Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 97

Location, Location, Location

An apartment building near the symphony hall in San Francisco. Wondering if the window with the cello case belongs to an orchestra member.

Outlier

Sound Studies x Theology

This book review I wrote originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of The Wire, number 471. The article appears here (from behind the paywall, now that subsequent issues have come out) in ever so slightly edited form (just matters of punctuation). As I noted at the time of its publication: major thanks to my old friend Erik Davis for having tipped me off to this.

Here’s the review in full:

Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks – And What It Can Teach Us 
Kim Haines-Eitzen 
Princeton University Press Hbk 145 pp 

For Kim Haines-Eitzen, the desert is both biblical and personal. An American, she spent her childhood in the Middle East, or Near East, reared by parents who, inspired by their Mennonite heritage, had moved from the US to Jordan to study Arabic and do humanitarian work. Born in the late 1960s, she associates her experience with serenity and fear alike, with the quiet expanse of the Sinai and the sirens of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The shore of the Red Sea was her holiday playground.

Now a Cornell University professor of religion, Haines-Eitzen seeks to merge the personal and the biblical in a slim volume with a vaguely self-help-ish subtitle, Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks – And What It Can Teach Us. She achieves this goal through the humble act of sitting quietly, much like the hermits of yore.

Unlike those hermits, however, she has audio recording gear in tow. Since 2012, Haines-Eitzen has documented the sound of the places she visits and where she lives. The poetic codas to each chapter feature QR codes that, given the context, can be mistaken for the ornate initials that decorated ancient manuscripts. These link to online recordings she made around the world. Her tracks transport the listener to places like her family’s retreat in Arizona and the canyons of the Wadi Qelt in the Judean Desert.

The key word is retreat. Despite the monastic act’s association with solitude, a monastery is itself a community, and thus the notion of self-exile gets revealed here as something more akin to migration: from one life to another, from exterior to interior. In Haines-Eitzen’s telling, such paradoxes inherent in the monastic impulse run deep. While Trappists take vows of silence, most monastic life is simply remote. Less explored in the book is the contrast (even conflict?) between personal discovery and selfless divinity.

The narrative moves back and forth between the wired present and the mythic past. In meaningful ways, little has changed, least of all the human propensity to complain about noise pollution. An early avatar of this disgruntlement is Antony, a celebrated hermit from roughly 1800 years ago who “left the noise and distractions of city life for the quiet of the desert.”

We abandon civilization alongside Antony, and with other monastic aspirants. The ancient ones include the saints John Climacus, Paul, George of Choziba, and Eucherius, who said “no sound is heard in the desert save the voice of God.” Haines-Eitzen politely disagrees: the desert is rich with sound. We witness her personal revelations (sometimes repetitively) in this regard, such as the idea that to listen while recording is to listen intently, and to re-listen through the ears of the machine is to hear what one might not have otherwise. Likewise, she stops trying to capture the world “pure and pristine,” without people in it, and comes to appreciate humans’ sonic place in the environment. We also visit reverberant cave chapels, ponder the animism belied by Western monotheism, and learn lots of cool ancient Greek onomatopoeia.

Sonorous Desert is a book about seekers, among them the widely travelled author herself. Modern figures cited include Edward Abbey, Virginia Woolf, Gordon Hempton and Thomas Merton, each arriving at the same conclusion: the quest for external silence is ultimately one for internal peace. (Oddly, that list doesn’t include Pauline Oliveros, who is synonymous with the deep listening mentioned in the book’s subtitle.) Wandering into the desert provides a metaphor for the effort and time required. As Haines-Eitzen quotes Merton from 1962, foreseeing smartphone apps like Calm and Headspace half a century hence, “You can’t have interior silence just by pushing a button.”

Scratch Pad: Headphones, Metadata

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 post.lurk.org (Mastodon).

▰ Fun with bluetooth headphone naming

▰ How is “codec” not an option in Monday’s New York Times Spelling Bee?

▰ The Moon Baboon level of the video game It Takes Two took a lot out of me

▰ Almost a month into Duolingo and I still don’t know the German word for “labeled a bunch of music files and then realized I hadn’t converted them yet from WAV to ALAC”

▰ Album metadata achieves new heights in trainspotting

▰ Best language I’ve seen in a security process (CAPTCHA/login) in some time: “Do not challenge me on this device again”

▰ Not sure why I find both Goodreads and StoryGraph so dissatisfying. They seem overly complicated for what they’re for (entering dates on Goodreads in particular is peculiar and often doesn’t seem to work). If you have a recommendation for an alternative (I tried the Mastodon-based one and didn’t get it) that’d be great.

