Month: March 2012

Minute of Listening (MP3)

Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) submits a minute toward elementary sonic education

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Before reading anything else, before reading any further, or clicking on a link, give this a listen. Just hit play and listen. And don’t dig in too deep. Hold off on listening for tone, or for dynamics, for narrative or processing. In essence, hold off on any of the kind of interpretive listening that this site is about on a daily basis. Instead, just listen and just focus on one task. The task is to try to identify the sound:

When you’ve got a solid guess, head over to the link below, where a consensus has built regarding its identification. The track is by Scanner, whose work deserves the sort of listening admonished against above. This track isn’t Scanner exploring sound. It is Scanner assisting others in exploring sound. It’s part of a broader project, which he explained when he posted the audio:

“Minute of Listening is a creative learning project through which Sound and Music hopes to enable every child in the country to gain access to a huge diversity of music and sound and, for sixty seconds each day, to focus on the richness and enjoyment of the act of listening. Children from the ages of 3 to 11 will be participating with their class teachers, testing a variety of approaches to engaging with Minute of Listening and exploring the act of listening.”

The project began on January 4 of this year and runs through March 30. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/scanner. More on Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) at scannerdot.com. More on the project at soundandmusic.org:

And, yes, the image up top is of Scanner at age 6.

The Communal Cough (MP3)

The sound of a patient Berlin audience

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The great TouchRadio podcast series has gotten more delightfully inscrutable as time has passed. Once upon a time, it was dependable for raw field recordings of high sonic quality and often intrepid subject matter, along with occasional works in which field recordings were among the multifariously transformed source material. As time has passed, the variety of the podcast entries has expanded to include, among other things, orchestral works and spoken word. But while the variety has grown, the information associated with the tracks has tended to decrease; often as not there is essentially no explanatory text, leaving the listener to sort things out by his or her own, often by using Google to find corresponding information based on a small handful of facts. That path has, perhaps, reached its apex with a quarter-hour MP3 live recording attributed to no one and, by all appearances, containing just the quiet coughing and otherwise patient if low-level noise-producing waiting of an audience at the CMT festival last month in Berlin.

[audio:http://www.touchshop.org/touchradio/Radio76.mp3|titles=”Listen!”|artists=TouchRadio]

The photo up top was associated with the MP3 when it was posted by TouchRadio, which attributed the image to Mike Harding, who is half of the Touch label’s management (along with Jon Wozencroft). At the touchradio.org.uk website, there is little if any information, just this single line: “Recorded live at Passionskirche, Berlin @ Spire Live, closing CTM12.”

The recording captures an audience waiting together for an event to occur. The document now persists as something a second, asynchronous audience listens to, waiting for it to reveal its meaning.

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on the festival at ctm-festival.de.

Snare Dub (MP3)

It's like an X-ray of dub: all the contours, none of the humidity

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Andras Hargitai, who’s based in Budapest, Hungary, has posted one of his most rarified, desiccated bits of dub yet. Titled “Saturday Sub (Live),” it is dub from an alternate universe, a place where the snare serves as the unlikely source of dubby goodness. In his rendition, the downtempo track has all the remote echoes one associates with dub, but not only is it laden with a raspy high-pitched beat, like a signal flare doubling as a metronome, it seems to take place in a uniquely arid environment. It’s like an X-ray of dub: all the contours, none of the humidity. It’s post-Singularity dub, when dance halls are unmapped partitions of forgotten hard drives.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/banyek314. More of Hargitai’s work at banyek.bandcamp.com. Here’s a group interview I did back in 2006 that Hargitai participated in: “Free as in Netlabel.”

Disquiet Junto Project 0009: “Cross-Species Collaboration”

The Assignment: Create a cross-species collaboration between bird song and acoustic guitar.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


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.

The ninth project in the Junto series was another “shared sample” project, though there were some variables at work. The musicians were given the same samples to work from, but they had a choice. Two choices, in fact. There were two guitar samples, both acoustic, though one employed a slide, and there were two bird-song samples.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, March 1, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, March 5, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0009-avian. As of this writing, there are 78 tracks associated with the tag.

Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0009: Cross-Species Collaboration

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, March 5, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The ninth Junto project is a shared-sample project, though participants have some choice in the source material. Each participant will produce a single track that combines a source recording of bird song and a source recording of acoustic guitar. Four samples are provided: two guitar, two bird song. You will select one of the two guitar samples and one of the two bird-song samples. You will employ only those two samples in the production of your track. You can do whatever you want with those two samples (process, contort, edit, etc.). The goal is to explore the very different origins of these sounds: one human, one avian.

These are the two options for the guitar sample:

http://www.freesound.org/people/UncleSigmund/sounds/30266/
http://www.freesound.org/people/UncleSigmund/sounds/40866/

These are the two options for the bird-song sample:

http://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/14909/
http://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/32480/

Length: Please keep your piece to between two and five minutes in length.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0009-avian”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post your track, please include this information:

The source material for this track was provided from these two samples:

[and then include the two appropriate freesound.org links]

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

The biggest surprise for me was that the slide guitar sample was far less popular among remixes than the other acoustic guitar sample. Someone at some stage commented along the lines that if they never again heard the latter chord progression it would be too soon, though many people re-used it to transformative effect, and as always slight variations were, to my ears, as illuminating as drastic ones. One possible reason the acoustic guitar was more popular was it provided a more clear contrast to the bird song than the slide guitar did.

One thing I learned was: have backups available of source material. The great freesound.org site was the location of the four samples, and it is not the most stable environment. It went down during the project, perhaps as a result of Junto participants’ downloading. Numerous Junto members answered the call to make the source tracks available, and in the end everyone benefited from the assistance of Larry Johnson, DJ_Kaboodle, Matt Kane, and Elst Pizarro

The image up top is a still of a kinetic sculpture by Keith Newstead (more info at keithnewsteadautomata.com). His work is tremendous, and I was unaware of it until Junto participant Schrödinger’s Dog employed an image from it as the “cover” to his entry in the ninth project: soundcloud.com/schrodingers-dog.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • RIP, Peter Bergman (b. 1939), founding member of Firesign Theater, ingeniously used audio in satiric comedy: http://t.co/YPM7KzyG #
  • RIP, Moebius (b. Jean Giraud, 1938), comic book artist. #
  • Never checked out the Stones Throw Beat Battle (big influence on Junto)? It’s in its 261st week, and it’s a great one: http://t.co/W3PXB5KD #
  • Yowza. The Disquiet Junto 1 one track away from its 500th track in 10 weeks: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • Dear Hivemind: Is there a AAA version of the AA USB battery that USBCell makes? #
  • Excellent reason to skip a week. RT @arbeemonkey: My new project is takin all my studio time, not sure I’ll submit for the 10th junto. #
  • That premonition of typing on a keyboard becoming an antiquated practice. #
  • Remembering Samuel Johnson’s emphasis on the weighting of words in drama has made me more empathetic toward emoticons. #

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”