Disquiet » software

Savaran’s “Dubelectrons” (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:35:03 +0000

It’s like listening to a digital aquarium, not the lovely image suggested by such an idea, of hyperreal CGI aquatic life rendering in slow motion, but the aquarium itself, the machine of rhythmic pumping and cycling fluids that provides a foundation for life. This is one way of registering the track “Dubelectrons” by Savaran, who produced the piece as a mix of digital and analog, of iOS software (the Animoog, specifically) and everyday noise. It is less a song than a slice of activity, a roil of texture-as-rhythm, of electronic burbling as an end unto itself. As Savaran describes his process:

So I was messing about with Animoog on the iPad and thought I would combine some live noodling with some field recordings of household gadgets. The recordings used an induction coil pickup to capture the normally unheard electromagnetic signals in a Sony portable CD player, iPad, laptop and mobile phone. Animoog is probably the best synth app currently available and has a superb level of tactile control using the buchla style keys which allow a huge range of expression when combined with the modulation routing. Anyway, done in one take, warts and all – Dubelectrons…

Savaran is Wales-based musician Mark Walters, more on whom at twitter.com/savaran_music and savaranmusic.wordpress.com. Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/savaran. Image above is of the Animoog iPad app interface (moogmusic.com).

Sonic Infrastructure (ArtPractical.com)

Marc Weidenbaum — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 04:13:57 +0000

I have written an essay about the growing prominence of San Francisco as a provider of sonic-arts infrastructure services. It appears, for free reading online, at the journal artpractical.com.

The essay is part of an issue devoted to sound, which includes an introduction by Tess Thackara (who invited me to contribute), an interview with Paul DeMarinis by Renny Pritikin, a discussion between artists Joshua Churchill and Chris Duncan, Matt Sussman on Infrasound, Liz Glass on the Tape Music Center, an interview with Jacqueline Gordon by Ellen Tani, a profile of Ethan Rose by Bean Gilsdorf, a discussion about the forthcoming Invisible Relics exhibit at Park Life (parklifestore.com, a gallery in the San Francisco neighborhood I have long called home: the Richmond District), and an essay by Aaron Harbour drawing from his experience as a curator and DJ.

For my piece, titled “Sonic Infrastructure,” I use three examples of individuals and organizations whose work in sound art involves providing technology to artists and institutions to realize their ideas. I interviewed Shane Myrbeck (shanemyrbeck.com) about his work at Arup (and his own art) and Barry Threw (barrythrew.com) about his work as a solo developer (which includes developing Oval‘s OvalDNA software, a screenshot of which appears up top) and at Obscura Digital. And I also touched on Scott Snibbe‘s substantial contributions (snibbe.com), such as his work on Björk‘s Biophilia apps.

Read the essay, “Sonic Infrastructure,” at artpractical.com.

SoundCloud Primer on NewMusicBox.org

Marc Weidenbaum — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:39:11 +0000

The great website newmusicbox.org, for which I’ve done some writing in the past, invited me to put together a SoundCloud primer, and it was a welcome opportunity. Titled “The Procedural Hows and Theoretical Whys of SoundCloud.com,” the piece is as that suggests a mix of basic steps on employing SoundCloud to host one’s music, and some more contextual/philosophical considerations of why SoundCloud functions as it does. The how-to section is straightforward, and the opening section is a lengthy overview the history of failures and attendant anxieties in relation to music hosting. These next three graphs are the among more exploratory, and so I post them as a window into the piece, which I hope people will find useful. The main idea is to emphasize that social music is about participating not promoting:

Step 6: Dig in. There is far more you can do on SoundCloud. The coverage above is intended simply as an introduction. For example, you can create Sets of tracks that provide additional context. You can join Groups, which in addition to collating tracks by some semblance of shared cultural activity (field recordings, serialism, toy piano) provide for discussion beyond the confines of a single recording. There are Soundcloud apps that allow you to do additional things with and to your tracks. Everything described above is free, albeit with a space limit on data storage, but you can elect to pay for a premium account and access additional resources. (The limits to SoundCloud are worth noting. For one thing, this is all “fixed recordings.” If you specialize in algorithmic music, you’ll be posting finished recordings, not live generative sound. Also, SoundCloud is a business, and as such monitors what is posted; it is especially attentive to copyright violation, so if you tend toward the aggressively plunderphonic, be prepared to have your track removed—or your entire account for that matter.)

