Author: Marc Weidenbaum

This Week in Sound: Ways of Listening Beyond the Human

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This Week in Sound

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the April 11, 2023, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

▰ BACKING TRACKS: How does music support work activities? Nikki Forrester of Nature spoke with a variety of scientists, including Manuel Gonzalez, an organizational psychologist at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey: “Gonzalez encourages his lab members to avoid music when delving into new territory, so that they can apply all their mental resources to process what they’re doing and learning. As researchers become more proficient in particular methods, complex tasks can start to feel routine, a better scenario for incorporating music.”

▰ AIR HAZARD: A lizard called the Colorado checkered whiptail deals with noise pollution by stress-eating: “After aircrafts passed, the lizards’ levels of cortisol, a hormone linked to stress, had skyrocketed, the team reports in a paper published last week in the journal Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science,” writes Carolyn Hagler of Smithsonian Magazine. “Their behavior also shifted—the lizards moved around less and ate more in a likely attempt to rebuild the energy resources lost during their stress reaction.”

▰ AUTO PLAY: Wired’s Boone Ashworth profiles Jeremy Yang, lead sound designer for the robovan company Zoox: “Robotaxis have to use a whole suite of noises to guide a rider through the journey and keep them from doing anything stupid along the way. Most of it is standard car stuff: sounds to let you know a door is ajar, sounds to tell you to put your seat belt on, sounds to alert you that the route has changed. The challenge is making the bleeps and bloops communicate as clearly as a human would.”

▰ VEG OUT: More on the sounds of agitated plants, via the New York Times’ Darren Incorvaia: “The vexed vegetables didn’t air their grievances randomly but rather made specific complaints that matched up with the type of stresses they were under. A machine-learning program could correctly tell, with 70 percent accuracy, whether the grumbling plant was thirsty or at risk of decapitation.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)

▰ OTHER EARS: Ithaca College hosted a presentation by Kate Galloway on video games that engage with animal perspectives, and how doing so “articulates the complexity of human-animal relationships, displaces the boundaries between human and other, and articulates ways of listening beyond the human to actual and virtual sensory ecologies.”

▰ QUICK NOTES: Growth Market: Noisy incubators could stunt the growth of premature infants (usnews.com). ▰ GPS Whiz: Meet Karen Jacobsen, whose voice is used ubiquitously by Google Maps — and yet which Siri has difficulty recognizing (standardmedia.co.ke). ▰ Ear-ly Adopter: Martha Joseph of the Museum of Modern Art surveyed MOMA’s past engagement with sound art (moma.org/magazine). ▰ On Brand: Wikipedia debuted its new sound logo (fastcompany.com). ▰ Road Rage: Traffic noise makes blood pressure rise (bbc.com).

Sound Ledger¹ (FAA, Wilhelm, Plants)

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

$19,000,000: Amount, in $US, awarded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to 14 universities to reduce aviation noise

39: Length, in seconds, of the original (and newly rediscovered) recording session that yielded the famed “Wilhelm scream”

40: Average number of “clicks” emitted by “stressed” plants over the course of an hour

. . .

¹Footnotes: FAA: faa.gov. Wilhelm: pastemagazine.com (via John Kannenberg). Plants: gizmodo.com.

Two Book Reviews in The Wire

I wrote about early Christian mystics and horror fiction

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve got two book reviews in the current issue of The Wire, the one with Dave Lombardo of the band Slayer on the cover. I think this is the first time I’ve had two different articles in the same issue of the magazine.

The lead book review in the issue is of Spectral Sounds: Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird, published by the British Library and edited by Manon Burz-Labrande. It collects over a dozen old stories that have sound as their raw material, all unseen voices, eerie noises, and demonic instruments. There’s some Edgar Allan Poe in here, and Edith Wharton, but most of the old names were new to me. The primary observation I didn’t have room for in the review is that sound is so prevalent in horror that several of the other books in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, of which Spectral Sounds is part, employ it in the examples shown at the back of the book in the catalogue, and also on the publisher’s website. What distinguishes the stories in Spectral Sounds is that sound is central to each tale’s narrative, rather than just a colorful element of the mood-setting.

Also in the issue, my review of Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks – And What It Can Teach Us, written by Kim Haines-Eitzen and published by Princeton University Press. Major thanks to my old friend Erik Davis for having tipped me off to this.

The issue came out today. I’ll post the full text of the reviews on Disquiet.com when the next issue comes out.

The Bank Manager’s Ear

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the ear of actor Nobuo Kaneko. The image appears prominently early on in the 1960 Japanese film noir Intimidation (ある脅迫), directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara. What’s shown here is what fills the entire screen. The moment at which this frame appears is a dream sequence. A senior bank employee named Takita, played by Kaneko, has fallen asleep at home after a boozy farewell party. His dream is, in fact, Takita thinking through a heist he intends to perpetrate — a robbery of his own bank. The anxious close-up of the ear occurs as the robbery sequence reaches its climax, and just as the dream is interrupted. 

In the dream, Takita hears an alarm followed by sirens — and then the audio transitions to a phone ringing. (According to the Criterion Channel, which is how I watched Intimidation, this occurs precisely 18 minutes into the film, which is just under one hour and six minutes long.) Takita is frantically trying to open the bank’s door to escape. He awakens only to realize it’s been a dream all along. The audience realizes at the exact same moment that he does that he hasn’t been pulling off the desired heist, but merely dreaming about it, subconsciously enacting an imaginary trial run. Narratively, this is an ingenious way to perform the classic heist story technique, in which we experience the crime twice: first as a blueprint for the operation, then as the actual event, one that almost always goes wrong. 

