field notes – Page 124

Pedal Details

February 23, 2024February 23, 2024 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Obey the orb

Crafting a Prompt

Not the AI kind

February 23, 2024February 23, 2024 / By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s funny how words get usurped. We talked about drone music long before the word “drone” came to be associated with small flying objects. And in the Disquiet Junto, we used the term “prompt” to refer to creative composition concepts for individual and collaborative music-making projects for a decade before the term became widely associated with engaging a nascent artificial intelligence to respond with some desired output. But the older meanings linger, especially in communities and scenes where a definition is baked into the lingua franca. In such realms, the earlier meaning can still evolve in its own way, even when the newer meaning gains prominence. On the discussion board llllllll.co (aka Lines), where a lot of Disquiet Junto community discussion takes place, someone raised the topic of a visual equivalent to the Disquiet Junto — that is, weekly composition prompts aimed at visual artists, rather than at musicians. In the resulting (and ongoing) conversation, a longtime Lines and Junto participant, Jason Wehmhoener, made a comment about the development of prompts, the substance of which I appreciated:

I think there’s more to be said about building a community around creative prompts. I’ve attempted, privately, to build up a backlog of weekly prompt ideas for visual arts, and I’ve spoken with @disquiet at length about what makes a good prompt, and I have to say, I personally found the task to be an immense challenge. One of the things Marc really emphasizes in his prompts is accessibility. He takes care to make prompts that don’t necessarily require specialized skill, or prior experience. There’s a very zen like beginners mind approach to the Junto, an aspect of the experience that I think may be under appreciated. I think it explains a lot of the Junto’s success. Anybody can jump in anytime. And yet it’s always engaging and often surprising.

It’s often the case that I learn the most about the Junto not just by watching people participate and listening to their work, but also by witnessing what participants themselves say about the Junto: how they describe it, how they position it, what stands out to them. The language they use is often language I later adopt myself.

Looking for Sound

A fox in the spectrogram headlights

February 21, 2024February 21, 2024 / By Marc Weidenbaum

In this past Friday’s issue of This Week in Sound, I shared a link to an example of a field recording practice in which spectrograms aid in the isolation of instances of activity within massive amounts of audio. Mat Eric Hart, whose work I had linked to, subsequently gave me permission to share examples of that technique.

This is the appearance of a fox:

This marks the arrival of a little grebe:

And this is an owl:

I love the concept of looking for sound in advance of hearing it, since the approach reverses how the brain can work — we experience sound more quickly than we might see something. I also love how these images resemble objects surfacing in a night vision camera. Visit Mat’s post to hear audio from the session that yielded these results.

This Week in Sound: Entrainment, Radio, Fungi

A lightly annotated clipping service

February 21, 2024February 21, 2024 / By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the February 20, 2024, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ THAT’S ENTRAINMENT: To answer the question as to whether electronic music might inherently “alter the consciousness” of listeners, “researchers used electroencephalography, which measures electrical activity in the brain via electrodes attached to the scalp, to gauge the participants’ neural entrainment to the music.” As described in New Scientist, the effort, which explored the concept of “entrainment,” may have medical applications, such as for therapy and in intensive care units. “Entrainment occurs when synchronisation arises between an external rhythmic stimuli, such as electronic music, and the firing of neurons in the brain.” (Thanks, Paolo Salvagione!)

▰ ADIOS, RADIO: “Who in the world steals a radio tower?” asks the station manager of a radio station, WJLX in Jasper, Alabama. He asks because the station’s tower has gone missing: “The tower, all 190 feet of it, had vanished — its 3,500 pounds of spindly steel beams possibly sliced into pieces and dragged away earlier this month by thieves, the police said. … There are, however, some precedents in Alabama. In 2021, the police in Dothan arrested a man who had stolen a 30-foot aluminum trailer with a collapsible radio tower that reached up to 100 feet. And in the summer of 2013, the police in Talladega said that a 75-foot steel radio tower and other equipment had been stolen from a broadcasting group.”

▰ QUICK NOTES: Vitamin Z: Scientists are exploring the role of zinc in causing and addressing hearing loss. ▰ Roots Music: “A pair of experiments has found that fungus grows much more quickly when it’s blasted with an 80 decibel tone, compared to fungus that receives the silent treatment.” ▰ Physics Ed: The discussion of newly confirmed “second sound” (thanks to everyone who sent this — along with related — links to me) in fluid dynamics made me think about the first and second cracks in coffee roasting. ▰ Root, Root, Root: For the first time, a woman is the lead voice in Major League Baseball play-by-play: Jenny Cavnar of the A’s. ▰ Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is that of the wren, “one of our tiniest and yet loudest resident songbirds.” ▰ Don’t Worry, Be Haptic: Learn about vibrational suits, which translate music (and sound in general) into full-body experiences. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Cry It Out: Exploring how infant marmosets use sound to communicate to caregivers.