925: The maximum speed in miles per hour of the new “quieter” supersonic jet
32: The percent by which harmful brain plaque, correlated with Alzheimer’s, was reduced in tests using focused ultrasound
45: The decibel level above which people generally find sound annoying
Sources: supersonic (nasa.gov), ultrasound (washingtonpost.com), decibels (wsj.com)
This is just one of the many works currently on display at the show from artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller open through March 9 at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Essentially all the works in the show engage with sound, two pieces filling entire rooms, others triggered by tiny red buttons the size of a bug bite. This one makes no sound, except perhaps in the viewer’s imagination.
Titled simply White House Night and dating from last year, it’s a fragile little painting of a little building against a murky backdrop, picturesque in a macabre sort of way, the piece’s delicacy emphasized by how it is not hung on the wall, but left to lean atop a small shelf. In front, on a piece of wood the odd shape of which suggests it’s been repurposed, are a couple lines of text, an assemblage, two words superimposed, or interjected, into what was either a pre-existing sentence, or two separate ones now joined together.
The combination of painting and rejiggered typography functions like a reverse of a piece by the late artist Tom Phillips: the words remote from the image and formed into a whole, even one with its seams showing, rather than the image serving to reorient a written sequence that preceded the art-making. It shares with Phillips the sense of making the most of limited resources, one of which is language.
There’s something almost accusatory about the edits, the “She” like a later clarification and the “short” carrying meaning the viewer can only guess at. We’re left with the image, so to speak, of a “short groan,” and the lingering presence otherwise of the deep silence that the structure, seemingly illuminated by a car’s headlights, contains.
Martin Yam Møller asks people more or less the same nine questions about music equipment for a running series of informative interviews on his website. These have included the musicians Sofie Birch, Emily Hopkins, Colleen, and Takeyuki Hakozaki, among many others. Møller asked me to participate back at the start of 2020, and I finally completed the Q&A this past week. To be very clear, I don’t remotely have the musical talent of the other people interviewed by Møller; as I mention in one of my answers, regarding my engagement with music-making: “using instruments has helped me understand more deeply the music I write about, and playing has informed the collaborations I do with musicians, as well as the occasions when I interview musicians and other people who work in sound.” That said, I really enjoyed chewing on his questions, things like which “knob/fader/switch” is my favorite, and what’s “the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without.” Below is the second half of the answer to one of the questions, just by way of example of how the interview plays out. His question in this case was: “What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?” I easily came up with several answers for the first half of the question. The other half was much more difficult to answer, and now having looked over the responses from other participants in the series, I recognize I’m not alone. It seems like an obvious reverse, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized not only that I couldn’t really come up with a specific answer, but that the question itself reveals something about the limits of what we talk about when we talk about software. Here’s what I wrote:.
[A] lot of my favorite software, such as the Borderlands app, isn’t purely software; these are tools that work because of the physical interface on which they run. An app like Borderlands already is hardware, in a manner of speaking, because it runs on an iPad. However, a distinction can be made between a piece of software-driven hardware that will work until the thing breaks, like a guitar pedal with firmware, versus a piece of software that is dependent on a separate operating system, such as iPadOS in the case of Borderlands, that may break the software when the OS updates and the old hardware on which it ran is sunsetted. Any number of iOS apps fall into the latter category.
In addition some software, like the Koala app, already have physical parallels in hardware: if I want Koala in standalone hardware form, I could just get an Roland SP-404 (I do want to try the MK II, which does a bunch of stuff the Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II doesn’t). I love Samplr, which also falls into the Borderlands category of being iPad-specific. I love SuperCollider, but it requires a computer keyboard and a screen — I wonder what “hardware SuperCollider” might even mean, right? In many ways, SuperCollider is as tied to a keyboard as Koala, Samplr, and Borderlands are tied to iPadOS. So, no, there isn’t really a piece of software that I wish was hardware.
Read all my responses at martinyammoller.com/9oddquestionsformusicgearjunkies.
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ SoundCloud is reportedly for sale for one billion dollars (US). If the roughly 2,000 subscribers to the Disquiet Junto email announcement list each ponies up a half million, we could buy SoundCloud and make it a Junto-only playground. Let’s get on that.
▰ Remembering that tour of Sun Studio I took 20-plus years ago where the guide explained that some of the beloved echo in the recordings was the result of being in the hall just outside the bathroom
▰ The calendar is confusing. Firmwarebruary should precede Jamuary.
▰ It is quite possible I have gone 48 hours without misplacing my AirPods
▰ I got an extra copy of Eli Fieldsteel’s excellent new book, SuperCollider for the Creative Musician. I’ll be giving it away to a lucky reader at random in an issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter sometime between today’s issue and next Tuesday’s. Subscribe at thisweekinsound.substack.com.
▰ I don’t track my activity closely, but I do look back each morning at how many miles my phone, an iPhone 13, has inferred that I walked the day prior. It’s weird I have to pull this up on my phone because I can’t do so on my laptop, since so many other apps are cross-platform.
▰ Made it to 2024 without ’em, but I finally am picking up some USB-C cables that have USB Type B, USB Mini, and USB Micro ends. Using adapters has gotten ridiculously complex.
▰ Only way the final episode of Monarch’s first season coulda been better is if everyone who met the team upon their return was an ape
▰ The birds have gone bonkers this evening. It’s like corvid Gwar karaoke up and down the block.
Again, my current social media locations are listed here.
Are there really no Eurorack synthesizer makers further inland in California than this? (Locations courtesy of the map of Eurorack Module Manufacturers.)
