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Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Tag Archives: TV

Tangents: defining electronica, jamming speech, updating apps, …

News, quick links, good reads

[ March 26, 2012 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]


Jargon Watch: Last week I happened to watch an episode of CSI (the “original” series). Titled “Trends with Benefits” it was a foray into the interpersonal impact of surveillance culture, and into the perceived — perhaps the best word is “purported” — generational technological gaps. The key episode-specific character, the dead body around which the narrative circles, was a precocious Las Vegas college student who aspired to the gossip profession (the TMZ enterprise was name-checked). His dorm room was found to be loaded with prosumer technology, including cameras and various other recording devices. One of the CSI staff (the character named Greg Sanders, shown above) observed the collected digital equipment and said of it, “The kid had all kind of electronica.” It’s worth noting that this Sanders character is on the young end of the CSI staff, and was displayed in stark counterpoint to the character played by Ted Danson; Danson’s character isn’t quite sure what “trending” meant in regard to social networks, and he sometimes holds a smartphone like it’s the first time he’s ever been handed a pair of chopsticks. This usage, by Sanders, of the term “electronica” in this manner is interesting, and promising. (The episode’s script is credited to Jack Gutowitz, who according to IMDB.com spent a lot of time on Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.) It employs it to describe not a specific and dated subset of popular electronically produced music, but the broader flotsam of general digital-era activity. That is along the lines of the sense in which I use the term, and why I have resisted the urge, over the years, to remove it from this site’s logo.

Speech Jam: Geeta Dayal, author of the 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, has taken residence at Wired’s website, which is good news. In one of her first wired.com posts, she covered the “Japanese speech-jamming gun” and smartly highlights precedents ranging from J.G. Ballard to Karlheinz Stockhausen. (Additional coverage at technologyreview.com and io9.com.)

App Updates: These are all iOS, though some if not all also apply to their Android versions. Thicket has added three new modes. NodeBeat has added MIDI support, and expanded the number of savable recordings. Ambiance has added the ability to record sounds and to play sounds in “background” mode, among other things. The eDrops app has added new sounds and the ability to load and save patterns. Audioboo seems to have mostly focused on infrastructure for its latest update. Air has added AirPlay support. Reactable has added access to the community area, “save and view” performances, and more.

Social Bullet: I wrote the following to someone asking for how to “use” “social media” to “promote” their music: “The whole social media thing is complicated. There is no generally applicable answer. I would say the following, broadly: make sure you participate. For example, the Junto project had rules, and to have posted on it without reading the Info page was a matter of not really participating. Make sure if you’re on Twitter and Facebook and SoundCloud that you actively participate: post, reply to other people’s posts, comment on their music. This will, in time, lead to a stronger sense of community. You’re find musicians with whom you have things in common, and you’ll support each other in your pursuits.” (The context was correspondence with someone who had posted a track to the Disquiet Junto project on Soundcloud.com that didn’t have anything to do with the current project.)

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Brian Eno Leans on Stephen Colbert

[ November 15, 2011 / Department: field notes / Comments: 2 ]

Brian Eno appeared on The Colbert Report last Thursday, November 10. (Watch the episode at colbertnation.com.) It was a peculiar conversation, enjoyable for its peculiarity. It ran through highlights of Eno’s career, but not “the” highlights. With barely a nod to Eno’s most recent and prominent work (the latest Coldplay album, new recordings under his own name), Stephen Colbert focused on subjects that are of concern to an admirer.

One of the pleasures of Colbert’s show is figuring out where his parody of a talk-show host ends and where “he” begins. Complicating matters is that in both modes he likes to poke at the pretensions of his guests. In a way, Colbert’s hardcore fan-ness peeking out from inside his assumed identity makes a good parallel to the video that Eno put together a year ago, the one for which he interviewed himself under the guise of “Dick Flash of Pork Magazine.” Both videos invoke alternate identities, and both involve interviewers who go their own way.

Colbert spent no time spent on U2, but plenty on Roxy Music. (Eno talked about how he knew to quit the band when he found himself thinking about his laundry while performing.) No time on Coldplay, but on the “77 Million Paintings” project, which involves a generative approach to visuals. (Eno estimated it would take 400 million years to view the thing in its entirety, but gave no “guarantee,” as he put it.) As is his strength, Colbert managed to praise the work while providing mild ribbing. After comparing “77 Million Paintings” to a computer screensaver, he asked if flying toasters come across it. He asked about the Long Now project, about the giant clock that is at its heart, the 10,000-year clock, and proceeded to josh: He asked if it has an alarm. Eno reminded him it does have a chime. He asked Eno if he can sing the chime. He then reminded Eno of his work on the Windows 95 chime and asked could he sing that? Eno said he did 83 versions for that project, and he isn’t sure which they used. He said it’s his most popular piece of music ever. That’s a familiar line, as is much of what he said, but the absence of commercial pandering made the reiterated material feel less like he was on rhetorical autopilot (the talk-show-guest equivalent of thinking about the laundry), and more like Colbert was eager to run through the true fan’s greatest hits.

