Author: Marc Weidenbaum

On the Line: Code, Periphery, Forest

Some favorite recent sentences

/ By Marc Weidenbaum 

“The computer became a way to create my own special place—microworlds of sounds, drawings, words, and symbols.”

That is Matt Nish-Lapidus, of Toronto, Canada, writing about “connections between coding and poetry, tracing how initial programming languages were motivated by reciprocal learning between human and machine”

. . .

“I wanted this extra sound to be as minimally invasive as possible — in my head I visualized it poking out from the periphery every now and then — so I again thought about how I could carve out most of its weight.”

That is musician Andrew Tasselmyer, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from his excellent newsletter about his musical process. (I’ve mentioned Tasselmyer’s music here one or two times recently.)

. . .

“Forest-sound is like an ocean that has been suspended above the ground.”

That is Melanie Challenger, author of How to Be Animal: What It Means to Be Human, and host of the Enter the Psychosphere podcast, in the context of writing about “why we can and should listen to other species.”

Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

2,668: Number of electrodes used among 29 test subject humans in an experiment by which researchers reconstructed a Pink Floyd song from listeners’ brain activity

80: The number of warning sirens on Maui — none of which went off during the recent fires

1,279: Potential of increased Hong Kong fine, in $US, for domestic noise complaints

Scratch Pad: Menu, Reznor, Lula

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I used to do this on Saturday mornings over coffee, but it recently became clear to me that that timing is counterproductive, since I aim to take weekends off social media — thus, doing this chore on Saturday morning meant pulling up social media on Saturday morning, which is not what I want to be doing. So, now I’m collating late Friday afternoon, and then posting on Saturday morning. As for social media, these days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. 

▰ I like how the phone voice menu estimates the wait. There’s a brief pause after the number as the system constructs a sentence. It says “7 …” and the ellipsis provides you with more than enough time to wonder: “hours? days?” Eventually it clarifies “… minutes.”

▰ I know, I know, see Oppenheimer in a theater on a big screen. But also: do the same for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s far richer graphically than I had imagined it might be, up there with Spider-Verse. I mostly went to hear the Reznor-Ross score on a big system, and I was astounded visually.

▰ You could do worse than blasting Chloe Lula’s tracks on her recent split EP, Synergy, while crossing a bridge as midnight approaches

▰ It’s Wednesday just before noon as I type this and every hour or so all I can think is, “There’s a new Autechre album due out tomorrow.”

▰ New release from Autechre — seven live 2022 sets — on its way

▰ I don’t attend the annual Outside Lands fest because, clearly, I mostly listen to fridges hum, gears break, and birds sing; much music with a proper chorus and verse makes me break out in hives. But the day before is full of distant brief muffled mic checks and it’s pretty grand.