Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Another Conversation Ends

RIP, Cindy Williams (1947-2023)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cindy Williams, best known for her role as the latter half of the comedy duo who comprised Laverne and Shirley (1976-1983), died last week at age 75. For those especially attentive to the way sound is employed by filmmakers, she is perhaps more specifically niche-famous as half of a quite different couple, the one at the center of the intrigue that was Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1974 film The Conversation (the other half is the gentleman wearing a tie in this still — not the mime). To watch The Conversation is to hear their conversation over and over, each time the phrasing gaining new meaning, thanks in large part to the ingenuity of sound designer Walter Murch, who worked right around the same time with Williams on George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973).

It was in American Graffiti that Murch put what he called “worldizing” into effect. This meant that the sound of, say, a car radio was heard as if it were right there in the car seen on-screen, lending new realism to the storytelling, bringing the viewer ever more into the sensorium of the characters. In The Conversation, the potential of sound as a narrative tool emerged fully formed, at the behest of the character Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman. To watch The Conversation is to hear the same sentence over and over — a sentence spoken to Williams (who infused the role, as Ann, with an essential tenderness), and scrutinized to distraction by an obsessed Caul: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.”

A Minor Technical Victory

Adding a mic to the Dirtywave M8

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Cable Guy: Connecting my phone and my synthesizer

This weekend I surprised myself by sorting out a solution to a technical problem I’ve been bothered by. There’s a small piece of music equipment called the M8, which is the sole product made by a small company called Dirtywave (dirtywave.com), based in Los Angeles. The M8 is a “tracker,” a term for a manner of sequencing music. Working in a tracker looks sort of like composing in a spreadsheet, which may sound unappealing, but if you’ve gotten good at working in a spreadsheet then you know how just how powerful muscle memory can be, much as is the case with “traditional” instruments. (I put the word “traditional” in quotes because trackers have been around since the late 1980s, over 30 years. I’m not sure when something becomes “traditional,” but trackers are by no means new.) I used to play with a tracker on my various Palm Pilots back in the day, but hadn’t used one in a long time, even as they’ve recently experienced something of a resurgence in popularity.

What appealed to me about the M8 (versus the Tracker from Polyend, or the software Renoise that could run on my laptop) was its portability. As shown in the photo, it’s not much larger than a phone. In addition, the keyboard has been reduced to a literal handful. The software, which Dirtywave has updated regularly, is quite powerful. And as has become essentially required of new music equipment, there is a great online forum where users discuss the M8, and share tips and examples of their work.

Two things, however, have bugged me about the M8: one hardware, one software. The software matter is that, far as I can tell, it can’t process live sound. I can record music into the M8 and process it, but I can’t process music live. Perhaps that will change with future upgrades. (It also may not solely be a software issue.)

The hardware issue involves recording: for all its inputs and outputs, the M8 doesn’t have a built-in microphone. And for it to use an external microphone, the mic has to be powered (that is, at “line level,” rather than “mic level”). So, not only do I have to use an external microphone to record audio as samples, that mic must be powered. I wanted a portable mic, and I couldn’t find a powered, line-level mic that would fit in the M8’s case. Part of the beauty of the M8 is its portability. A large mic reduces portability.

And now I’ve sorted out a good solution to the “easily portable microphone for the M8” matter: By using a simple mic app and a Lightning-to-audio dongle, I can turn my phone into a mic and plug it directly into the M8. When I first tried to do this, the feedback was alarming. The key thing is to turn the speaker in the microphone app to zero. That nixes the feedback. I can also just record to the phone and play back into the M8 this way. It works really well (I have an iPhone, but it would work with Android, too). And yeah, I’ll likely use feedback on purpose down the road. (The reason the cable in the photo is so long is that I briefly experimented, earlier in this process, with putting my phone really far from the M8 to avoid feedback, before I realized I could fix things by turning off the app’s speaker function.)

Technically, I haven’t found a microphone that fits in the M8 case, my original goal, but since I’ve always got my phone with me anyhow, this is a totally acceptable solution — and better yet, I didn’t need to make any additional purchases, aside from the microphone app, which cost just a couple bucks.