In the Intimidation dream sequence, we don’t actually see Takita’s face. His identity is hidden from us. Perhaps if Takita had seen his own face in the dream, he’d have woken up. Perhaps the anonymity in the dream simply reflects his underlying desire for the incident to take place without any blunders. Either way, the focus on the ear — and that sweaty brow — just as the sound of reality (the phone) seeps into the dream state (as an alarm) is an indelible moment. In effect, the alarm is an alarm, one that alerts Takita’s sleeping brain to the fact that the phone is ringing. Later on in the film when Takita actually robs the bank, a sonic alert does go off, but it is neither a phone nor the sort of alarms he heard in his dream. It’s simply an alarm clock.

Junto Profile: Mark Rushton

From Des Moines, Iowa: streaming live, and leaving nothing on the shelf

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This Junto Profile is part of a new series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s your name? Mark Rushton.

Where are you located? As of early 2023, I live in the Des Moines, Iowa, metro area — where I grew up. I moved back in the summer of 2022. Working backwards, I’ve lived in Iowa City, Iowa; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Houston, Texas; and Kansas City, Missouri.

I started making music on the computer after a work colleague in Cedar Rapids showed me a loop-based program during the night of Y2K. Also during my time in Cedar Rapids, in 2005, I started a “live ambient improvisational” collective called Ambient Matyk.

What is your musical activity? Starting in the early 2000s, I’ve created and independently published a lot of electronic music, mainly ambient. I also publish downtempo, beats, drones, cut-up technique / spoken word things, and environmental field recordings. These are released under about 20 different names. My catalog contains over 2800 titles.

In the past decade, most of my music has arrived from iOS apps. I started adding effects boxes a few years ago, and I usually live-mix the final recording. Every now and then I’ll put some loops and beats together on the computer, for old time’s sake. I don’t really play an instrument. I avoid MIDI and deep menus.

What is one good musical habit? In a 2011 interview in The Believer magazine, later reprinted in Salon, Brian Eno was asked about what advice he’d give if he could email himself when he was 20 years old. Eno replied, “Put out as much as you can. It doesn’t do anything sitting on a shelf.”

I first read this in 2015. Eno’s advice was a siren call for me. It gave me permission to release under pseudonyms and experiment with different genres, effects boxes, distribution companies, and see how my recordings are discovered on the numerous streaming services. It also inspired me to release the Disquiet Junto recordings I made entirely on my own.

After 20 years, my fun hobby that made no money for a long time turned into an incorporated business. Today, I can support my family with the income. I wouldn’t be where I am today without applying Eno’s advice as a general work philosophy. I don’t think Eno really practices it. Robert Pollard and Chihei Hatakeyama do something similar.

What are your online locations? Most evenings, I’m creating visual art and drinking kefir on my YouTube channel, youtube.com/markrushton. Those live videos are rebroadcast on my Facebook page, Twitch, and other video services that are tied to YouTube. I often talk about music and quote lyrics while working on paintings.

It’s difficult for me to hang out with most musicians, so I don’t do it anymore. I’m enthusiastically pro-streaming, and many aren’t. As far as I’m concerned, distribution is everything, or at least a starting point. It’s a grind to find listeners, especially in the genres I work in, but they’re out there.

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? I really like 0393, where I made a new composition out of my favorite parts of three previous recordings.

Most of the music I create is original, but every now and then I like to combine past recordings to make something new. It’s like that William S. Burroughs quote, “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.” I’ve been a big fan of Burroughs’ “cut-up technique” since first hearing it around 1986.

Do you think cut-up technique is even more trenchant today than it was in Burroughs’ time? Cut-up, when applied to musical passages and beats, rather than strictly words, became the total basis for turntable-based hip-hop music and then sampling.

Did it take effort, after reading that Eno quote, for you to change your attitude about releasing music, or was it more like a light switch being flipped? The Brian Eno quote arrived to me in 2015 when distribution to streaming services was becoming cheaper and quicker for independent artists. When I started releasing music in 2004, it took forever to get on every digital download service. It’s not like today where you upload your tracks and they’re on Spotify tomorrow and Resso in a few days. Back then, Pandora’s process was curated, you got approved, and then you had to mail them a CD which took months to get digitized and into their system. It was like a 6 month wait.

For Eno to say this in 2011, when the interview was conducted, seems very prescient. Spotify only arrived in the US in the summer of 2011, but it really wasn’t until about 2017 or 2018 when subscription-based streaming services seemed like they were here to stay.

Even though I released more music and sounds after 2015, it took a while to get traction. There were a lot of frustrating hurdles along the way. Looking back, I think the music industry is way better for independent recording artists today in 2023 than even five years ago. People might disagree with me, but I don’t care. I’ve been through the fire.

You also sell your paintings online. Is working in painting commercially similar to doing so with music, or is it quite different? Visual art is like that AC/DC song, “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock ‘n’ Roll),” because there’s no wide distribution network. And I wouldn’t say a website that hosts artists or their artworks is a distributor because discovery is a pain. Most visual artists are terrible at marketing online. It’s a hard road. I put things online, but my main focus for this year will be pop-up shows at local events. A lot of my paintings get used as cover art for my sound recordings.