This is lightly adapted from the June 30, 2019, issue of the free weekly Disquiet.com email newsletter This Week in Sound. I don’t usually wait a full week to post the material on Disquiet.com, but the July 4 holiday messed with my schedule. The July 7 issue of This Week in Sound went out a few minutes ago.
/ / A GOOGOL OF BLOGS If you maintain a blog related to music and/or sound, please reply to this email to let me know. Thanks. Some recent favorite posts:
The bass player Steve Lawson ponders the pluses and minuses of making album-length recordings: “I just want to keep making the music that matters to me. And the few hundred people I need to be interested in what I’m doing in order to make it viable are statistically insignificant in terms of the wider music industries.”
Ethan Hein on developing an introductory course to music theory: “If you read this blog, you know that I take a dim view of traditional music theory pedagogy, which tends to present the aesthetic preferences of Western European aristocrats of the 17th and 18th centuries as if they’re a universally valid and applicable rule system.“
This isn’t quite a blog, but Susanna Caprara, who goes by La Cosa Preziosa, has a great monthly newsletter that’s called The Secret Soundscape Club, and that’s what it’s about. It’s wonderful. (She also has a blog.)
/ / THIS WEEK IN SOUND A lightly annotated clipping service
Beat Surrender: Your heartbeat has a signature, and the Pentagon has developed technology to read it with a laser from a distance. “The system is 95 percent accurate and can be used at distances of at least 200 meters, making them useful at locations such as military checkpoints.”
Space Music: Brian Eno is now the name of an asteroid. The day prior to the announcement, he earned the Stephen Hawking Medal.
Cloud Cover: Bitcoin may be the “native currency” of the internet, but its diehards are looking for redundant forms of communication, should the internet fail them, so that their accounts are always accessible. They are now tapping satellites and even ham radio to do their bidding.
Speak & Teller: There’s a new version of the board game Monopoly that comes with a “voice-controlled AI” that manages players’ finances and transactions.
Blast from the Past: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, something mysterious launched a burst of radio waves into the cosmos. Last September, that powerful pulse collided with an array of radio telescopes in the western Australian Outback. Though the fleeting barrage lasted mere milliseconds, scientists were able to trace the radio burst back to its source: A galaxy roughly four billion light-years away.”
Mic Drop: ProPublica and Wired reported on “an aggression detector that’s used in hundreds of schools, health care facilities, banks, stores and prisons worldwide, including more than 100 in the U.S.” The tool uses sound as a detector of suspicious activity. “Yet ProPublica’s analysis, as well as the experiences of some U.S. schools and hospitals that have used Sound Intelligence’s aggression detector, suggest that it can be less than reliable.”
Bat Mobile: Now that cars can be nearly silent, due to electric and hybrid engines, they require sounds to be added. BMW has tapped composer Hans Zimmer (Inception, The Dark Knight) for its forthcoming BMW Vision M NEXT concept car.
Right Stuff: The song of the North Pacific right whale has long eluded researchers, until now, reports Smithsonian Magazine. Why might this scarce species of whale sing? Same reason humans generally do: “the rarity of the whales has led to the animals becoming more vocal to find mates.” (via Subtopes)
Rock Lobster: It’s been said that the Chinese-American dish known as chop suey helped keep miners from getting scurvy. Madeline Leung Coleman argues persuasively that Chinese food later fueled West Coast punk rock. (via the NextDraft newsletter)
Within the Context of No-Context, Part 358: The information associated with streaming classical music, such as conductor, composer, and performers, is often found to be lacking: “critics of the status quo argue that the basic architecture of the classical genre — with nonperforming composers and works made up of multiple movements — is not suited to a system built for pop,” writes Ben Sisario. It’s worth nothing that the system fails pop music, too. Streaming services often leave out the record label, liner notes, band members, and song/production credits. Just this past week I was trying to find a 1996 album from the Lo Recordings label of collaborations (it’s titled Collaborations) that teamed pairs of musicians, only to find that Google Play Music leaves out half of each pair in the track listing.
Summer School: Ableton, the German software-development company behind the widely used digital audio workstation called Live, launched a fun web-based tool for teaching the basis of audio synthesis.
Concierge DJ: A year or so ago while searching for a hotel in New York City, I selected the Ace because it provided free loaner guitar to anyone staying the night, and I wanted to be able to practice while away from home. Were I to stay at the lower Manhattan hotel Sister City, created by the folks behind Ace, I might never even spend much time in my room, as musician Juliana Barwick has created a score for its lobby, and it’s interactive. Lobby music is the new elevator music.
Psych Out: This recent research may not bode well for my mental future, but let’s wait until its findings have been verified several times: “A machine-learning method discovered a hidden clue in people’s language predictive of the later emergence of psychosis — the frequent use of words associated with sound.” (via Jason Richardson)