Imagining when such technology might get normalized with domestic doorbells
Healthy Buttons
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Susan Philipsz on an SFMOMA Balcony
Experiencing and documenting “Songs Sung in the First Person”
I spent much of an afternoon this past week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a key cause of my visit being an exterior installation, on a high balcony, of a piece by sound artist Susan Philipsz. The work is titled “Songs Sung in the First Person on Themes of Longing, Sympathy and Release.” Philipsz was born one year before I was. Her personal songbook registers her as a peer: Teenage Fanclub, Gram Parsons, the Smiths, and Soft Cell. Philipsz’s voice has a lovely quality. An untrained singer, she combines a mix of tenderness and self-consciousness that feel, for lack of a less ordinary term, real. Then again, ordinary is sort of the point. There is a useful ordinariness to her singing. It’s not “bad” by any means. In fact, as someone who doesn’t listen to much music with singing, I prefer her dedicated amateur tonality with the throaty, emotive overkill of many professional entertainers (trained or otherwise).
Perhaps ironically, the work that this ephemeral piece reminded me of most is one with visuals: a video titled “the world won’t listen” by the artist Phil Collins (not the recording artist). That piece presents music fans from Colombia, Indonesia, and Turkey singing karaoke versions of Smiths songs. Collins is a half decade younger than Philipsz, both are from the United Kingdom, and they naturally draw from the same cultural source material.
As with a lot of Philipsz’s work, there is no real physical presence to “Songs Sung in the First Person on Themes of Longing, Sympathy and Release.” You stand on the balcony and you listen. You do or don’t look at the other people who are also present. Perhaps the intimacy of her voice makes eye contact difficult. Perhaps that is the point. There is some ritual to the scheme. You have to walk through two heavy sets of doors to get to the balcony. If you look around, you might spy a distant, massive speaker, separated from visitors by a light metal stanchion that signals to not venture further. A bit of unintentionally exposed cabling at the balcony’s edge suggests that maybe some other approach had been experimented with earlier. (I’m fairly certain this speaker cone is the same model I’ve seen in other Philipsz installations — interior and exterior — and I wonder if it’s an intended marker of her work, or simply the right choice for certain type of space.)
I wondered how, aside from a photograph of the exposed speaker, I might visually document the Philipsz piece. In the end, photos of the wall text made particular sense: they show the related information, and reflect back the view in which the singing is experienced.
An Amplified Skeuomorph
And the sound of photography
I don’t know what it says about my aesthetic leanings, but I found this 1912 building far more interesting once the presumably temporary scaffolding went up than I ever had previously — so much so that I pulled over the car I was driving in order to take a few pictures. None of the resulting snapshots began to do justice to the elegance of the lattice, the way the newly enveloped structure suggested an architectural plan come to life.
The point of my noting this incident isn’t the construction or the photo but what happened when I hit the button on my phone to trigger the camera app to document the scene: the sound of the shutter filled the car. It would have been even louder had I not already rolled down the window to get a better view of the building, a large church on Turk Street here in San Francisco. Hearing the artificial shutter sound — a classic example of a digital skeuomorph, in which a software application mimics a vestigial design element of a formerly physical object — was confusing, to say the least. Played that loud in the car, it wasn’t even recognizable at first as a camera sound. The magnified noise was entirely out of scale with the succinct click that audibly confirms a photo has been shot. I took a few extra photos in order to, in turn, confirm my sense of what had occurred.
This incident was an unintended consequence of my phone being connected to the car via CarPlay, a service that mimics select iOS apps on a dashboard display. These versions of the apps are optimized, even restricted, given the use case. That is, they tend to emphasize voice input and to limit hands-on activity. Somehow, though, the rerouting of the phone’s shutter wasn’t taken into consideration in the process. Perhaps at some point in the future, an update to iOS or to CarPlay or to both will eliminate the car’s exaggerated echoing of the camera’s shutter. Which leaves a question lingering about whether we’ll even notice such a passing. The constant iterative updating of the devices and software tools we employ in our lives means that numerous changes, small and large, occur on an almost daily basis, generally without any ability on our part to roll back the clock, to contrast today with yesterday. The future keeps occurring. Only by documenting the details of the momentary present might we even begin to keep track, to make sense of it all.