On Repeat: Glassbirds, Schulz, Santaolalla, Westerkamp

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ There are concept albums, and there is Me and the Glassbirds, forthcoming from Heejin Jang, who imagines “a laboratory in which she hatches birds from a bricolage of painted sounds.” These are the title “glassbirds,” and this is a collection of their activities: “These glassbirds are constructed with parts that are fragile, transparent, and frequently malfunctioning. As some break and others are disassembled, new glassbirds emerge on their own, eventually combining and forming a mirror image of their creator.” The result is a clanging industrial noise of the highest caliber. Three tracks are already online, in advance of the March 3 release.

https://heejinjang.bandcamp.com/album/me-and-the-glassbirds

▰ Jeannine Schulz’s first release of the year is out. She’s prolific, so presumambly there’s more to come. According to the calendar, we’re still in January. The three tracks, one of which is refered to as a “bonus,” are collected under the title Clicks and Tones, which properly sums up the material: rough drones, full of their own quiet drama, play host the the simplest of crackling beats on track “A” and the bonus entry, whereas “B” largely dispenses with plosives in favor of what could be a dusty vibraphone turned into a windchime.

https://jeannineschulz.bandcamp.com/album/clicks-and-tones

▰ Watching The Last of Us on HBO has sent me back to the score of the originating video game, by the great Gustavo Santaolalla (Brokeback Mountain, The Motorcycle Diaries). This slow collection of gentle yet eerie tones is one of my favorite cues:

▰ An interview by Mack Hagood with composer, field recording figure, and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp, veteran of the World Soundscape Project, recorded in 2021 shortly after the death of R. Murray Schafer, and featuring excerpts of some of her music. (OK, this one I only listened to once, but it did lead me to revisit of her albums on repeat.)

https://phantompod.org/hildegard-westerkamp-life-in-soundscape-composition/

Scratch Pad: Granular, Bad Batch, Oscars

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org. Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ There’s lots of types of granular ambient music. There’s cloudy granular, all hazy softness. There’s industrial granular, all textural tension. There’s classical granular, all string-section sustain. There’s sodden granular, all murky goodness. This has been a sodden granular morning.

▰ I’m working on four different articles for The Wire at the moment.

▰ Dee Bradley Baker rightfully gets a lot of praise for voicing multiple clones in Star Wars animation, especially The Bad Batch, and composer Kevin Kiner (who has worked a lot with Clint Mansell) deserves similar credit for his chameleonic abilities. This current season has had him making music in so many different modes, especially the three most recent episodes (second season, episodes three, four, and five), which ranged from Blade Runner to Tron to Indiana Jones in their styles.

▰ I could complain about no Oscar nominations for Tár or for Women Talking, or for Bones and All or for Empire of Light, or for Kimi – but the Oscar list is still pretty solid.

▰ Just installed Duet Display (to use an Android tablet as a second screen for my Mac) for the first time in forever. What year is it? (It’s working great, by the way. It used to be quite finicky back in the day. How long has it been around anyhow?)

▰ A note that I’m now mostly using Ivory, the app from the folks who made Tweetbot, for Mastodon on my phone. Online I use the default Mastodon browser webapp.

▰ I finished reading my fourth novel of the year, Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, which I took my time with. It’s about a former Russian royal, the Count, who is, following the Revolution, offered a cushy exile: relegation to a luxury hotel. The book follows him over numerous decades. I found the opening section to be as tightly wound as a Wes Anderson movie, so choreographed that when I closed my eyes I pictured it as, more than anything, a Pixar movie (certain elements, notably an observant cat and a cartoony man identified by his ethnicity, support this). If you are allergic to alliteration you might want to avoid Amor. At the end of the second section, the Count makes an important decision that informs the rest of the book. At the end of the fourth, there is a reveal (not a huge surprise, but important once stated) that I feel the final section doesn’t really do much if anything with. The Count is, in effect, a wise fool. Does he grow, despite his breeding and predilections? That is for the reader to decide. It’s a beautifully written book, if sometimes overly rich (I had to take breaks). If books lacking proper endings bug you, then this one is the perfect corrective. (A TV series is being filmed, with Ewan McGregor as the Count, and they sure better hire that Russian kid from Mysterious Benedict Society!)