Step 7: Make it new. The structure of SoundCloud suggests itself as a neutral space. In many ways, it has defined itself as the anti-MySpace. Where MySpace became overloaded with design elements, SoundCloud keeps it simple. This simplicity suggests SoundCloud less as a place and more as a form of infrastructure—if MySpace was a city that never slept, SoundCloud is the Department of Public Works. Its elegant tool sets provide structure but don’t define or fully constrain activity. For the more adventurous participants, SoundCloud is itself a form to be played with. Some musicians have used the “timed comments,” for example, to annotate their work as it proceeds. Others have fun with the images associated with their tracks, posting sheet music or workspace images. Some create multiple accounts for different personas or projects. Others have used the limited personalization options to colorize the embeddable player and make it look seamless within their own websites and blogs.

It’s arguable that the most productive users of SoundCloud recognize the fluid nature of the service and post not only completed works, but works in progress. They upload sketches and rough drafts and rehearsals: this keeps their timeline freshly updated, helps excuse the relatively low fidelity of streaming sound, and further invites communication with listeners—many of who are fellow musicians themselves.

In response to a subsequent comment on the article, I realized that the first time I ever employed the SoundCloud embedded player was February 17, 2009. That was a big step for me, because I had been wary of embeddable players, as is the commenter on my post. My hesitance remains, but I have, clearly, been more actively engaged with them. My general sense is that anxiety about whether those embeds might some day go down are rooted in a pre–digital era concern about fixed recordings. The thing that makes SoundCloud tick — and tick more loudly, I’d argue, than Bandcamp, a peer service — is that it jettisons the album model, or certainly subsumes it dramatically, in favor of a largely chronological feed of audio. The interface comes close to acknowledging that the tracks are in many ways closer to ephemera than, say, to a compact disc. I’m not saying that is the end of the story, or even a good thing. I am saying that it is closer to how people consume music these days, in a digital era, than most other tools allow, and that proximity between interface and habit is a subtle cause of SoundCloud’s success.

The main reason I was grateful for the opportunity is that the readership at SoundCloud is comprised primarily of musicians, notably of composer-musicians, and the means by which musicians communicate, and use music to communicate, has been an increasingly important focus for me.

Another reason was that part of the purpose of the piece was to provide tools to participants in the site’s new “Sound Ideas” projects, which are not disimilar to the Disquiet Junto series I have been running on SoundCloud. This is what newmusicbox.org’s Molly Sheridan had to say about “Sound Ideas” when it first launched:

The concept is this: We’re going to ask you—yes you, sitting there, reading this post—to create music and share it. And the “we” isn’t just anyone, either. It’s John Luther Adams, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Sxip Shirey, and Ken Ueno.

Once a week we’ll post a prompt from each of these four composers which they’ve crafted to inspire sonic creation. If the idea resonates with you, write, record, invent or otherwise draft something new using any method that suits your style and skills, then share it in comments. You can embed a SoundCloud player, a YouTube video, a link to a score file—whatever works.

Here at NewMusicBox, we talk about music a lot. This project is our way of shifting focus and actually making some music, too. We can’t wait to hear what everyone creates.

That shift that Sheridan describes registers with me, in light of the Disquiet-commissioned projects I’ve been working at here.

The Data of the Buddha (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 07:34:24 +0000

Early on in “Pure Buddha Data,” a recent piece of music by Stephen Stamper, a four-note riff comes briefly into sonic view. The fourth of the notes is so subdued that it might not even exist. That final note trails off into the lush ringing field that is the majority of the work, a thick lawn amid which the riff occasionally blooms. The brief melody is not dissimilar to the theme from the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, those Morse-like tones with which aliens and humans find a common if rudimentary language by employing math transformed into music. In the movie, the music is harmonically sound, which lends the meeting the air of good will.

The notes in Stamper’s piece will be familiar to anyone who has turned on the first of the Buddha Machines. It is a rare melodic moment from the device, designed by the duo FM3 to emit swaying drones and drone-like effluence until its batteries run out. In the brief note appended to the track, Stamper mentions that the sounds we’re hearing are “A first generation FM3 Buddha Machine left to run through my Pure Data performance patch.” (Pure Data is the name of a graphic programming environment.) That patch appears to be the same software process that he employed in the production of a recent contribution he made to the Disquiet Junto project, when the collective remixed a track off the recent Marcus Fischer album, Collected Dust:

Listening to both tracks is to let the mind slowly reverse engineer what it is, exactly — well, more to the point, inexactly — Stamper’s patch is doing. It isn’t a destructo approach. It’s more of a thickening and quickening agent. It speeds up the material in a manner that it loops back on itself, accruing layers into a sonorous denseness that, somehow, doesn’t fully lose the gentle qualities of the original source material.