Scratch Pad: Spider-Verse, Stonehenge, Voicemail
From the past week
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon) and disquiet.bsky.social (if you’re on Bluesky, which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment).
▰ There should be special screenings of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse that play at half speed. That way you can focus on how beautiful it is. I may watch it all over again, this time with noise-cancelling headphones blasting Nils Frahm, Brian Eno, or Hania Rani so I can just watch it all unfold.
▰ In episode “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” of The West Wing (first season, episode 19), Donna asks Josh why everyone in the White House is so down, and my first thought is, “It’s the score.”
▰ Find someone who remixes your single like these voicemails I keep getting from someone I don’t know who leaves rambling messages with garbled music playing in the background.
▰ Shazam couldn’t recognize the drones playing during the live broadcast of sunrise at Stonehenge
▰ And who among us hasn’t experienced this change from time to time?
▰ The ceiling at SFMOMA isn’t too shabby, either.
▰ It’s as if the Slayer logo had been designed for this stage of its eventual deterioration.
▰ The immersion blender has taken EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) to new heights. Sounds like it’s singing death metal.
▰ Have a great weekend. Listen to your favorite album with the tracks out of order. Write down what you hear when you first wake up in the morning. Look for mentions of listening in the book you’re currently reading.
Backyard Soundscape Recording
Working with the AudioMoth
This recording was made in my backyard while I was deep asleep. At precisely 1am on June 22, 2023, the device, called the AudioMoth, turned on and at precisely 6am it turned off. In between those start and stop points, the AudioMoth recorded 55 seconds followed by a pause of 5 seconds, and then it repeated the process. This automated scenario filled, over the course of the night, the AudioMoth’s tiny, removable SD card with 301 files: one for each of the recordings (that’s 5 hours times 60 instances of 55-second audio snapshots), plus a single text file listing details of the session. The text file noted the device’s settings, which are configurable via my laptop thanks to a free piece of software. There’s also a free piece of software to set the AudioMoth’s internal clock, and another one to upload the firmware that runs the device. And there’s a free phone app (for iOS and Android) that serves one purpose: it plays a chime that syncs the AudioMoth’s clock. Which is to say, the device’s microphone isn’t just listening to record; it is listening for instructions.
For the June 22 session, my device’s maiden voyage (to the extent that being affixed to an umbrella pole in an urban backyard can be termed a voyage), it just used all the default settings. For the June 23 session, I made one change: I enabled the AudioMoth to automatically place each individual day’s recordings into a separate folder. Nothing has quite made me excited to get up in the morning like my AudioMoth recorder. I find myself unable to wait to go outside to retrieve it and hear what wonders it has recorded: birds, insects, passing critters, automobiles, planes — and all the better, the orchestrated combination thereof. I’m going to try to hold off until Monday (three mornings from today), now that the auto-foldering of daily recordings will save me a lot of data housekeeping.
Dealing with all those files was one of two concerns I had after I started using AudioMoth. The other was knowing how the alkaline batteries were holding up. It turns out that when you switch the thing off, one of its two lights blink. If there are 4 blinks, the batteries are full — then it goes 3 blinks, 2 blinks, or 1 blink as the batteries drain. The fifth alert (lowest in terms of battery strength, highest in terms of expressed urgency) is 10 rapid blinks, so you can’t miss it. This solution is so simple, so clear. It exemplifies the efficient brand of ingenuity embodied by the AudioMoth.
The one I purchased is part of a growing family of devices designed to enable acoustic ecologists and other audio practitioners to make audio recordings remotely. There is also a smaller version called the μMoth, a water-safe one called the HydroMoth, and something called AudioMoth Dev, which was designed with software and hardware developers in mind. The AudioMoth itself is little more than a naked printed circuit board, most of its size given over to the three AA batteries that provide power.
There’s also a small green plastic capsule available, complete with a velcro strap. For the June 22 session, I attached the thing to a table umbrella pole in the backyard. For June 23, I attached it to a chair, hoping to cut down on the wind. For the next three days, it’s attached to one of three stakes keeping a sapling erect. My next steps involve learning more about the device’s settings, in particular using built-in filters to limit noise, and about how to manage all these files — what are the best practices for identifying key moments when you’re faced with multiple hours of what many would simply call silence?