▰ Ben Monder. Ava Mendoza. Eivind Aarset. Jamie Stillway. Bill Orcutt. Mary Halvorson. Sharif Sehnaoui. And of course Bill Frisell. It’s a pretty good time to be into guitar, lemme tell ya.

▰ If I ever get to the point where all I’m writing about is the past, please lock my website and take away my keys.

▰ That thing where you’re practicing “Autumn Leaves” for guitar class, and if you play the melody just wrong enough, it ends up being “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” and if you emphasize the major seventh chords too much, it sounds like the Style Council, which is to say, no matter how you mess it up, it sounds pretty good. (And once I’m done I go back to churning chords through my granular effects.)

▰ Fifth novel I finished reading this year: Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval. I knew he wrote a bunch of westerns, too, but to say this isn’t a western is pretty silly. It’s a western with electricity, running water, disco, and more than its share of self-consciousnesses. As the subtitle makes clear, it’s “High Noon in Detroit.” The bad guy actually steals a black hat, and the good guy gets compared to Gregory Peck (who wasn’t in High Noon, but apparently was offered the role before Gary Cooper). The story features more legal bureaucracy and car talk than did High Noon, and the final chapter sets the inevitable shootout about as far from the old west as one might get, but it’s a duel nonetheless. This is not a horror novel, but as someone who has never gotten into much of the horror he’s read, I’d say the depiction of the antagonist’s sociopathic willpower and his girlfriend’s addled supplication are some of the scarier things I’ve spent time with. And as in much horror, the hero doesn’t walk away psychically unscathed. The book is taut and unwieldy, formally structured and fiercely anarchic, in equal measure. (I mentioned this book previously, and updated that post after finishing.)

▰ Report from the breakfast table: Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is not a novel you sit down with to relax.

▰ This icon is an alternate available within Ivory, the Mastodon app (with an unfortunate name) made by the folks who used to make the Twitter app Tweetbot. It also is the answer to the question: What is the opposite of a subtweet?

▰ It seems meaningful that while reading a book about a witch over lunch, my Kindle suddenly displayed nothing but a bright white screen, and there was nothing I could seem to do to reset it. Please recommend any spells or other offerings.

▰ On an episode of Leverage: Redemption I watched this week, a character was playing the New York Times Spelling Bee (well, a fake version of it) on her phone. She got to “Genius” level and said to her phone, “I’m Queen Bee, bitch!” I felt seen, even if the character turned out to be the episode’s villain.

To “Gear” or Not to Gear

Emerging video norms

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I think it’s pretty funny that people sometimes slam, as “gear videos,” synthesizer videos in which the instruments are prominently displayed. Most of the time that term of disparagement is not a meaningful articulation of what’s going on. What’s going on is you have the opportunity to witness a connection between the sounds you’re hearing and some of the means by which they’re produced. In the best of cases, such as when a single synthesizer is involved, they can even serve as contemporary études. There’s plenty of “gear” video out there (tutorials, reviews, “reviews,” tips, walk throughs, and various forms of often not remotely self-aware consumer fetishization — and then there’s perhaps the vilest of streaming infirmities, the “unboxing”). But just because you can see the gear doesn’t make it a (pejorative) gear video.

When I mentioned this online, I was asked if it weren’t the case that those complaints align with when the gear is expensive, and that either way, you have to admit that there are a lot of videos that put visuals (“even the cables”) first.

I’d say that sometimes the expense isn’t inherent in the critique (a couple used Pocket Operators can trigger the haters), but when it is expensive, the critique is more likely, for sure — though often the gear is still way cheaper than the guitars and pedalboards you see in other videos.

I definitely agree that’s the case about many overly designed videos, though I’d also argue that a lot of critiques, which verge on inside-baseball chatter, about evolving music norms don’t take into consideration similar circumstances outside of music. If you’ve dipped into bicycling, photography, or any number of other gear-oriented pastimes, you’ll find similar modes of activity. I think that’s just part of the post-hipster, over-designed, Instagram’d world we’ve woken up in.

So, yeah, some are prettier than they need to be, and some are pretty for pretty’s sake. And then some of the not pretty ones are probably not pretty to make a point — which is to say, they’re reactive while trying to appear not so.