Recent interview with me at freemusicarchive.org on Creative Commons, Disquiet Junto, and more • Projects: Instagr/am/bient + LX(RMX): Lisbon Remixed • Key Topics: #sound-art, #classical, #generativeHow to Submit for Review • Elsewhere: Twitter (Disquiet + Junto), SoundCloud (Disquiet + Junto).

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

tag: science-fiction

Alphas (+ Infrasound) in Nature Magazine

My interview with showrunner of the Syfy superhero TV series

The current issue of Nature magazine, dated July 19, 2012, features in its Books and Arts section an article I wrote about the TV series Alphas. (Note: those links lead to a paywall required to access the story, but for those without access, Nature is pretty well stocked by libraries.) The second season of Alphas begins airing on the Syfy network in the U.S. this evening, July 23. The piece is a Q&A with the series’ new showrunner, Bruce Miller (also of such shows as Eureka and ER); I was interested in discussing with him the scientific basis for the various powers that are explored in the show, from the synaesthesia-like sensory awareness of Rachel Pirzad to the endorphin-infused strength of Bill Harkin to the ability of Gary Bell (pictured up top in the same image that accompanies the Nature piece) to sniff data from the air.

Part of the realism of Alphas has to do, simply, with the fact that the characters don’t think of themselves as superheroes; they think of themselves as misfits who are more burdened than blessed with these unusual abilities. Rooting that anxiety is the show’s writers’ attempts to only depict powers that can be extrapolated from natural sciences. Thus, there is — at least so far — no time travel or, say, long-distance teleportation. Sound, of course, is among the numerous areas of scientific study that inform Alphas. Last season there was a blind man with dolphin-like sonar powers; he was played by Star Trek’s Data, aka Brent Spiner. This season, Miller explained, there will be at least one more audio-based storyline, one in which “infrasound” — those sounds considered to be below the spectrum perceived by humans — plays a role. He told me more than appears in the Nature story but if I’d written much more, it would have given away the episode.

The Nature story is available, unfortunately behind a paywall, at nature.com. More on Alphas at syfy.com/alphas.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0029: Count Zero

The Assignment: Make music from running water, inspired by William Gibson's novel Count Zero.

Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com 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 to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This week’s project makes use of field recordings, a not uncommon source of sonic material in the Disquiet Junto series of weekly music projects. The particular idea this week originates in the following description at the start of chapter 17 in the 1986 novel Count Zero by William Gibson. I selected this version of the book’s cover, because it’s the paperback I own:

This idea of running water as music, in particular as “one of the oldest songs,” is highlighted in various ways in the chapter, which is titled “The Squirrel Wood,” and in the book as a whole. In the next paragraph of the chapter there’s an implied contrast to an artificial canopy in a forest, with its “mimetic approximations of leaves and branches.” More broadly, this is a novel in which there is an ongoing concern about possible Voudoun spirits running loose in cyberspace. The console jockeys make their money, and their names, reading signals: gleaning meaning from perceived noise.

I’d had the idea for some time of using running water in a Disquiet Junto project as the proposed source of a track, so my imagination was primed when I came across this notion in the novel when I recently reread it for the first time in many years. I was rereading Count Zero because of all Gibson’s novels, it lingers with me the most, in part because of its themes of corporate espionage, which I find fascinating, but also because this is the book of his that I found most difficult to pierce when I first read it. One interesting final note: This chapter holds special meaning in the broader novel, because it is the only chapter whose title is repeated. “The Squirrel Wood” is also the title of the book’s final chapter.

In any case, that’s all backdrop to this week’s project.

The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, July 19, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 23, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0029-countzero.

Bonus: In advance of the project’s announcement, I tweeted some information about it from the twitter.com/djunto account, and William Gibson himself (aka twitter.com/greatdismal) retweeted it not once but twice: Read more »

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Steampunk Ambient (MP3)

Pipe Organ: The Boiler House at MASS MoCA, site of Stephen Vitiello’s All Those Vanished Engines

To follow up the interview posted here earlier today with sound artist Stephen Vitiello (“In the Echo of No Towers”), here is a download (and stream) of an edit from the long-term installation he has recently unveiled at MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts. The work, titled All Those Vanished Engines, is a collaboration between Vitiello and the novelist Paul Park, who wrote a narrative that Vitiello then set to sound. This edit removes the spoken vocal, to reveal the underlying current of pneumatic activity, a kind of steampunk ambient music:

In the interview, Vitiello describes how he asked Park, a science fiction and fantasy novelist, to write a story that created a fictional world built around the Boiler House: “I then recorded the story,” he says, “and laid sound around the events that were described. From there, I took out some of the spoken language, leaving the sound itself to convey the narrative.” As the descriptive text at the museum’s website, massmoca.org, explains, “Starting with the inherent resonance of the pipes and metal drums in the space, Vitiello built a layered sound installation that can be explored throughout the first two floors of the building.”

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello. More on Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com.

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Quote of the Week: The Music of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

The new novel by Jonathan Lethem takes place in a modern Manhattan slightly askew from our own. It’s the same Epcot for aesthetes that the borough has become in the years since Mayor Rudolph Giuliani bleached Times Square and tamed crime, but there are differences, like a giant, and likely mechanical, tiger raging through midtown, and the existence of pop-cultural artifacts with no equivalent in our world, such as films that don’t appear in the IMDB listings for Marlon Brando and Werner Herzog — at least not in our parallel universe. The novel is titled Chronic City, and true to its name, it’s a marijuana-infused story of cultural paranoia. Key among those paranoids is Perkus, a walking encyclopedia of film, pop music, and politics who spends his time weaving conspiracies from stray threads of coincidence. These insights also manifest themselves in the form of “cluster” headaches, which lead him, in the following scene, to visit an acupuncturist known as Strabo:

    Thin as threads, each with a tiny flag at their end, they entered his body at various points, neck and wrists and shoulders, painlessly. Only a hint of tightness, a feeling he shouldn’t move suddenly, confirmed Strabo had used them at all. Then Strabo lowered the lights and switched on some music, long atmospheric tones that might have been vaguely Eastern. “To someone like you this CD may sound a bit corny,” he said, surprising Perkus. “But it’s specially formulated, there are tones underneath the music that are engaging directly with your limbic system. It works even if you don’t like the music particularly. It’s inoffensive, but I personally wish it didn’t sound so much like Muzak.”

    “Okay,” said Perkus, just beginning to see that he was expected to reside with the needles a while.

    “I’ll be back for you in half an hour. Practice breathing.”

    “What if I fall asleep?”

    “It’s fine to sleep. You can’t do anything wrong.” With that, Strabo was gone. Perkus lay still, feeling himself pined like a knife-thrower’s assistant, listening as an odious pan flute commenced soloing over the synthesized tones, promising a long dreadful journey through cliché. Here Perkus was, supreme skeptic and secularist, caught naked and punctured, his whole tense armor of self perilously near to dissolved. How had it could to this?

The first chapter is available for download at amazon.com.

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Whuffie, Social Capital, Social Networks … and Music

Over at the artsjournal.com/gap of Molly Sheridan, a bunch of us are this week talking about (well, writing about) the recent book The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt, and the book from which it draws its title and inspiration, the science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Specifically, we’re looking at how arts organizations and individual musicians can adapt to the increasingly online world.

My first entry in the conversation (“Do or Die or Other?”) focuses on the way Doctorow and Hunt separately manage the theme of rapid technological change.

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