▰ Nature marks where to cut

▰ Morning sounds: birdsong, chatter, air conditioning exhaust

AI + Pop (or vs?) in Wired

A Wired magazine reporter, Amos Barshad, got in touch with me recently when he was writing a story, “AI Could Usher in a New Era of Music. Will It Suck?” published earlier this week, about the intersection of artificial intelligence and popular music. The article’s focus, per its title, is “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song enabled by AI that mimicked Canadian rapper Drake and got a lot of attention in the process (from audiences, from the press, and from the record label that administrates Drake’s commercial interests). 

Barshad and I talked on the phone when he was researching the piece. As he quotes in the article, I think that the “hand-wringing [around AI music], it’s a strange thing to me. … We’ve been concerned with creating artificial life at least since the Golem.” The rise in anxiety about AI makes me think about issues raised when the cloning of Dolly the sheep was announced in 1997; I kept coming across people saying how “now” was the time to start debating the impact of cloning, as if cloning hadn’t been on the horizon for a long time. It was at that moment I realized how few people must read (or absorb and reflect on) science fiction, which I’ve found has routinely provided me with tools to navigate daily modern life. Sci-fi may not successfully predict the future (arguably, it is always about the present), but it can sure instigate thought experiments in advance of the future’s eventual — and in the case of Drake Prime, mundane if worrisome — arrival. I appreciate the economic and existential anxieties that come along with the current slate of AI techniques. I think the Writers Guild of America, for example, is correct is using this moment to put initial rules in place. I also think a lot of writing about “AI” treats it as a singular instance — as a known, identifiable, and nameable thing. Which it is not. In many cases, today’s writing opposed to AI reads about as sophisticated as arguments that regularly situate a nameless “they” as the source of any given problem. (As for writing that’s strongly in favor of AI, by contrast it often reads like it was written by an AI, which is a whole other problem.)

In some ways, I’m the worst person to talk with about the impact of AI on pop music because I don’t really pay a lot of attention to pop music. While on occasion a song will catch my fancy, I barely listen to anything with a singer, and haven’t for a long time. It’s not that I dislike pop music these days so much as it disinterests me. I listen to music continuously, and the patterns of adoption and mimesis in pop music strike me as slow and routine, compared with the ingenuity and invention in experimental music.

A key thing for me that Barshad touches on in his Wired article is the cybernetic history of both artificial intelligence and electronic music. The development of cybernetics is key to the development of artificial intelligence and, as I note in the article, of generative systems. The Drake AI song is, as Barshad quotes me, boring, plain and simple. It’s the end result of rote cause and effect (“please make something that sounds like X”). AI will be of interest, at least to me, as a musical instrument, as a music production tool, as a creative tool, when it engages in the creative process more thoroughly as a generative system — which is to say, one where the outcomes are considerably less certain, less like placing an order with a mechanical turk and more like, as Brian Eno says (and as, again, is mentioned in Barshad’s article), tending a garden.

In AI Landscape

I sometimes do ask myself “What would John Cage do?” — and it’s been happening with regard to ChatGPT, etc., lately as the discourse around AI grows and grows. Writing about AI has become a kind of OpEd version of the “grey goo” feared during the initial development of nanotechnology. Forgive me for adding a few hundred GMA-free* words to it.

I imagine Cage saying various things about AI circa mid-2023, and some of those things are in opposition to each other. The opposition is not representative of him being mercurial, but of me being unsure about where his opinion would potentially land. In this context, I reread some of his conversations with Morton Feldman, collected in the great book Radio Happenings, and also some of his lectures, in which he talked about computers, radio, tape splicing, and other equipment he employed.

The following two contrasting statements seem to me what might, perhaps, be the outcome of his consideration of the topic — though I say that with the emphasis on the word “perhaps.” These statements in quotes below are entirely inventions on my part. An English teacher of mine, back in 11th grade, introduced the word “perhaps” to us as a highly useful rhetorical device, and it has been a key tool for me ever since. How does one employ the word “perhaps” correctly? When uncertain, say “perhaps.” When not in doubt, definitely consider saying “perhaps.” 

