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.)

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.

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.

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.”

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.)

It’s Comic-Con this week, down in San Diego. Once upon a time, Comic-Con was a mix of professional business conference and geek art fair for fans of serial storytelling told in cheap pamphlets and sold in several thousand mom’n'pop stores around the U.S.

These days it’s primarily an opportunity for Hollywood to pitch its wares to fully suspecting pop-culture fetishists, and for the IT ninja at Twitter to test the fortitude of its servers.

While Comic-Con has not taken a tip from the Tribeca Film Festival and offered a long-distance pass for those who want to watch the panel discussions and other events from the comfort of their own laptops, there’s plenty of reporting from the con online, among it the tireless work by Alan Sepinwall, of the TV blog hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching.

In a post this past week, Sepinwall made note of the following comment from the panel for the upcoming Hawaii Five-0-remake series by the actor Daniel Dae Kim, best known as the tragic Korean corporate bagman from the series Lost:

“I’m happy to be on a show that has a theme song.”

What Kim’s referring to is the opening theme to Lost, which was little more than a drone that slowly contorted, as the logo for the show came into focus against a black screen, rotating as it moved, and then slipped out of view. (This is the U.S. theme — as with other shows, it varied when adapted for other countries.) But what that Lost theme lacked in whistle-along-ness it made up for with pitch-perfect, story-appropriate ambiguity. No hummable song would so well match the narrative fluidity and genre switcheroos of Lost — and more to the point, no other opening song would prepare listeners for what is one of the most sonically expressive series ever on television. Forget the proper score by Michael Giacchino (which got a lot of press coverage as the series reached its recent, and to me unsatisfying, conclusion), whose swelling strings and heart-racing beats were a red herring, while the real audio ingenuity was at work on screen: from the dastardly rattle of the smoke monster, to the nostalgia symbolism of the occasional turntable, to the thundering alarm of the Dharma clock, and on and on.

Not that the folks behind Hawaii Five-0 version 2.0 don’t have the courage of their own convictions. According to that post at hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching, the producers originally recorded a new version of the song, then realized what a bone-headed idea that was, and brought in many of the original musicians to re-record the quasi-surf-rock classic. Click through to that story for a link to video footage of the recording session.

In August, it’ll be seven years since I left New Orleans; it’ll also mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and the governmental incompetence exposed in its wake. Was reminiscing about the city tonight, when I caught the premiere episode of Treme, the new HBO series from the creators of The Wire. Learning that it was to be focused on the music of New Orleans raised some concern, since the first season of The Wire was peculiarly tone deaf when it came to the sounds of Baltimore, the city in which it was set. No such issues, as it turns out, with Treme, which mixes in not only old-school jazz and r&b, but also touches of the rap and swaggering rock’n'roll that make a home in the city. Here are some place-specific sound memories that surfaced while watching episode number one, “Do You Know What It Means”:

• The DJ character played by comedian Steve Zahn is enamored of New Orleans music, and has the big ears to prove it. On his radio show, he doesn’t suffer the standards, playing a tangential cut by Louis Prima and cursing the pledge drive that requires him to slot in the chestnuts that signify New Orleans to outsiders, and that fill the station’s compilation CD. At home, he blasts Mystikal‘s “Shake Ya Ass.” I bought that very same 12″ in the early summer of 2000, almost exactly a decade ago, at a small record shop up the street from the post office where I kept a box. The production by the Neptunes, with its super spare beat, was the soundtrack of my entry into New Orleans. There may not be a song I played more often during my four years there, though I tended to stick to the instrumental cut. (The episode also featured a second Mystikal track, and one from Juvenile.)

• Speaking of radio, I hadn’t thought of this in a long time, but for a while in New Orleans, I volunteered at WRBH, a station for the sight-impaired; the staff read all day long, starting with the current issue of the Times-Picayune newspaper, and then proceeding through magazine excerpts and novels.

• One more regarding Zahn’s character — he mentions “Cosimo” at one point to a fellow DJ. He’s talking about Cosimo Matassa, the legendary record producer of Little Richard and others, and whose old studio, on Rampart Street just outside the French Quarter, had become a laundromat by the time I made it to New Orleans.

