The Bource Supremacy: Oscar 2012 nominations were announced today, and the ones in the “Music (Original Score)” category seem to serve as a retrograde industry analgesic to the groundbreaking win last year by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their work on The Social Network. John Williams, whose name is synonymous with old-school, was nominated for not one but two films (The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse). Howard Shore was nominated for Hugo (like Tintin, an animated film). The remaining two scores are Ludovic Bource‘s for The Artist and Alberto Iglesias‘ for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Not only are all five scores orchestral (or large-scale chamber), but as if to emphasize their old-schoolness they’re all associated with movies that take place in the past. (Iglesias also did Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che, which means he has become the go-to composer for Cold War atmospherics.) The moribund aura hovering around this sort of antiquated approach is emphasized by the nomination of just two songs in the “Music (Original Song)” category. The caption to this situation is: The Academy didn’t get excited about much this year. Fortunately, Drive and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (two of the year’s most sonically conscious films) were acknowledged in, respectively, the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories. Full list at oscar.go.com. I’ll be posting my favorite scores of 2011 shortly.

Pedal Power: Yes, there is “A Blog about Hand-Made, Analog Effects Pedals.” The name says it all. Well, the site’s subtitle does. The name of the site, blog.8302.net, is a little more opaque, and according to its author, Barcelona-based Arturo Castillo, the four-digit number signifies nothing in particular. Typical posts feature such language as “Quite often I get asked about the difference between overdrive, fuzz and distortion,” or pay homage to filmmakers (note the last 30 seconds of a video posted in earlier this month). As the videos on his site, as well as his descriptions of pedals, might suggest, Castillo recognizes the equipment as tools for sonic invention unto themselves as much as for traditional employment in the service of guitars. If you prefer your pedal coverage in tidy bursts, Castillo is also at twitter.com/8302net. The pedal blog parallels Castillo’s online shop at, you guessed it, shop.8302.net.

Unmute the Commute: “If an escalator was lubricated to within an inch of its sonic life, it would have much less of one,” writes Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com. She’s pondering the ramifications and cultural context of a piece by Chris Richards at washingtonpost.com in which he pays close attention to the sounds of public transportation, and in the process interviews Emily Thompson, author of the indispensable book The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Richards’ stated and implicit question (“Could this be music?”) is one that is almost frustrating in its obviousness. The affirmative answer is self-evident to, certainly, the majority of readers of this site, and Richards himself cites, of course, the now almost ancient if not fully canonized teachings of John Cage. And yet the question still, in a paper as widely read as the Post, seems to need to be stated as some sort of fresh observation yet to become conventional wisdom. What event, what milestone, would — will — move us beyond having this question repeated? (The New York Times tread on this terrain last year in its “Arts of Summer” coverage.) Nelson, for her part, brings admirable philosophical force to the discussion: “For a thing to function is for it to be in use. And in its use is its constant failure. And in that failure are gaps that force different activity, and allow for different perspective. This is true for cities as well as escalators. And for music. And for us.”

Fantastic Voyage 2012: The sciencemag.org website reports that a “nano-ear” is being developed that “can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing.” This falls under the category of “acoustic microscopy.” The creative and diagnostic potentials are mind-boggling. What confuses me is that I haven’t seen the development mentioned on several bioacoustics and field-recording lists to which I subscribe. It may be just a result of an interesting needle of information being lost in a news-feed haystack, but I wonder if there’s an unfortunate myopia in those areas that focuses on sonic observation of the more immediately visible world. (Tip from Paolo Salvavione, salvagione.com.)

Is “Free” a Gender?: First at actsofsilence.com and then at uncertainform.com, fellow free-culture traveller David Nemeth ponders the statistical gender patterns inherent in electronic music. He quotes Tara Rodgers’ book Pink Noises: Women on Elec­tronic Music and Sound (“Another artist remarked that her entree into the world of elec­tronic music felt as if she had landed on a planet where some­thing had hap­pened to make all the women disappear”) and documents the numerous incongruities. In brief: there are a lot more men than women represented in the free/netlabel scene. In the process, Nemeth notes that one of my recent projects, the Instagr/am/bient compilation, has but one woman among its 25 participants. I fully agree with Nemeth that it’s unfortunate, and as Rodgers suggests, even eerie, the extent to which it appears that men outnumber women in electronic music, and in the free-music subset of electronic music. In his follow-up post, Nemeth says he has decided to cover one female artist a week at minimum henceforth. I’ll just note two things at this stage of the discussion: first, that the next major Disquiet.com curatorial project, due for release shortly, has three women among its eight (or nine, depending on how you count them) contributors: Kate Carr, Paula Daunt, and Marielle V. Jakobsons; second, that the majority of music I write about is made by people with willfully peculiar monikers, and it’s only late in the process of reading up on them as artists that I learn who is behind that moniker and if it’s a man or a woman.