These two diametrically opposed hypothetical responses are where I’ve currently found myself:

“ChatGPT is just a tool, a tool made by humans. I’ve worked with creative constraints for much of my life. I want to see what this tool can do. For what is an iteratively refined prompt other than a form of explorative constraint?”

Or perhaps:

“ChatGPT is a machine — not even a machine, but software running on a machine. Why should I care what a machine has to say if all it knows is what we’ve already told it?”

I’m not sure which direction Cage would have gone. It’s sort of like how on the one hand, Cage was exactly the wide-eyed thinker you’d want on a committee of notable humans if we were suddenly contacted by an alien world, while on the other, his response might likely be something along the lines of, “We can’t even speak with our cats yet, and we don’t know what’s at the bottom of the ocean, so why do we want to leave the planet so soon?” Of course, before deciding one way or another, he’d ask if this alien world is home to a previously undocumented species of mushrooms. 

Almost certainly, Cage would have come upon on a direction — an insight — about modern AI, circa 2023, that I can’t myself imagine. But with the limits of my imagination, that’s the forked path I currently find myself at the crossroads of. On the one hand, he was an inveterate tinkerer. On the other, he all but gave up on the concept of using music to “communicate,” which makes me wonder if yet another means of communication would be of interest in the first place. 

I’ll continue my dive back into Cage, and I’ll keep thinking about this.

*generatively mediated authorship

Disquiet Junto Project 0597: Goal Line

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, June 12, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 8, 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 0597: Goal Line
The Assignment: Get started on a plan by getting over getting started.

Step 1: For a lot of people right now, it’s around the start of summer. For many of them, it can mean the start of one plan or another. You may very well have musical goals for the next few months. Think of one to focus on.

Step 2: Don’t wait. Record one piece of music that kick-starts whatever goal you’re working toward. Often the first step is the most difficult. Take that step.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0597” (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 “disquiet0597” (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-0597-goal-line/

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. Sometimes shorter is less daunting.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 12, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 8, 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 597th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Goal Line (The Assignment: Get started on a plan by getting over getting started), at: https://disquiet.com/0597/

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-0597-goal-line/

The Rise and Rise of Voice AI

I was wondering about the relative frequency of certain topics that intrigue me in regard to contemporary, technology-oriented sound studies. For a quick glimpse, first I charted “machine listening” in Google Trends, then adding “audio surveillance” and, for a broader swath, “audio deepfake.” The three terms were almost identical in the narrow band of popularity they populated for the past few years. I sought to expand the subject matter with a fourth item, something related to artificial intelligence.

Needless to say, we’re in the midst of AI Summer. These days “AI + [anything]” — following the rise in chatter around DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, DeepMind, Bard, and OpenAI, among other projects — is going to be more popular now than it was even six or seven months ago.

Still, when I selected a term, I was fascinated to see how much larger this one line item was than the others. To round out the set, I added what I imagined would be the more active “voice ai,” yielding the outlier green bar in the chart below. The results marked a significant shift:

What’s going on isn’t merely that “voice AI” is greater than the other three lines combined. It’s that “voice AI” renders any internal divergence among those three to a flattened data nothing-burger. To a degree, this divide might signal that a single term has become a catchall for all manner of subjects, fields, and anxieties in the popular imagination. Alternately, it could also mean that whatever energy might be spent more in more different ways is now focused, laser tight, on where the SEO money is. What would be great would be to see a wider variety of terms gain traction as time passes.

What other key terms interest you in this realm?

TWiS Listening Post (0004)

This went out today as a thank you to paid This Week in Sound subscribers: an annotated playlist of recommended music (a new Aphex Twin cover from Simon Farintosh, a science fiction audio backdrop from Stark Trek, and a noise album from Tim Olive).

This Week in Sound: The Small Club of Species That Learns Songs

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

▰ FLIGHT CLUB: “[A] growing body of research is showing that the affinity human musicians feel toward birdsong has a strong scientific basis. Scientists are understanding more about avian species’ ability to learn, interpret and produce songs much like our own.” One researcher (Hollis Taylor, a violinist and an ornithologist) “has observed what appear to be warm-up sessions, rehearsals and singing contests. Other than humans, there’s only a ‘small club’ of species with an observed capacity to learn songs and vocal patterns.” And mysteries remain: “If birdsong’s main purpose in some species is for males to attract females, then why do some females also sing? ‘Female song actually arose very early in songbird evolution,’ he said. ‘In species where females don’t sing, it’s because they’ve lost the ability to sing rather than it being gained.’ This indicates that it may have once been evolutionarily beneficial for females to sing — and scientists can’t say why.” (Read at nytimes.com with a gift link.)

