Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Scratch Pad: Noise, RSS, Conway

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media 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.

▰ The problem isn’t the construction noise. The problem is that the construction noise sounds exactly like a giant dental drill.

▰ RSS 4 Life

▰ With great power … comes a lot of drop-down menus I get confused by and lose track of

▰ I love the front of the C.G. Jung building on Mission in San Francisco, and not just because the tiles make me think of Conway’s Game of Life.

▰ Morning trio for street construction noise … — and who am I kidding? I can’t hear anything else.

▰ Synths!

▰ Finished reading one novel and four graphic novels this week. The novel: Lightness by C. A. Higgins. The graphic novels — this is me getting back into the swing of things with my Marvel Unlimited subscription — were largely in the recent Ultimates line (Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri’s Ultimates: Volume 1: Fix the World, Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man: Volume 1: Married with Children, and Peach Momoko’s Ultimate: X-Men: Fears and Hates), plus the start of Al Ewing and Martín Cóccolo’s run on Thor, Immortal Thor Vol. 1: All Weather Turns to Storm. And I’ve started trying out leagueofcomicgeeks.com as a way to track my comics reading. So far, so good.

Eduardo Miranda’s Quantum Explorations

At Gray Area on Thursday, July 31, 2025

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The field is still somewhat new to me, despite how much I’ve read and continue to read about quantum computing, but on Thursday night I attended a performance and presentation at Gray Area here in San Francisco by Eduardo Miranda. Miranda is a professor of computer music at the University of Plymouth, and he is currently visiting as a fellow at Stochastic Labs, across the bay in Berkeley. He’s the editor of several related books, including Quantum Computing in the Arts and Humanities (Springer), Quantum Computer Music (Springer) and Advances in Quantum Computer Music (World Scientific).

At Gray Area, Miranda performed three works and then gave a brief talk about the use of quantum computing in the production of music, and took questions from the audience. I’m still wrapping my head around it, but a key distinguishing characteristic seems to be the unique nature of superposition in quantum physics, a topic explored in particular in Miranda’s piece Heisenberg’s Hammer, shown up at the top of this post.

He’s been involved in artificial intelligence in music since the mid-1990s, but says of the current state of the technology, during the ongoing boom, “It makes it easy to make music, but not to be creative.” He also expressed a concern that “big data averages everything and creates mediocrity,” and explained he is currently exploring “small data” as an alternate path.

In Miranda’s own description, the state of quantum computing today is equivalent to the age of punch cards in the overall development of computers. If I followed him correctly, then he expressed uncertainty, so to speak, that this particular path will even pay compositional dividends, but he’s continuing to see how far he can go with it.

2/3rds of Yo La Tengo

Live at Duck Creek

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I first heard about the Arts Center at Duck Creek when guitarist Bill Frisell played there with his trio two years back, in June 2023. Duck Creek is way out on Long Island, in East Hampton. I grew up further west on the island, toward the north shore. I mentioned the Frisell gig, which the venue uploaded to its YouTube channel, at the time, and have kept an eye on the place ever since, hoping that the concert schedule might coincide with my occasional visits back home.

All of which is how I learned about a newly uploaded, fantastic live ambient performance from June 21, 2025, by two thirds of the band Yo La Tengo, Georgia Hubley on electric guitar and Ira Kaplan on keyboards. With echoes of Robert Fripp and Laraaji, they played a quietly psychedelic set, initially gentle and then more abrasive and out there as it proceeded, with lots of warbling noises, backwards effects, and held notes on the eBow transformed through effects pedals.

While Yo La Tengo are rightfully thought of as indie rock, they venture into ambient zones on occasion, as on the track “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” which appeared when the band first launched its Bandcamp page (it was part of the album We Have Amnesia Sometimes), and the instrumentals collection The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, which was all composed to accompany short aquatic documentary films by the late Jean Painlevé (1902-1989).

Side note: ambient, contemporary classical, new age, and guitar pedal fans will want to check out an Emily Hopkins harp performance at Duck Creek from last November:

Teensy 4.1

Making plans

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I picked up a teeny tiny little Teensy 4.1, and I’m looking forward to toying with it. I think my first project with it will be the “headless” Dirtywave M8 Tracker (which isn’t really headless because I’ll be using the laptop as the screen, and as the controller).

Beatles Forensics

"I, I could see"

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Yes, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared — in one of the photos in the latter’s current exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco — to be contemplating handwritten notes that were blurry, which is to say, not the focal point of the image, I sure did take a close-up shot and flip the detail upside down so I could ascertain what song they were in the process of writing. It was “I Saw Her Standing There.” The exhibit is Paul McCartney Photographs 1964: Eyes of the Storm, which runs from March 1, 2025, through October 5, 2025.

When I first entered the exhibit, I found I immediately had an early Beatles song running through my head. Then it occurred to me that what might be neat would be to wander around the galleries and ask visitors what they were hearing in their heads. But then I realized that in some room several rooms away, audio from an ancient live performance was playing, and thus seeping into all the other galleries, and that the song in my head was, in fact, the song that the playback had ever so quietly placed there.