As a measure of Eno’s range, and of Colbert’s, they barely talked about music, and when they did, they talked about singing. (Eno’s growing interest in the human voice is a subject of his recent interview on the Sound Opinions podcast.)

And then they sang. Not immediately, but at the end of the show. They sang “Lean on Me” with Michael Stipe, whose band since 1982, R.E.M., recently announced it was breaking up. Their makeshift trio’s harmony was pretty strong, even if the lyrics got flubbed a little, and at times they weren’t entirely all sure who was leading, if anyone was, if anyone should be. (Perhaps Eno and Colbert were also distracted by the possibility that they were singing with Captain Beefheart, whom Stipe has eerily come to resemble.) They actually did the entire song. The show didn’t fade out midway through, as the viewer might have expected.

Once upon a time, the idea of Stephen Colbert, Brian Eno, and Michael Stipe singing “Lean On Me” on national television would have been surreal. Now it is simply television. Surreal, by the way, is reading the comments that appear on the show’s webpage, where all the subjects of the episode (the Occupy movement, Rick Perry’s inability to recall the name of the Department of Energy, the Eno interview) are tossed around like ingredients that resist coalescing into a salad.

The Eno interview (colbertnation.com) begins with an introduction by Colbert at 9:27.

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Silent TV & Not-So-Silent Movies

[ July 6, 2011 / Department: field notes / Comment: 1 ]

There was a nice little scene on the TV show Leverage this past Sunday evening, a rare instance of “silent television.” The episode, titled “The 10 Li’l Grifters Job,” exemplified the playfulness that the series manages to achieve, in part as a counterbalance to the fact that Leverage clearly doesn’t have the biggest budget on television. The show is about a bunch of ex-criminals who take on corrupt big businesses, and it stars Timothy Hutton, who plays Nate, the ringleader, though the real standouts are a thief named Parker (Beth Riesgraf) and a fighter named Eliot (Christian Kane). (The latter’s ability to think, in advance, through a fight like it’s a chess game suggests his creation was maybe influenced by the character Midnighter from the comic series The Authority, which had been written for some time by Warren Ellis, whose series Global Frequency was almost turned into a TV series by Leverage co-creator John Rogers. [Update: apparently this is the case, thanks to a commenter's citation.])

Anyhow, this past Sunday’s episode of Leverage, written by Geoffrey Thorne, involved a death that occurs during a costume-party murder mystery that is staged at the home of an exceedingly corrupt businessman. At one point, the Timothy Hutton character, who has dressed like Ellery Queen, and Parker, dolled up like Nancy Drew, find themselves at opposite ends of a stairway, needing to get by a guard. They have to remain silent, so they read each other’s lips. There are subtitles for us non-lip readers, but the whole thing already has the feel of a silent movie when a tinkling piano appears in the show’s score to seal the deal — not to mention that the guard is wearing a bowler hat, straight out of a Charlie Chaplin flick. (Hutton playing Queen is an in-joke, because his father, actor Jim Hutton, played the character in the 1970s TV series.)

True Grift: The characters Hardison and Parker dressed, respectively, as a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew in an episode of the series Leverage that briefly flirted with the concept of “silent television”

The sequence is one of the longest wordless non-action/non-sex/non-people-in-labs-with-colorful-test-tubes scenes on television in recent memory. TV musicals, as series and as standalone episodes, have been the rage for some time now, and despite being a huge admirer of the late Dennis Potter (whose The Singing Detective is the ur-text for most fourth-wall-breaking, singing-and-dancing television spectacles), I’d say it’s high time that silent TV episodes had their moment. Being an intimate medium watched generally in the privacy of one’s home, television lends itself to the silent treatment.

What’s sort of funny, as a side note, is that neither Ellery Queen nor Nancy Drew has ever been the subject of silent movie, at least to the best of my knowledge. The two earliest Ellery Queen are streaming online for free and are titled The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) and The Mandarin Mystery (1936). The first Nancy Drew movie appeared in 1938, more than a decade after The Jazz Singer (1927) popularized the “talkie.”