▰ HELL’S BELLS: “Yes, the harvested audio will be imported onto a computer and deepened, sculpted, flayed, and spliced until it fits the unforgiving grim-dark horrors of Sanctuary, but Blizzard still takes a distinctly classical approach to the aural aesthetics of Diablo IV, one that resembles the practical Hollywood filmmaking of the 1950s and ’60s. The marauding demons are programmed with dangling bike chains, molten candle wax, and crushed fruits and vegetables, all of which is captured tangibly, without resorting to the freeware clips bobbing around the internet.” All about the sounds of the new video game.

▰ AMPED UP: “He describes Sonic Check as ‘rapid-development tool’ that uses machine learning AI ‘trained with real market research’ to give the user a ‘measurement’ of a sound. It looks at how consumers responded to similar sounds in the past and provides a prediction of how a sound will be received by consumers. … Once users upload a sound, the AI analyses its performance in relation to ‘brand fit’, memorability, and ‘authenticity’.” —Abbey Bamford interviews sonic branding agency Amp CEO Michele Arnese about Sonic Hub, “which seeks to simplify the sonic branding process for designers and brands using four different AI technologies.” Sonic Check is one of its tools. The others are Sonic Radar (which provides “insights on a brand’s use of sounds across its digital channels, using music AI tagging technology ‘trained by experts to categorise music’”) and Sonic Space (which “uses generative AI to create new music out of existing music, acting as a ‘sonic repository’”). More at ampsoundbranding.com/sonic-hub.

▰ QUICK NOTES: ▰ This Is What It Sounds Like: The Shriek of the Week is the “stock dove,” which, we’re told, sounds like a normal dove’s “coo” — but “in reverse” (“Imagine the bird is scratching a record like a DJ, swiping it backwards and forwards”). ▰ Drop the Mic: Micah Loewinger of On the Media speaks to Dan Charnas, author of Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, about “how music copyright law suppresses the artistic voices of hip hop producers.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Light Brigade:Behind the scenes with the Imagineers who developed the sound for the TRON Lightcycle / Run ride at Walt Disney World. ▰ Songs About Buildings: Learn all about new Finnish acoustic standards for “acoustic environments in buildings.” ▰ Grand Scale: Composer-developer Giorgio Sancristoforo’s new software is a synthesizer with 1,000 oscillators. ▰ Sized Up: How MassiveMusic Berlin updated the sonic logo of the German bank Sparkasse. ▰ Voice Over: The voices of Shaquille O’Neal, Melissa McCarthy, and Samuel L. Jackson are leaving Amazon Alexa.

▰ APPLE DROP: There was a lot of Apple news this week, and in it quite a bit of audio, such that it gets its own section this week: Coming in Apple tvOS 17 is “Enhance Dialogue” (“which lets users more clearly hear what is being said over effects, action, and music in a move or a TV show” — thanks, Bruce Levenstein!) ▰ The new VR goggles from Apple involve “audio ray tracing”; here’s a primer: wepc.com (“It would make it seem like … sounds are coming from your room in a particular place.) ▰ “There’s a new Adaptive Audio feature for the AirPods that combines Transparency and Active Noise Cancellation to dynamically match the conditions of the environment that you’re in.” ▰ USB-C microphones to be supported by iPads. ▰ Apple Music adds crossfading, among other features. ▰ “Users can now simply say ‘Siri’ instead of ‘Hey ‌Siri‌,’ and ‌Siri‌ will understand follow-up commands that do not include the trigger word.” ▰ “Personal Voice is designed to allow you to use artificial intelligence to create a replica of your voice.” ▰ Added to iMessage: “automatic transcriptions for voice messages.” ▰ FaceTime will have “Live Voicemail with voice-to-text transcription before answering; transcription is handled on device.” ▰ “AirPlay‌ can learn how and when you listen to certain content, for example by displaying a nearby AirPlay-supporting speaker to select depending which room you’re in.”