Both tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/bitsnibblesbytes. More on Stamper, who is based in London, at bitsnibblesbytes.wordpress.com and
twitter.com/bitnibblebyte.

The Disquiet Junto

Marc Weidenbaum — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:17:38 +0000

The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on Soundcloud.com. The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity. Each Thursday evening I post a clearly defined compositional assignment, and members of the Junto are to complete the assignment by 11:59pm the following Monday. The initial Junto assignment was made on January 5, 2012, the first Thursday of the new year.

The inspirations for the group’s existence are numerous. There are the weekly Beat Battles sponsored by Stonesthrow, and also hosted at Soundcloud.com, in which dozens if not hundreds of participants craft instrumental hip-hop beats from a shared sample. There is the tradition of Oulipo, whose embrace of creative constraints is personified by one of its co-founders, the author Raymond Queneau. Several comics artists with whom I have worked, including Matt Madden, have bonded under the banner of Oubapo, and there is, in fact, a related musical tradition, which goes by Oumupo. (I was reminded that the Iron Chef of Music projects at kracfive.com were also an influence on my thinking. They were for many years a big part of the Downstream department here.)

The word “junto” comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.” In Franklin’s honor, the third Disquiet Junto project explored the glass harp, an instrument he experimented with in the development of what he christened the armonica.

The idea for the Junto arose after the completion of a Disquiet project at the end of December 2011. That project, Instagr/am/bient, was more loosely curated than other such projects I had commissioned, beginning in 2006 with Our Lives in the Bush of Diquiet. Instagr/am/bient proved quite popular, with over 20,000 listens and almost 4,000 downloads in its first month, and this success suggested to me that I experiment with an even looser format — the irony being that this “looser” format is, in fact, dedicated to constraint. Much to my surprise, the very first Junto project resulted, in four days, in 56 original pieces of music by as many musicians. The assignment was to record the sound of ice cubes in a glass and to make something musical of that recording.

If for the musicians involved, the Disquiet Junto is an experiment in creative constraints, for me it is as much an experiment in what I would describe as “community organizing as a form of curation.”

Visit the group — and, better yet, sign up and participate — at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto. There’s also an email announcement list for the group. If you would like to be added to the suscription list, you can join up here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

This page serves as an index of the assignments. They are listed here in reverse chronological order. The tag for each assignment links to either a post on Disquiet.com about the project, or to a search return on Soundcloud that yields the tracks in that project:

21: Disquiet0021-4seasons
Create a piece with one field recording representing each of the four seasons.
Start: 2012.05.24 … End: 2012.05.28

20: Disquiet0020-nodebeat
Make a piece of music with the NodeBeat app and one other instrument.
Start: 2012.05.17 … End: 2012.05.21

19: Disquiet0019-rojiura
Treat the provided photograph as a graphically notated score.
Start: 2012.05.10 … End: 2012.05.14

18: Disquiet0018-3×3
Make a three minute track from three sounds, alternating their relative prominence.
Start: 2012.05.03 … End: 2012.05.07

17: Disquiet0017-transition
Make a seamless transition between an original field recording and a provided, preexisting track.
Start: 2012.04.26 … End: 2012.04.30

16: Disquiet0016-backforeground
Take samples of sandpaper and dice. Make a track with one as foreground and other as background.
Start: 2012.04.19 … End: 2012.04.23

15: Disquiet0015-rgbinteract
Create sounds from colors, and make them interact with each other.
Start: 2012.04.12 … End: 2012.04.16

14: Disquiet0014-oumupo
Do a sonic-narrative version of Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story.
Start: 2012.04.05 … End: 2012.04.09

13: Disquiet0013-wildup
Make new music from a multitrack recording of a Shostakovich symphony.
Start: 2012.03.29 … End: 2012.04.02

12: Disquiet0012-cutpaste
Use “cut and paste” to combine two 1928 recordings of rural music.
Start: 2012.03.22 … End: 2012.03.26

11: Disquiet0011-motoring
Record an everyday mechanical rhythm, and make something of it.
Start: 2012.03.15 … End: 2012.03.19

10: Disquiet0010-reflect
Remix one of the previous Junto project tracks.
Start: 2012.03.08 … End: 2012.03.12