Digital Commerce Watch: In a promising development, the record label Stonesthrow now offers a $10/month subscription fee for digital versions of “all” its releases. It’s a pretty solid deal: 320kbps MP3s, no DRM, month-to-month billing, and apparently some set of “exclusive” materials: stonesthrow.com.

The saying goes that a broken clock is right twice a day. The thing about a fully functioning clock is that it means different things at different times of the day. The noon bell, for example, is a midday alert. Even if the noon bell also happens to signal, say, a Latin mass, it provides a secular timekeeper for everyone within earshot. Other times might be synchronized with things other than the nearly universal 24-hourly intervals: religious events (services) and semi-secular ones (weddings) generally fall off the strict hour/half-past regularity. Even when slight, discrepancies in timing can feel significant, or at least meaningful. In the neighborhood where I live, the noon bell rings each Tuesday just after a noon siren calls out across the city (actually a network of sirens, all slightly off sync). The noon church bells always start slightly after the alert ends (the siren consists of two parts: an alarm, and then a spoken announcement). It’s unclear if the alert comes early or if the bells late, but they long ago reached some sort of sonic armistice.

The great Touch Radio podcast noted the end of 2012 with an extended recording of bells (MP3), recorded in the belltower of St. Mary’s Church, Walthamstow. They were no doubt intended to signify the close of a year, but they were, in fact, if the data in the RSS feed is correct, released eight days prior, and in fact recorded a full month prior. The bells rang any number of times between November 30, when they were recorded, and January 1, 2012 — and thanks to the podcast MP3, they will continue to be heard into the future, each time signally something slightly different: coinciding with an event, looking ahead to one, or bringing to mind something from the past.

And, for that matter, the bells find themselves occasionally excepted from timekeeping duties, and listened to for their sonic properties. There is a particularly eventful sequence at around the eight-minute point when decay and overlays combine to create illusions of more bells than are in fact ringing — the reverberation almost takes on the appearance of backward masking, which is ironic given the association of backward masking with Satanism.

Track originally posted (“With thanks to Denis Hewitt & Ewan Marshall”) at touchradio.org.uk.

An Introduction to Instagr/am/bient:

Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?

Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.

The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?

In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.

Thumbnails of the 25 Images:

The full collection is also streaming at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

The 25 MP3s are downloadable for free individually and as a Zip file at archive.org.

Download a 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians: PDF.

A Disquiet.com Project
Commissioned by Marc Weidenbaum

Design/Boondesign.com
Cover Photo/Brian Scott

This project in no way intends to imply any formal association with Instagram.

“Toward Silent Computing” is a piece I had published today at theatlantic.com, the website of the magazine The Atlantic. It’s a combination of news-you-can-use tips on quieting a laptop that’s running the OS X Lion operating system, and a reflection on the unintended consequences inherent in sound design: Remove one sound, and others appear. The background becomes the foreground. In the case of the laptop that is the subject of the piece, my month-old Macbook Air, the removed sound is that of the hard drive and, by extension, the computer fan that is often called into service when the drive or CPU go into overdrive.

Here is the first paragraph:

I changed laptops about a month ago. I had a Windows netbook, and I opted up, as it were, to a Macbook Air. Part of the attraction of the Macbook Air was its solid-state drive. Unlike a traditional hard drive, which is in effect a high-tech LP player with read-write capability, the SSD has no moving parts — well, except at the level of the electrical charge that allows data to be stored. (If you can hear that, please get in touch while the next X-Men movie is still in pre-production.) The lack of a physical interface means the SSD is silent, and also less likely to trigger the computer’s fan, which in most cases is the primary producer of computer noise on a laptop or desktop. (Note: You can, indeed, upgrade netbooks to SSD drives, but the one I had, a slim Acer, had its drive buried so deep in the device that it was beyond my abilities and my time.)

I then cover three particularly annoying sounds: the trackpad click, the boot-up sound, and the plink that accompanies the raising or lowering of the machine’s volume.