If the fun Leverage sequence brings to mind the ctheory.net essay on “silent television” by Robert Briggs that I wrote about last September, the quasi-anachronism is straight out of this great xkcd.com webcomic:

There’s an episode recap for “The 10 Li’l Grifters Job” at tnt.tv, and in the next week the full episode should stream there for free.

Shhh! It’s a Theater: Speaking of silents, as well as of history as viewed through the lens of the present: it’s pretty genius that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival teamed up with the local public library. Read about it at examiner.com. Truth be told, though, this is one of those situations when words in common suggest correlations where they don’t necessarily exist. For one thing, the projectors that played silent movies were notoriously loud. For another, live music performances were part of the experience, and the music was anything but silent, as part of its role was to cover up projector noise. The showings could, reportedly, get pretty rowdy. We only call them “silent” movies in retrospect. It’s an example, as debcha (in a message from her twitter.com/debcha account) recently reminded me, of what is called a “retronym”: Until the introduction of the talkie, silent movies were simply movies, just as until the introduction of the electric guitar, acoustic guitars were simply guitars.

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Monograph 51: Early BBC Radiophonic Workshop Pamphlet

[ December 29, 2010 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

It’s been over 50 years since the BBC saw fit to create its own applied laboratory for electronic audio — which at the time meant, to a great extent, the creative use of tape recordings and turntables. That lab was known as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and it existed from 1958 through 1998, during which time it benefited from the efforts of such early electronic music figures as Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, and produced untold hours of sounds and music (the distinction between which was a source of near-constant inter-departmental drama) for BBC radio and television, including, perhaps most famously, the theme song (aka “signature tune”) for Doctor Who.

Sonic Warfare: A gadget created early in the life of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: “weighs only 12 lb.”

In the process of reviewing a recent book on the Workshop — Special Sound (Oxford), by Louis Niebur — for another publication (that review should be out in January), I was introduced by a friend to an online trove of BBC engineering monographs, some of which include Radiophonic-specific documentation. There’s one in particular, from 1963, that’s entirely about the Radiophonic activities. And it’s the subject of my latest post at boingboing,net, “BBC Engineering Monographs from 1950s and ’60s: Once 5 Shillings, Now Free.”

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Quote of the Week: Silent Television

[ September 5, 2010 / Department: field notes / Comments: 6 ]

In a recent essay at ctheory.net, titled “Silent Television: A Virtual History of Voice and Voicelessness in Divergent Media,” Robert Briggs discusses a negligible cultural territory by energetically taking the measure of its relative absence.

There has been no significant silent television, unlike in film, which was preceded by a full and popular “silent” era. Briggs, naturally, points out the “myth” (in the words of Raymond Fielding) of silent film, how few if any “silent” films were viewed in silence — if anything, they were rambunctious affairs, with live musical performance, choreographed sound effects, and an audience comfortable with discussing the on-screen activity.

If anything, Briggs notes, it’s the rise of the talkie that turned the movie theater from a convivial place to a library-like zone of quiet. To this effect, he quotes Alexander Walker’s The Shattered Silents:

Silent movies had enabled the casual customer to drop in, and within a minute or two be locked into the story and characters. Mime-acting made the characters’ predicaments easily intelligible; sub-titles gave people emotional cues to follow rather than narrative points to recall. But dialogue changed all this: it demanded attention, it enforced silence on the audiences who had hitherto been able to swap comments on the movie below the music of the pianist or pit orchestra. Now one had to shut up, sit up and pay attention to a plot that more and more was conveyed in words, not pictures.

It’s odd that an article such as Briggs’, with a subsection titled “Art” and several references to the avant-garde, makes no mention of the television-set abstractions of Nam June Paik. But Briggs does dive deep into popular television, noting the silent show of Ernie Kovacs and the “Hush” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he expands the purview to include amateur video postings to YouTube and the like. (He doesn’t mention Yule logs — perhaps it’s an American custom, as he’s based in Australia — but he does touch on nature documentaries.)

Especially of interest is Briggs’ attention to the rise of the DVD, and how the presence of commentary tracks “shatters the ‘naturalism’ of sound that has dominated audio-visual production since the late 1920s.”

One thing Briggs’ doesn’t state directly but does make room for, by emphasizing the manner in which radio (not film) was the real precursor to TV, is the extent to which it is a writer’s medium. That’s the main tension inherent in silent television. A show like West Wing was, deservedly, praised for its scripts, which reportedly were notably thicker than the TV average. As shows get more and more cinematic, we’re witnessing more sequences that move the story forward without dialogue — think of the interstellar shots Battlestar Galactica, the fights in Human Target, the Oceans-style heists in Leverage — and we may yet be entering into one of the more “silent” periods in television’s history.

(Photo licensed via Creative Commons from flickr.com.)

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