There are reasons I find myself reading thrillers that have less to do with the thrills, less to do with the vicarious, Walter Mitty pleasure of someone fictional doing outlandish things while I sit in my chair, of being transported momentarily to their circumstances, or with the tension of these death-defying pressures and conspiratorial motivations having been brought to bear for my casual entertainment — reasons instead that have far more to do with the simple fact that the characters in such books (and in the good ones their authors as well) spend a lot of time listening very closely to their surroundings, interpreting the world around them with their ears and wits.
This following bit is from the novel Take No Names by Daniel Nieh. In it, a character has just messed up badly, risking drawing attention to his presence and that of a criminal colleague. He has nothing to do but wait to see if has endangered his life. Since this moment occurs a few pages into the book, the likely answer is that no, of course, he has not.
What further elevates that instance is one that comes earlier. Even before this character, named Victor Li (who was also the protagonist of Nieh’s previous book, Beijing Payback), comes to fear that his clumsiness has cost him everything, we witness him simply listening — not out of need, but out of habit:
That paragraph comes toward the opening of the same chapter. It serves to prime the reader’s awareness of Victor’s awareness. I’ll be listening along as I read further. I’m 25% of the way through, according to my trust ereader.
The Assignment: Get a musical New Year's resolution out of the way.
/ 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.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 16, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 12, 2023.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.
The Assignment: Get a musical New Year’s resolution out of the way.
Step 1: Think of something, recording-wise, you want to accomplish musically this year — something you can attempt to accomplish now with the tools you have on hand and a little bit of time.
Step 2: Give the goal you set for yourself a go right now. Take a first stab at something that might, of course, require concerted effort over the remainder of the year to really make progress on. The first step is often the most difficult. Why not get it out of the way now?
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0576” (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 “disquiet0576” (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:
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. Set a short-term goal, not a lengthy one.
Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 16, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 12, 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 576th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Casual Resolution (The Assignment: Get a musical New Year’s resolution out of the way), at: https://disquiet.com/0576/
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 10, 2023, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound.
▰ PERIOD PIECE: Jill Linz, a physics instructor at Skidmore College, has a project that “mapped atomic data into unique audible tone,” yielding an “aural periodic table.”
“By examining the waveforms and tonal qualities of each element in the table, she’s beginning to explore how this ‘sonification’ of atoms might reveal unexpected structural relationships among elements.”
These are waveforms of the first dozen elements:
“From top to bottom, the left column shows hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium; the middle column shows boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen; and the right column shows fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium.”
“Then there’s the noise-canceling issue with the headphones. Yes, noise pollution is certainly a problem in cities like Manhattan with its cacophony of car horns and sirens. But, as annoying as those sounds can be, completely cutting them out in a dense metro area could constitute a health hazard. Situational awareness is pretty important with that many vehicles and people nearby.”
▰ TALK THERAPY: Novelist V. V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage and Brotherless Night, wrote for Time about turning to voice recognition software after losing use of her hands — and how much the tools still need to improve in order to truly serve the disabled:
“I found that I preferred Mac voice control and Google Docs voice typing because the lag between what I was thinking and what the software was typing was shorter; even if the difference was infinitesimal, it mattered. Because of its speed and its slightly better performance with non-Anglo proper nouns, I chose Google Docs for my novel. Sometimes I closed my eyes and muttered scenes into the screen, my former copyeditor’s self unable to bear the typo-written transcription. Sometimes when I could not resist touching the keyboard, I ended up having to wear ice sleeves. Sometimes I opened my eyes only to find that the dictation had stopped working partway through my sentences. If I used a phrase that was also a song or film title, Google would sometimes capitalize it. (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” one character might have said to another.) As when I had typed for myself, I found that I could not write fiction in the presence of others. It felt too intimate. But eventually that self-consciousness fell away. It had to: The software was capable of composition, but when it came to revision, the amount of time and skill it would take to get things done was beyond me and my looming deadline.”
▰ SPEAKER SYSTEM: Apple is experimenting with using AI voices to narrate audiobooks: “[S]ome in the publishing industry are skeptical about replacing human narrators—often professional voice actors or the authors themselves—with A.I. They say that audiobooks are a form of art, and that human narrators help enhance the experience.” Meanwhile, apparently Amazon requires its Audible audiobooks “be narrated by a human.”