Here’s a fourth tip that didn’t really fit in the article:

Once upon a time, in Apple’s OS you could hold Shift+Option while raising and lowering the volume of the computer (speaker or headphone jack), and you’d quadruple the scale at which it shifted up or down. This didn’t make it louder, or quieter for that matter — it just provided a more gradated range between silent and whatever the machine’s loudest level was. That may sound unnecessary, but the fact is that at midnight, if all is quiet, the difference between silent and just a notch above silent can be significant. Unfortunately, Shift+Option doesn’t work in OS X Lion. I tweeted something to this regard (“OS X Lion could use 1/16th the number of keyboard-lighting settings and 16x the number of volume-level settings”), and got a prompt reply from Lin Mu (aka @linmu), directing me to an anonymous post at hints.macworld.com from this past August that provides a hack to regain the finer-grain volume shifting. (For the record, I haven’t actually tried this approach yet.)

Amid all this detailed trivia about the sound design of Apple’s operating system, it’s worth noting that Apple’s OS outdoes Spinal Tap. Its volume control goes to 16:

For a long time, DownBeat (founded: 1934) was the oldest magazine I’d ever written for. Then it was Nature (founded: 1869). But The Atlantic was founded in 1857, so it’s now the oldest I’ve been published in (again, technically, I wrote for its website).

You can read “Tower Silent Computing” at theatlantic.com.

Since April 2010, Disquiet.com has hosted a monthly project called “Sketches of Sound,” in which illustrators, most of them comics artists, are invited to draw a sound-related object. I post the drawing as the background of my Twitter account, twitter.com/disquiet, and then share a bit of information about the illustrator back on Disquiet.com. Call it “curating Twitter.”

This, the 20th entry, features bicycle horns drawn by Michael Bartalos. Bartalos works extensively in the graphic arts in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. His design commissions include Swatch watches and postage stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

He also produces limited print editions and sculptural assemblages, and has created artist’s book editions with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. 

For his NSF project, Bartalos collected re-usable discarded material from Antarctica to create a sequential sculptural work now in progress titled ”The Long View” (calacademy.org). The work intends to raise awareness of resource conservation and eco-preservation practices on the Ice, and by extension, to promote sustainability worldwide. Structurally the artwork references the book form, paying homage to an early instance of polar recycling in which Ernest Shackleton fashioned wooden covers from provision crates to bind Aurora Australis, the first book ever published in Antarctica.

Bartalos is the California Academy of Science’s first Affiliate Artist and the Chair of the Imprint of the San Francisco Center for the Book. His work is online at bartalos.com.

He also submitted the following three variations. I may swap in the digital entry on my Twitter page later in the month.

The previous “Sketches of Sound” contributors were, in alphabetical order, Jesse Baggs, Brian Biggs, Leela Corman, Warren Craghead III, Scott Faulkner, Owen Freeman, S.L. Gallant, Scott Gilbert, Brian Hagen, Dylan Horrocks, Megan Kelso, Minty Lewis, Natalia Ludmila, Darko Macan, Caesar Meadows, Justin Orr, Hannes Pasqualini, Thorsten Sideb0ard, and Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca. ‎

The 20th issue of the journal Vague Terrain (at vagueterrain.net) has 10 entries. They’re divided between, one might say, thought and art, between essays (plus one interview) about art, and then art itself. (One of the essays is mine. It’s titled “New York and New York, New York: A Midsummer Sound Diary,” and I wrote a bit more about it, and the overall Vague Terrain issue, earlier this week.)

This proposed distinction between “thought” and “art” is confused in part because the art here is, in most cases, accompanied by an essay written by the artist who committed it. Of the entries that fit in the “art” category, the MP3 provided for free download by David Kristian is placed in an especially self-aware context. Kristian knows his influences (“i.e Fripp & Eno, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze’s early works,” he writes), and he explains how his career developed to the point where instruments are beside the point:

I use very little in terms of traditional electronic musical instruments to generate sound, preferring instead to rely on an ever-growing collection of effect units and guitar pedals. Everything you hear in the piece I submitted to Vague Terrain was made using pedals, with no actual synthesizers or sequencers, at least none with keyboards or other standard performance controls.