09: Disquiet0009-avian
Create a cross-species collaboration between bird song and acoustic guitar.
Start: 2012.03.01 … End: 2012.03.05

08: Disquiet0008-voice
Rework a spoken-word recording of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.
Start: 2012.02.23 … End: 2012.02.27

07: Disquiet0007-subtract
Create by removing material from an existing field recording.
Start: 2012.02.16 … End: 2012.02.20

06: Disquiet0006-cylinder
Remix three archival Edison cylinder recordings.
Start: 2012.02.09 … End: 2012.02.13

05: Disquiet0005-layer
Add sounds to a pre-existing field recording of everyday life.
Start: 2012.02.02 … End: 2012.02.06

04: Disquiet0004-mfischer
Remix the Marcus Fischer piece “Nearly There.”
Start: 2012.01.26 … End: 2012.01.30

03: Disquiet0003-glass
Record a live performance for “expanded glass harp.”
Start: 2012.01.19 … End: 2012.01.23

02: Disquiet0002-duet
Duet for fog horn and train whistle — using only those two provided samples.
Start: 2012.01.12 … End: 2012.01.16

01: Disquiet0001-ice
Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.
Start: 2012.01.05 … End: 2012.01.09

And this is the initial post I made on Disquiet.com, announcing the project on January 7, 2012: “Sneek Peek.”

As of January 31, 2012, this is a Twitter list of Disquiet Junto participants: twitter.com/nofi/disquiet-junto.

As of May 21, 2012, there is a dedicated Twitter account for the Disquiet Junto: twitter.com/djunto.

Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards

Marc Weidenbaum — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 02:03:16 +0000

25 ambient musicians created original sonic postcards in response to one another’s evocative Instagram photos.

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.

Everything Goes Better with Automaton (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 06:40:31 +0000

The Automaton effects unit from audiodamage.com is a unique piece of software. It uses rules from Conway’s Game of Life to trigger variations on whatever audio is sent its way. I’ve used it a lot at home to lend unexpected variation to the loops inherent in instrumental hip-hop. Brian Biggs, who records as Dance Robot Dance, plugged in his guitar. Well, not his guitar, but a guitar loop. The result is doubly refreshing — first, because it’s great to hear people still using the tool, and second, because Biggs had recently posted on his blog that he had been seduced away from his banks of modular synthesizers by a G+L electric guitar. Instead, it turns out that the guitar isn’t a distraction; it’s simply yet another item in his electronic tool shed. The piece by Biggs opens like some old-time Johnny Cash song, and quickly slips into blippy good fun. The guitar, already played with a certain amount of bounce, now ricochets with just enough chaos to make it come alive. It gains a kind of rhythmic sentience. In this case, Biggs’ robots don’t dance; they do a two-step.

It’s clearly more of an experiment than a completed piece of music, but that’s sort of the point. Biggs regularly posts things he’s working on, and to listen to this is to get your ears prepared for what he’ll do next. Here, by the way, is a screenshot of Automaton, showing the classic pixel Petri dish formations of Conway’s Game:

The track, titled “Buffshuffmaton,” was originally posted for streaming and download at soundcloud.com/dance-robot-dance. More on Biggs at dancerobotdance.com.

The Chat Room at the End of the Universe (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 06:02:04 +0000

Anthoney J Hart is a London-based musician who goes by Imaginary Forces. His “CT Room” is a collection of sounds culled from unwitting microphones. There are no divulged secrets, no evidence of ill doings. To the extent that voices are heard, they sound more like Electronic Voice Phenomena than like actual conversation. According to the description that accompanies the piece, the recordings come from forms of communication (video chat rooms, instant messenger services) in which sound was conveyed but text was the primary form of transmission. And thus the verbal component — along with, even more compellingly, the extended near silences — is a mere byproduct of the process. The result is a series of textured static and garbled speech, of curt bits of grey fuzz and thick ropes of drone. Speech is an underutilized component of electronically mediated music and sound art, and here it is successfully sourced for its sonic rather than its literal assets.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/radius-7 and theradius.tumblr.com. More on Hart at entropyandenergy.com.

Tangents: Lunch Sounds, Shuffler.fm, Polluting Noise, …

Marc Weidenbaum — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:27:47 +0000

Audio Flaneur: The excellent soundscrapers.blogspot.com by Nick Sowers is three deep in a new series of “Lunchwalks.” What’s a lunchwalk? Explains Sowers, “Got an hour? Take a walk. Inside of a thirty-minute radius, an infinitely detailed (though finitely bound) landscape is within reach.” On each walk, he records the sounds he encounters. He maps the walks, and takes photos, which tend to feature his microphone, which in turn takes on the appearance of Sowers’ fuzzy walking buddy (see above). His descriptions are splendid (“The gear boxes and cable junctures add a constant hum to the background static of the city”), and he also posts samples of the audio, such as this from his third walk:

Read them, as his walking progresses, at soundscrapers.blogspot.com.

