all those fireworks.”

▰ Time for the annual conversation:

Me: ” … “

▰ Mundane crowdsourcing question: If you keep a running document on a given topic broken down by day, do you generally put the items in chronological order or reverse chronological order? I find I do some one way and some the other.

▰ The dentist had yet another iteration of x-ray tech, a 360° thing you stand in the middle of. It makes “sample and hold”-style synth beeps. Ended up talking about MRIs. The dentist said he got through the annoying noise by imagining instruments fleshing out an EDM arrangement.

▰ Several people have uploaded their Disquiet Junto tracks this week to Bandcamp, and I thought, “Hey, since I can make a playlist on the mobile app, I’ll do so.” Then I realized I can’t share that playlist with anyone else. That’s on the official app. But several people recommended some third-party solutions, so I’m trying out bndcmpr.co.

Teenage (Engineering) Wasteland

Looks like visitors in the gift shop couldn’t resist the urge to touch the exposed speaker