▰ BUG REPELLANT: The noisier humans get, the less successful grasshoppers are at having sex. Even though “their calls can reach intensities of 98 decibels at one metre, which is about as loud as a hand drill,” we can muffle that with our own sound: “As this species is highly dependent on acoustic communication for mate location, the reduced calling effort demonstrated by males at both study sites might have a negative impact on mating success.”
▰ QUICK NOTES: RING TONE: The Kitchen Sisters have an episode on the great sound artist Bill Fontana’s work based on the silenced bells of Notre Dame. (Thanks, Lotta Fjelkegård!) ▰ LIST LESS: Nothing particularly sound related ranked among the top 10 technological innovations as determined by MIT’s technologyreview.com, nor among the four additional items readers are to vote for.▰ LEADER BILLBOARD: Ranking the 10 best games based on their sound design: thegamer.com. ▰ FOLEY DU JOUR: Learn how game designers behind Dead Island 2 made the sound of zombie guts, among other subjects.
42: Percent of rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, reporting hearing loss
15: Percent rise in brand awareness after a hair salon franchise employed ASMR to promote itself
300,000: Settlement paid by Whole Foods under Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) for allegedly using “voice recognition system without properly obtaining consent” of its workers
*Wetland Project: Explorations in Sound, Ecology and Post-Geographical Art*; Brady Marks & Mark Timmings (Editors); Figure 1 Hbk 300 pp
A science fiction novelist, a sound artist, and a Member of Parliament walk into a marsh — and that’s not the set-up for a joke. It’s the modus operandi of the beautifully designed multimedia book *Wetland Project: Explorations in Sound, Ecology and Post-Geographical Art*.
Nor is that aforementioned trio — cyberpunk legend William Gibson, World Soundscape veteran Hildegard Westerkamp and former Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May – the first to enter the marsh. The book collects their writings alongside work from poets and various scholars, all the contributors following in the figurative footsteps of its two editors, the artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings.
In 2016 Marks and Timmings founded the Wetland Project at a bog on one of the Gulf Islands near Vancouver, British Columbia. They brought along microphones to document the place’s teeming biodiversity, thus blurring the line between sound art and acoustic ecology.
Since then, their Wetland Project has encompassed a plurality of approaches, including a 24 hour audio document from 2016 (done with Eric Lamontagne), transcriptions for musicians, an installation with Gabrielle Odowichuk that algorithmically associates sound frequencies with colours, and an annual “slow radio” broadcast in commemoration of Earth Day. This book is simply the latest way their Wetland Project has flowed.
And of course, before Marks and Timmings came, First Nations people populated the region in advance of the arrival of Western settlers. One descendant, poet Philip Kevin Paul, talks here about how a tape recorder risks severing sound from the circumstances in which it originated. Elsewhere in the book Laurie White warns the reader against listening to nature in a manner that “risks over-determining a narrative of loss.” Dylan Robinson, like Paul of First Nations ancestry, connects their concerns in an essay that takes arrival, in all its forms, as its theme. Gibson contrasts the broader Wetland Project with the techno-quixotic aspirations of virtual reality. And the late Stephen Morris, to whom the book is dedicated, maps everyday sound to formal compositions via concepts dating from the Renaissance. Over ten percent of *Wetland Project*’s pages contain sheet music resulting from Morris’s approach.
There’s also poetry from Susan McMaster, geochemical consciousnessraising from May, and colour – lots of colour. The book is a veritable peacock, each page a different solid hue, drawing from Odowichuk’s algorithms, expressing a sound from the marsh. The result is a sort of reverse sonification.
And there are QR codes. These appear here and there to allow the reader to click through via a phone camera and hear specific instances from the marsh. On the one hand, the sounds are central to the overall topic. On the other, the QR codes are inelegant, even intrusive; going back and forth between the book and one’s phone can break the concentration the endeavour deserves.
But the QR-triggered webpages are beautiful. They throb and glitch according to the given sounds. One for the red-winged blackbird’s chirp lights up with synchronised flashes. The longer it plays, the more you realise the colours aren’t uniformly bright or dark; between each high-pitched peak appear myriad shades, each for a quieter order of presence. You stop hearing the chirp, and listen out for what’s in the background. Nothing could be more true to the spirit of Wetland Project.
*This originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the January 2023 edition of* The Wire. *More on the book at [figure1publishing.com](https://www.figure1publishing.com/book/wetland-project/).*
