Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0589: Auto Play

The Assignment: Automate something manual — or vice versa

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, April 17, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 13, 2023.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

Disquiet Junto Project 0589: Auto Play

The Assignment: Automate something manual — or vice versa

Step 1: Think about things you’re used to doing when you make music, habits you take for granted.

Step 2: Record a track in which you automate something you usually do manually, or manually do something you usually automate — or both.

This project was inspired by recent conversation in the Disquiet Junto Slack.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0589” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0589” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0589-auto-play/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, April 17, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 13, 2023.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 589th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Auto Play (The Assignment: Automate something manual — or vice versa), at: https://disquiet.com/0589/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0589-auto-play/

Junto Profiles: The First 10

Getting to know the community members

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Hundreds of musicians have participated in the Disquiet Junto music community over the years. Each week I send out a composition prompt, and then members from around the world upload a recording of what they make of — or with, or from — it. Back in February I started something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, since not long after the Junto started back in 2012 (almost weekly 600 projects ago, as of this writing). I began interviewing people who contribute regularly. Everyone answers the same questions, and then I ask a follow-up based on their responses. I’ve run one of these Junto Profiles each week since February 6, 2023. At some point I imagine the entries will become less frequent, but I already have several more in the works. Below are the first 10.

Daniel Díaz / From Paris, France: working in film, making space, keeping a notebook

Ian Joyce / From the North Wales coast: soporific synths, having fun, the cat’s meow

xiiixxi / From York, England: growing up with Italian opera, working with Euclidean rhythms

Kei Terauchi Sideboard / From San Francisco, California (and Japan): embracing contradictions, reading to compose

Aethyr / From Sheffield, England: eschewing perfection, tweaking genres

Jason Richardson, aka Bassling / From Leeton, New South Wales, Australia: drafting, redrafting, and collaborating

Klaus-Dieter Hilf, aka RabMusicLab / From Heidelberg, Germany: Mathematics, Munich, MIDI

Joe McMahon, aka Equinox Deschanel / From West Virginia, now SF Bay Area: welcome imperfection, false dichotomies

Michel Banabila / From the Netherlands: “Be open for anything that can happen.”

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

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.