Which is to say, it isn’t so much a matter of instruments being beside the point as it is of traditional instruments being put aside in favor of less traditional ones. Even without the knowledge of the instrumentation (displayed up top, in the photo that accompanied the essay), the track, titled “In Your Sleep,” sounds heavily technologically motivated. The sine-wave phasing that provides much of its sound could easily be the noise on a song recorded in a poorly grounded studio. But in place of a song we have the noise. Or, more to the point, the noise becomes a song. With each subsequent listens the piece, which is just under 20 minutes in length, displays increasing variation, increasing warbles and inconsistencies in what initially seems to be an automated whole.

Between the track and the essay, one thing becomes clear: it makes perfect sense that much as ambient music draws attention to background sounds, ambient music is especially meaningful when perpetrated on tools that were previously relegated to a supporting role — tools such as the ones used here: “a variety of oscillator pedals, a sequenced ring modulator, fuzz(es), flangers, phasers, filters, choruses, delays, and reverbs.”

Get the track for free download in a Zip file, and read Kristian’s full essay at vagueterrain.net. More on Krisian, who has created music and sound for film and video games (including Splinter Cell: Conviction; Army of Two: The 40th Day; and TERA: The Exiled Realm of Arborea), among other things, at davidkristian.com.

The excellent Wavelength show on Resonance FM is first broadcast in London (at 104.4 FM) and later distributed as a podcast. The show focuses on a variety of sound, from field recordings to experimental music, and a recent entry was one of its most bare-bones episodes yet: about half an hour of a grandfather clock ticking away. It is titled “Tick Tock … Bong.” The “bong” is the intense striking sound that signals the arrival of an hour. It’s a gong-like explosion that disrupts the steady field of the tick tock. Putting aside that “bong” for a moment, the “tick tock” is a splendid thing unto itself, a quotidian Steve Reich installation, no counterpoint, just the steady progression of time (MP3).

As the Oblique Strategies card reads, “Repetition is a form of change.” In this case, the change that becomes apparent is the way the details of the to-and-fro procession of mechanized time come into focus. As it goes on, the whole concept of time comes into question, because the imprecision of the timepiece becomes apparent: the swagger of its off-balanced tone, the extended pause that makes every other beat slightly longer than the previous (or vice versa, depending on when you start counting).

And then, fair warning, there are those hour markers, the intense gong sounds — the “bong!” from which the entry takes its title — that provide the impression that the creaky grandfather clock has, for a moment, regained the ramrod posture of its youth. Heard here, the gong is preceded, as at 7:17, by a kind of winding-up, a quiet warning that the hour is about to be noted loudly. The first hour heard here is 11, and we are then treated to three more such markers (1, 12, and 6) after extended periods of tick-tock homogeneity. The bong is hard to ignore, but worth even closer consideration is the lingering resonance that seems to taper off to infinity, a slow decay that never seems to fully go away. The overall impression is that time doesn’t pass; it accrues. (Peculiarly, at the very end of the recording, there is suddenly traffic noise and then birdsong and then a plane crossing overhead.)

In the post associated with the track, there is a brief explanatory note:

It was midnight in Syston, Leicestershire and the microphone was inside the clock which was awarded to Sandra’s grandfather; William Cross who won a stack of individual and team titles with the army and Castleford Harriers and was presented to King George V and Queen Mary in January 1920 after finishing sixth out of a field of 700 in the army cross-country championship. Sandra’s mother came into the room, noticed the microphone and just said “tick tock” before going back upstairs.

Track originally posted at resonancefm.com. More on Wavelength’s host, William English, at williamenglish.com. (Image courtesy of flickr.com via the Creative Commons.)

Small software, small experiments, small files. Mike Rotondo recently tweeted a new recording, and it turned out to be 35 seconds of beat bliss. Arguably shorter than that, given its loop-based construction — and arguably longer, given its inherent temptation to be set on loop for an extended period of time.

Titled “Flip Throw In,” it has the feel of a hip-hop production waiting for vocalists, but one secretly more than happy to keep the pace all by itself. There’s a robot heartbeat of a pulse, and what appears to be a sample of piano. Not only does the looseness of the analog piano recording align at best roughly, and therefore rewardingly, with the tensile routine of the tiny beat — so, too, does the lush low fidelity of the recording, a kind of muslin filter, pair against the beat’s pixel precision. The result is promising: a little of J Dilla’s underkey metrics, a little of Kanye West’s alchemical ability to turn sloppy into louche, a little of DJ Premier’s fetish for imperfect ivories. “Flip Throw In” was recorded in an inexpensive iOS app called iMaschine that its developer describes as a “beat sketchpad,” pictured up top. From little things, lovely little things grow.