• The closed-down Tower Records, where Zahn goes to retrieve some albums he had on commission: I was writing and editing for Tower’s Pulse! magazine when it shut down after 19 years of publication. I wrote the last cover story (on Missy Elliott), and learned via cellphone of the magazine’s imminent closing as the issue was going to press. I was walking down Magazine Street at the time.

• The one sound in the episode I didn’t recognize was that of helicopters, which like the images of the National Guard standing along New Orleans streets, entirely post-dated my stay in the city.

• And, finally, the episode — which is to say, the series — opens with a second-line parade, and there’s a brief moment when a police siren blurts along with the rhythm of the passing jazz band. That’s a not unfamiliar sound from second lines. Motorcycle cops toot their horns on occasion, the hard siren just another bit of counterpoint amid the ruckus.

Full track list for the episode at hbo.com/treme.

Here’s a piece I wrote, reflecting on my time in New Orleans, shortly after Katrina hit: “NOLA-tronic.”

Birkin makes his home at soundcloud.com/notl, where his moniker is an adorable emoticon, :¬l. His reworking of the Camberwick theme opens with a spacey, head-trip bit of hazy, gaseous oddness (an appropriate time-warp signifier), but soon enough the looping trinkets of the original melody, along with select bits of the spoken voice-over (a word here and there, really), form a randomly rhythmic yet undeniably soothing piece of music. Drawing distant resources from his psyche, Birkin has reshaped them in a form of musical commentary on innocence and the passage of time.

I can’t help but think that the opening couplet of the series’ narration programmed a young Birkin at a subconscious level to eventually open up that “musical box” himself and make with it what he chose:

Here is a box, a musical box,
wound up and ready to play.
But this box can hold a secret inside.
Can you guess what is in it today?

For reference, there appears to be a brief video of the show’s opening moments, unmolested, at youtube.com. The “cover image” for Birkin’s track, appearing up above, is a still shot of a moment from the TV series. Below is a still image from the YouTube video, showing the musical box in question:

Back in February, I made note in this space of an earlier Birkin track, titled “bass drone 6c” (disquiet.com).

● PDF: Pauline Oliveros Wins 2009 William Schuman Award (millertheatre.com): As music awards go, the William Schuman has been particularly open-minded. It's gone to classical-tradition figures like David Diamond, jazz-informed mavericks like Gunther Schuller, minimalists like Steve Reich, and out-jazz characters like John Zorn. There's something particularly gratifying about Pauline Oliveros being the recipient of the award this year, given that her work is so apart from the orchestral and chamber mode, in that she regularly emphasizes instructional works over precise written scores, employs electronic effects, and involves site-specific ephemerality. (She is also, it appears, the first woman to receive the Schuman.) The award will be presented to her on March 27, 2010.

● Four Sound Effects That Made (British) TV history (bbc.co.uk): For the BBC, Tom Geoghegan recounts accomplishments of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop on the 50th anniversary of its founding — and a decade after it was closed. The focus of this piece is four sounds, and how they were created, among them the "Dalek voice" from the fabled science-fiction series Dr. Who: "'We tried to give the impression that whenever a Dalek spoke, it wasn't speaking like we do, it was accessing words from a memory bank, so they all sound the same — dispassionate, mechanical and retrievable.' He [Dick Mills] used a centre-tap transformer plugged into the microphone of an actor standing at the side of the set, and the threat in the voice was all in the performance." (Via londonsoundart.wordpress.com.)

● More on David Byrne‘s London Edition of ‘Playing the Building’ (davidbyrne.com): I missed this when it occurred in downtown Manhattan last summer, by just a day. Now, in advance of its August 8-31 run in London (at the Roundhouse — see image above), on David Byrne's site there is substantial coverage of his "Playing the Building" piece, including documentary video footage — not only of the Battery Maritime Building event, but also the earlier one in Stockholm from 2005 — and links to press accounts.

● 11 Things to Do with a Buddha Machine 2.0: Jesse Jarnow lists almost a dozen options for the FM3-created sound-art object the Buddha Machine 2.0, including #7: "Go to LaMonte Young's Dream House. Upon exit, use pitch control to match drone, carry vibe home with you."

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.