Been thinking a lot about Greg Brown, the founding Cake guitarist, who died recently, age 56, way too young, even by rock’n’roll standards. We weren’t close friends or anything but he lived nearby when I was living in Sacramento, working for Tower Records, and we’d yap as he’d pass by, usually on the way to/from a rehearsal/gig. I can still easily picture him, slightly slouched, jacket a little larger than it needs to be, ratty case in hand. Such a sweet, thoughtful guy, and his playing in those early years of Cake was sublime: taut, economical, driving, restrained, bristling — whatever a song called for, it was exactly that. Seeing the band countless times as they came into being was a wonderful experience, central to my 20s. It’s one thing to go to concerts occasionally, to catch a touring band, maybe get to the venue in time for the end of the opening act. It’s another to be part of a community where bands are constantly playing, and you’re observing as they form, emerge, and yes often decline, and how the ones that persevere proceed to mesh, mature, evolve, and yes often splinter. There are a lot of ways to spend your 20s, and going out to see live local music all the time is about as good as it gets. I find it fascinating how certain periods of your life don’t sit with you in full, but get encapsulated in a fragment of a conversation, in a bit of afternoon sun, and, of course, in a riff. Brown contributed many such riffs. RIP, sir.
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
The 0th Esolang
Courtesy of Daniel Temkin
This is the very first poetic / imaginary / experimental computer programming language in Daniel Temkin’s recent book, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code. There’s a marvel on just about every page: the code, its enactment, considerations of both, overarching themes.
Time to Cull
When I posted this image on Instagram, I got an immediate warning. Apparently the phrase “Time to cull” is often associated with posts, presumably images, that are removed from the site for being inappropriate. This alert was, to say the least, surprising to me, and I did briefly consider whether I should proceed with the post. (I did.) But in any case, I do wanna trim some of my vinyl (and CDs, for that matter).
Looking at Field Recordings
Thanks to a piece of visualization software by Scott D. Brown
Scott D. Brown has created an elegant web interface for creating starkly beautiful circular spectrograms for uploaded audio files. The above one is the result of a 30-second recording I made of a fire alarm. The one below is of birdsong played in a bathroom (read for more details). Note how much less self-evidently rhythmic it is, and how the shading between frequencies is more varied and nuanced:
The next one, resembling a slice of a tree, is the sound of a train beginning to slow as it approaches a station. Looking at field recordings is a great way to listen to them. By observing how machines register to machines, you can find touchstones for your own attention.
And this final one, from the earliest of my recent spate of field recordings, is the phase shift of contrasting beeps from retail protection devices, plus occasional appearances of cashier pings and muffled human speech (read for details). You can actually see the phase shift as the distance between rhythmic elements grows smaller and then larger, round and round.
You can upload your own sounds to see what they sound like at spectrogram.scottbrown.co.nz. Brown is, per the URL, based in New Zealand.
Scratch Pad: TTS, TY, STT
From the past week
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Through an earbud, an incoming message is read to me mechanically via text-to-speech (TTS). The message concludes with the emoji TY, short for thank you. I know this because I hear “tie” at the end of the sentence. Then I wonder if in the future people will say “tie” aloud when they mean thank you. Perhaps some already do.
▰ Occasionally these various speech-to-text (STT) voice recording apps I use for note-taking will insert descriptions of the sounds they can’t transcribe. Today I got “(snow crunching)” which I’ve never gotten before, and I can’t help but wonder if it gave this San Francisco that interpretation because I’m (briefly) in New York.
▰ Huh, so if my phone is reading a text message to me, I can say “Stop,” and not only does the reading stop, it initially does a quick little fade-out. I will make much use of this new superpower. (Interesting detail: If I say “Stop” while the message is being read, my “Stop” isn’t itself interpreted by my phone as a voice-to-text message.)
▰ It’s funny. San Francisco certainly doesn’t have more traffic noise than Manhattan, but since it’s not 10ºF here, I can open the windows, and thus there are way more sirens than I heard for the past week. Good to be home, either way.
▰ “Blue Liz,” “Petrified Forest,” “Cosmic Cobalt” — these are some of the many colors of crayons that Disquiet Junto participants are exploring for their sonic content in this week’s project. … Oh, and “Permanent Geranium Lake” — an old-school banger, as crayon color names go
▰ New York was great. It’s great to be home. These things are mutually compatible.
The apparent bend in the photo — noticeable particularly if you look at the Cliff House, the large building on the right — is because I angled the camera upward, so as to limit the presence of the volleyball activity, and instead capture more of the sky.
▰ Kinda entranced by the way my various speech-to-text tools describe stray noises, most recently: “(pages rustling)”
▰ Didn’t finish reading anything this week, but made solid progress on, among other books, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the coincidence of the titles (along with fact that both jump around in time while considering the subject of cleaved societies) having just occurred to me.