Banner Music: I don’t look too deeply into the statistics for this site. When you write about free music and about galleries that require no entry fee, as well as commercial music that often sells in the under-500-unit zone, the whole notion of pageviews can be an exercise in misdirection, if not futility. I do take note, because the dashboard in WordPress (the publishing tool that is this site’s backend) puts the information front and center, that this site seems to get a lot more visitors via Facebook than Twitter, even though I dedicate more time to Twitter than to Facebook. (Perhaps the automated posting of Disquiet’s RSS feed to Facebook that currently occurs is something I should do more of on Twitter? Somehow that doesn’t seem right. My approach to Twitter is conversational.) Anyhow, in the mix of sites sending somewhat significant traffic to this one is a service that was previously unfamiliar: shuffler.fm. The site is an aggregator of blog-filtered music (it bills itself as an “audio magazine made by music blogs”). You can search and sort by artist, genre, blog, and so forth. And, niftily enough, you can end up navigating this very site with a top bar that lets you listen to the music on a given page and navigate the site that way. The following link, unlike the previous one in this entry, will take you to an example: shuffler.fm. For the time being, the shuffler.fm service doesn’t seem to be infringing on this site’s non-commercial Creative Commons license, though there is a page on the site that talks about advertising.

Outside Man: Perhaps the craziest thing about the movie Bunraku isn’t its surreal set (part Kill Bill, part Sin City), its peculiar cast (Demi Moore and Ron Perlman and Woody Harrelson and Josh Hartnett), or the voice of its narrator (Mike Patton, of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, etc.), but that the score is by trumpeter Terence Blanchard, best known for his numerous Spike Lee films. (The New York Times called the movie “a potpourri of genres that ends up a morass of clichés”) Back in reality, Blanchard is also tied to Red Tails, about the African American Tuskegee Airmen.

Dark Portal: The second and third freely downloadable volumes of the score to the excellent video game Portal 2 are available at thinkwithportals.com. The first volume was covered here in late June, in the Downstream department. (Via joystiq.com and nobuooo.com.)

Polluting Noise: Noise pollution is a subject that gives noise a bad name. A story in a local news site in my area, the San Francisco baycitizen.org, touched on how emotions color perception of noise: “On Sept. 12, 2001, no flights took off at San Francisco International, but complaints were lodged nevertheless.” The science-and-scifi site i09.com has been noting how birds and dolphins have shown adverse effects of human-made sound.

The Listener: Author Warren Ellis has launched a new podcast. Second episode came out the 5th of this month, at warrenellis.com, featuring such Disquiet.com favorites as Daphne Oram and Scott Tuma. Episode one had Moondog and Tangerine Dream.

Operating on Operating Systems (MP3s)

Marc Weidenbaum — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 07:50:33 +0000

What will happen when our computers are always on, or instant on, or so ubiquitous that we think of them less as objects, as accessories, or even garments, and more like soap or aftershave? Will we hang on to vestiges of their earlier days, much as we today add noises to electric cars in the name of comfort, safety, and security? If so, we’ll look back to work like that of Jeff Kolar, whose Start Up/Shut Down is, indeed, made of the noises of computers doing just that. His description is as precise as his working materials:

Start Up/Shut Down is a set of short iterations, remixes, and refinements of Window and Macintosh operating system event sounds. This project features remixed material sourced from Microsoft Windows (3.1, 4.0, NT, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8) and Macintosh OS (10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panther) operating systems.

He has plumbed the less than recent history of the major two major operating systems for his noises. The result is an abstract play on sounds at once familiar and remote. It’s a bracing listen, and leaves one eagerly awaiting the Linux B-side.

Kolar is one of the people behind the grew Radius podcast and pirate broadcast, a frequent subject of this site’s Downstream department. He corresponded with Disquiet earlier this year about another kind of “start up” sound that serves as the opening theme of the Radius broadcast (see “Entering and Exiting the Electromagnetic Spectrum”).

Both of the set’s tracks are available for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/jeffkolar and at the netlabel notype.com. More on Kolar at jeffkolar.us.