I’ll have a longer review of this when the album is released, but in the meanwhile, I highly recommend a preview listen to the forthcoming Myuthafoo by Milan, Italy–based musician Caterina Barbieri. It’s a gorgeous, varied collection, 6 pieces, 32 minutes, zero vocals. The album is quite extroverted at times — full-bodied synthesizer compositions that are best heard loud, such as “Math of You,” a hypnotic array of patterns that’s one of the two tracks available for advance listening. The other preview track is quite different, “Swirls of You,” with which the album closes. The song would make perfect sense with the Cure’s Robert Smith singing on top of it. But since he isn’t, you can enjoy Barbieri’s lush instrumental all on its own.
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
A B Testing
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
More illustrious mysteries from the paradigmatic intersection of design, interface, sound, and interaction: the domestic doorbell. The A button is to the right, the B to the left. There are, for reasons beyond comprehension, not one but two Bs and they are identical stickers. If the garage becomes a tenant unit, does it get three Cs? The buttons differ in size, shape, and color, and are both old enough that it’s initially unclear which came first. My money is on B having preceded A. I sense that the A is a long ago quick fix from when the more ornate B-style button broke. Note as well the discoloration around the buttons — is that from repairing, or handprints of visitors with bad aim? And then the icing on top is that little bit of tape above the doorbells, which no doubt displayed some version of the now common scrawled instructions for visitors — you know, to hit both buttons, or call this number, or check with the neighbor. That sign is gone but the adhesive remains. And that is, as well, a metaphor for so much in this troubled realm.
“A Preliminary Theory of Sound Design”
Nathan Ho lays out eight traits
I spent some time last Sunday afternoon with Nathan Ho, a San Francisco Bay Area musician, coder, and educator whose name you may recognize from his gorgeous, sound-producing, complex Venn diagrams, which I wrote about at the start of 2021. (One of them served as the “cover” for this issue.) I mention him here not as a log of my social calendar, but because of something he wrote toward the end of last month on his excellent blog. It’s an essay that collates his thoughts on the underpinnings of sound design. He breaks the concepts down into nine “traits.”
The piece takes as its title “A Preliminary Theory of Sound Design,” and he notes Disney’s “12 Principles of Animation” as a model. The traits are, in alphabetical order: Contrast, Directionality, Fidelity, Regularity, Space, Transients, Verticality, and Vocals. They appear in a different sequence in Ho’s post, beginning, appropriately, with Transients (specifically the “initial” transient: “A tiny click,” he writes, “or burst of noise added to an attack, or a fade in, can make a huge difference”) and closing with Verticality (which he associates with other concepts, such as “arrangement” and “layering”). Whether you make sound or just think about it, the divisions he points out provide a useful classification system.
After reading it, you might try the following exercise: consider a sound, and then break it down into the eight traits that Ho has delineated. If you do, please report back.
Scratch Pad: Files, Jingles, Interfaces
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).
▰ How many times have I (re)learned that the best way to make sure that music files remain associated with each other as subsets of a given album in Apple Music (slash iTunes Match) is to make sure they’re MP3s or ALAC?
▰ I can hear but I don’t see the ice cream truck
▰ I’ve been trying out Duolingo for German. I assume this image means I’ll soon be reading Doepfer and Ableton synthesizer documentation in the original.
▰ Today’s near-paperless office: six screens, one tiny notebook
▰ Notifications settings:
▰ Digital-based note-taking can generate idiosyncratic cadences and processes. Today is the second day of the month. The second day of the month is the first day of the month when I need to have a document specific to the month, because my notes from my general daily note-taking, from yesterday, only became archival (historical) today. I create a new monthly doc to put those note in. Now, because I’m using IA Writer, which doesn’t sync seamlessly with Dropbox, I move the previous month’s monthly doc back into Dropbox, within a folder for the year, and then create a new monthly doc in its place within IA Writer (by “within” I just mean in an app-specific folder in iCloud). As always, some systems are simple; others reflect the accrual of habits as constrained by unique aspects of one’s perceived needs, discomforts, and priorities, which also shift and evolve over time. The latter are especially difficult to unpack after the fact. The main reality check is that this all took about two seconds to accomplish. Describing it took much longer.
Summer Hours
Planning ahead
Summer (i.e., the end of the school year) begins today. I’m going to try to give myself a little more time between now and mid-August for recuperation and what we now call “long form” writing. This may mean I’ll take the occasional issue off (of This Week in Sound), and maybe even an occasional blog post. The Disquiet Junto will continued unabated. To wit, there likely won’t be an issue of This Week in Sound on June 9 (next Friday). Then again, it may come naturally and quickly. We’ll see. Writing this newsletter is generally more of a release than a chore, that’s for sure.