Track originally posted at Rotondo’s soundcloud.com/treehouses account. More on iMaschine at native-instruments.com.

The term “field recording” has two particular meanings in regard to audio. There are the so-termed phonographers who toil in the physical world, documenting soundscapes and incidents. And there are those of the Alan Lomax variety (Lomax being the legendary documentarian of blues, folk, and gospel), who record indigenous music for posterity. These two ventures can be seen as quite different from each other, as archivists in the worlds of sound (the phonographers) and of music (let’s call them the Lomaxes). And the distinctions can lead to annoying confusions and consequences, when that box set you ordered arrives and it turns out that “field recordings of the high desert” include not rattling sagebrush and coyote calls but old-time religion and cowboy poetry. But they have some things in common as well, things far more important than their differences, foremost the precious nature of sound. For both the phonographer and the Lomax are capturing something soon to be gone. Both are invested in preserving a record — in the broader sense of the term “record” — of sonic reality.

Richard Devine recently posted a host of recordings of ancient and becoming-ancient devices. Titled “The Sound of Data Transmissions-Electromagnetic Fields” it contains the sounds of (as he lists them) “printers, scanners, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation, Mac-book hard drives, 5 different wireless modems, fax machines, iPhone, iPad, and computers.” If you follow along the waveform of the recording, he has annotated when each new sound initiates:

To compare the sound of a modem to the song of an impoverished blues musician is not to elevate the former or denigrate the latter. It is simply to note that in the latter case, the documentarian was of use because for a variety of reasons the commercial recording industry had found no use for the blues musician. His song went underheard. And the phonographer is dedicated to the underheard, to the sounds that exist around us but are taken for granted.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/richarddevine, which is where the above photo was sourced from. More on Devine at richard-devine.com.

The recent exhibition of contemporary art from India at the San Jose Museum of Art — Roots in the Air, Branches Below — had numerous and welcome splashes of color and whimsy.

Key among them was Chintan Upadhyay‘s “Untitled (Designer Baby) (2008),” a painted doll caged like a songbird (pictured at left), its mouth open, though perhaps more likely to bite than to sing. The figure painted on its chest could just as easily be meant to imply that it has been consumed, rather than tattooed — which is to say, rendered mute. Also making an indelible impression was Aparna Rao and Soren Pors‘ “The Uncle Phone” (2004), a red rotary-dial device extended to an almost absurd 78 inches (shown up top). Despite the phone’s relative antiquity and seeming ineffectiveness, it is not a comment on the long-distance relations of tech workers; according to the artists, it takes its inspiration from an uncle who preferred someone else dial the phone for him. So, come to think of it, maybe the long red phone is about a communication disconnect, but that would be one of age and class, not of physical distance.

The most cacophonous piece in the show buried its visual noise in a field of apparent white noise, a loose haze gathered around a central, colorful figure. The work is “Sink” by Dhruvi Acharya, and it dates from 2007:

As the five details below show, that haze around the central figure is, in fact, a warzone. Images of violence — archaic weaponry, car wrecks, bombs — are accompanied by the cartoon onomatopoeia of their associated sounds: “bang,” “blam blam blam,” “fsssssshhh,” and so forth.

Word balloons often appear empty, serving double duty as traditional containers of written sound and as visualizations of explosions and exhaust.

Many of the sounds are drawn from familiar comic-book norms, but also there are more improvisatory effects like “spakk” and “poom” and “nnhh” and a “kreeeeee” with almost too many vowels to count. It’s worth noting that for all the war-like imagery, the message of the piece is said to be as environmental as it is pacifist, and Shiva’s trident links the contemporary concerns to Indian myth.

The line work of the figures (helicopters and guns, for example) is, by and large, indistinguishable from that of the sound effects. This renders them equal on the page, serving both to elevate the prominence of the sounds, but also to usher the collective drawings into the background, a fatalistic statement about the ubiquity of violence if ever there were one.

More on the exhibit at sjmusart.org. Roots in the Air, Branches Below ran from February 25 through September 4, 2011. (Dhruvi Acharya: “Sink,” 2007; Synthetic polymer paint on canvas and panels; 48 x 48 inches; Collection of Dipti and Rakesh Mathur; Photo: Courtesy Chemould Gallery, Mumbai; Copyright Dhruvi Acharya.)