Author: Marc Weidenbaum

The Alarm and After

From annoyance to object of study

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is an apartment building on Long Island, in New York, where I stay over on occasion. When the place first opened, the fire alarms had a tendency to go off. There was one trip I took where both there and at a hotel where I spent a few nights in Brooklyn, fire alarms ruined multiple nights of sleep. That experience — of the alarm along with the flashing light that accompanies it — set me on edge for the entirely of the trip, and the impact has lingered. The apartment building’s alarms haven’t gone off for some time now, at least when I was present, but I still bear a bit of a grudge, and my latent concerns were brought to the surface when one suddenly rang out during a recent trip, in late January 2026. At least by recording the sounds, as I did here (on my iPhone Pro 17), the incident served some purpose, provided some utility. By recording the alarm, I transformed it from annoyance to object of study, from nemesis to item in a Petri dish. The pause after every third instance is what I find myself focused on, and not just because the brief quiet offered a respite. The silence suggested a rhythmic pattern, something I may put to musical use down the road. I made a second recording, shortly after this one, when the alarm had ceased but the light that blinked along with it kept on blinking. The blink was audible, a sharp, persistent cut in the air. I tried to upload the second audio file to Freesound, but the site kept rejecting it, likely because my recording was too low-volume. The click was quite evident in person. Guess you had to be there, though I can’t recommend it.

The track is on Freesound and SoundCloud.

Disquiet Junto Project 0736: Feed Me

The Assignment: Write a piece of music emulating the dopamine engine that is social media.

/ 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 five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0736: Feed Me
The Assignment: Write a piece of music emulating the dopamine engine that is social media.

Step 1: The author Robin Sloan recently cited a comment by journalist Nicholas Carr about how “the essential content of social media is now the feeds produced by the platforms, not the individual messages posted by users.” The observation made me think of the first time I watched someone, waiting at an airport years ago, flipping rapidly through Reddit — a mode of blipvert-like media consumption ratcheted up later on TikTok and elsewhere. Consider this remark, especially in the context of your own experience.

Step 2: Record a piece of music inspired/informed by the insistent, swift, and often jumpy pace of social media consumption. Produce a piece of music consisting of brief bits of disparate sound that fly by just as soon as they’ve registered with the listener, and that encourage the listener to keep listening through vibrancy and momentum.

Background: You can read Sloan’s post here:

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/feed-content/

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0736” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0736-feed-me/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long did you scroll?

Deadline: Monday, February 9, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 736th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Feed Me — The Assignment: Write a piece of music emulating the dopamine engine that is social media. — at https://disquiet.com/0736/

AirTrain as the Temperature Approaches 0º

And two other field recordings

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’m posting these rail field recordings while I’m on an airplane, headed home to San Francisco after a mostly frigid week in New York, first in Manhattan and then out on Long Island, from Wednesday to Wednesday, the end of January to the start of February. I have a few more such recordings to share, including two from a restaurant and two from inside an apartment building. The following three were recorded during my initial approach to the city, first on the AirTrain, which connects John F. Kennedy International Airport to the Jamaica station of the Long Island Railroad, and then on the LIRR proper. The excitement of my anticipation was dulled by the low temperatures, the late hour, and the rocky flight earlier in the day. The conscious act of recording sounds rooted me in the moment, even if at that moment I was moving pretty fast.

▰ AirTrain as the Temperature Approaches 0º: This is one of several recordings I made with my phone, an iPhone 17 Pro, while riding the AirTrain from the JFK airport to the Jamaica station of the Long Island Railroad. This occurred the evening on Wednesday, January 28, 2026. Being based in temperate San Francisco, I was not looking forward to the cold that had consumed the northeast. Days had passed since the snow had fallen, and the low temperature meant little if any had melted. My ears couldn’t help connect the brittle quality of the air with the shrill chime of the rail. The slow rhythmic thud is a nearby door that, despite being shut, rattled noisily as we sped along. I had difficultly recording 30 straight seconds that weren’t interrupted by an announcement on the public address system. Eventually I managed to do so. The field recording is posted on Freesound and SoundCloud.

▰ Slowing LIRR in Advance of Approach to Station: Manhattan’s expanded Grand Central Station, which now includes, deep underground, stops for the Long Island Railroad, was approaching — or we were approaching it. Some distance was yet to be covered, and yet already the train seemed to slow. The sound of this segment is nowhere near as loud as other, earlier phases of the trip, a straight shot from the Jamaica station with, if memory serves, just one other stop that time of night. The audio was recorded late on Wednesday, January 28, using an iPhone 17 Pro. The train was close to empty of passengers, perhaps owing to the fierce cold, which was closing in on single digits. The field recording was posted to both Freesound and SoundCloud.

▰ Hitting 95.8 Decibels on the LIRR: I’ve experienced a lot of loud noise lately, and the volume of the Long Island Railroad as it traveled from Jamaica station to Grand Central Station was beyond any in my recent memory — the volume, that is, in combination with the high pitch. I pulled out my phone to register the decibel level, and it pushed closer and closer to 100, maxing out at 95.8, by my (and my device’s) estimation. This snippet was recorded in the evening on January 28, 2026, on my iPhone 17 Pro. Even now, a week later as I post it, the sound is sharp and fierce and implicitly dangerous in a way that makes it a difficult listen. This field recording was posted to Freesound and SoundCloud.

Esolang Junto

The art of esoteric code

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This shows a page from a book

This excerpt is from Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code by Daniel Temkin, with a foreword by Allison Parrish, published in late 2025 as part of MIT Press’ Hardcopy line. It’s about unusual programming languages that might be thought of as works of art unto themselves. I was struck by how the same description could easily apply to the theoretical and conceptual music composition ideas that make up the weekly Disquiet Junto projects. I’m reading the book now, and will have more thoughts soon. I’m enjoying it very much, and taking it slowly, because it’s such a short volume.