Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Scratch Pad: iOS, STT, Savory

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.

▰ After-dark trio for dishwasher, skateboarder, and whirring electric vehicle

▰ A friend who saw me mention using an Anbernic retro game handheld: I thought you didn’t play video games.

Me, after thinking about it: I don’t much, but I try. Mostly I’m interested in alternative firmware, sound design of virtual worlds, and chiptune music. (All of which video games are rich with.)

▰ I’m not sure if this was the intention with the iOS app “library,” but I find myself, on my iPhone and iPad, removing the vast majority of my apps from the home screen and accessing those just from the library

▰ A friend who uses speech-to-text a lot for writing sent me an email in which what was intended was “mazel tov” but it was transcribed as “muzzle tough”

▰ Hyper-local* food post: there are two Cherry Blossom cafes, one in the Inner Richmond and one on Ocean, and they both have many treats to offer. The essential one — for me, that is — is the savory scallions and ham, which is light and fluffy.

*San Francisco

▰ In the Bosch novels, he listens to compact discs, but I don’t think he ever has CDs on the TV shows, only vinyl LPs for that version of the detective’s jazz collection. And no matter the playback medium, in the very first book he acknowledges himself as a cliche. (And after I posted this, a friend shared this list that Bosch author Michael Connelly keeps of all the music in the Bosch books.)

▰ Reading-wise, I’m very close to the end of the first Bosch novel, The Black Echo. A lot of the book involves Bosch and his partner figuring out what might be going on, laying out their various hypotheses step by step. I’ve come to wonder how much of that is the author describing the detectives figuring things out, and how much of it is a lightly altered version of the author thinking as he himself was devising the plot in the first place. Thus what appears to be the unraveling of the given crime may actually have been the opposite: the raveling, as it were. There’s also an excellent little bit later in the book involving telephones that follows up nicely on the item I posted about earlier. I’ll share that excerpt later. This weekend is largely given over to family activities, of the sort centered around a cemetery, so time is understandably limited. I imagine I’ll finish it tomorrow before bed. The book club in which I’m reading The Mushroom at the End of the World delayed its meeting until next Sunday, so I’ve slowed my pace so it’ll be fresh when discussion occurs.

RIP, Skype (2003–2025)

A lesson in sonic branding

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Skype, the telecommunications app, launched in 2003, the same year as MySpace and the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia.

Skype was a progenitor of our late-pandemic, Zoom-mediated lives. And now, after 22 years, and almost a decade and a half following its acquisition by Microsoft, Skype has been shut down, as of May 5.

Between cellphones and Facetime and Slack huddles and all manner of conference-call apps, we take instant realtime video communication these days as a given, but Skype originated (voice-only initially) at a time when such things were expensive, all the more so when connecting people internationally.

For just under a decade, I taught a course about sound to art school students, the majority of whom were from other countries (e.g., Sweden, Korea, China, Spain, and Saudi Arabia). I started doing so in 2012, a year after Microsoft bought Skype. A core part of the assigned homework was maintaining a “sound journal,” in which students wrote several times a week, detailing an observation they made about one sound or another.

Certain topics revealed themselves as common to these journals as the years of my teaching went by: the issues of noise in a city, the comforting purr of a house cat, the way the chatter in cafes somehow provided the perfect backdrop for doing homework. The everyday utility of Apple’s AirPods became a nearly universal subject in these sound journal shortly after their debut in 2016.

And at least one student a semester would inevitably write a short essay affectionately describing the sounds that Skype made, in particular when it opened and when its bubbly melody announced an incoming call. These Skype-specific sounds meant that the student would soon be talking to family or friends back home. Often these sound journal entries would describe how the student didn’t even recognize a persistent low-level homesickness until Skype announced itself — and then the sense of longing and the awareness of loneliness kicked in.

There was a lot packed into those little Skype noises, and the app became a useful tool for discussing the broader topic of the course, that being the role of sound in the media landscape, and the more focused matter of what’s come to be termed “sonic branding.” Some of the best ways to introduce subjects in class, I learned, was to let them happen naturally. So for the most part, I didn’t introduce Skype each semester. I just waited for it to come up — for it to, in effect, ring — and then we would collectively dive into its emotional and cultural meaning.

Making Trios Together Over Time

An annual tradition in the Disquiet Junto

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is from the note that went out to members of the Disquiet Junto music community early on Thursday, May 8, 2025:

There are a few projects we do each year in the Disquiet Junto. We start the year with the “ice” project (record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it), and we end with the “diary” project. And somewhere during the year, we do the “trios” project. That’s about to happen, starting today. 

A longtime Junto participant and observer, music educator Ethan Hein has described this particular sequence — it’s actually three projects over three weeks, though to be clear, you don’t have to do all of them — as “a horizon-broadening creative experience.” 

Here’s how I’ve summarized the trio projects in the past:

[T]he first week, participants upload a solo piece, one that is intended to, over time, with the contributions of other musicians, become a trio. Thus, for the first week, it’s helpful for participants to leave room for who and what will follow. 

The second week, musicians each select solo pieces from week one, pan them to the left, and add a second channel on the right, creating not just duets, but incomplete ones. Then the final week, new participants add a third track in the center, thus completing the trios. 

It’s a pretty incredible project to listen to as it unfolds, especially when, come week two, you can sometimes hear multiple duets built from one initial solo track — and the same, when the trios are complete, come week three.

To receive the weekly Junto project announcements, sign up, for free, at juntoletter.disquiet.com.

Pekler & Jelinek, Hardware Dept.

Eurorack central

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve been meaning to post this photo since I mentioned attending the excellent recent Andrew Pekler and Jan Jelinek (and Chris Otchy) concert at Gray Area here in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. Just for the historical record, that is Pekler’s setup on the left and Jelinek’s on the right. They did not play at the same time. Otchy opened, then came Pekler, and then Jelinek.