News, essays, reviews, surveillance
This is the 11th comic in the ongoing series I’m doing with Hannes Pasqualini. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf. More from Hannes at horizontalpitch.com and papernoise.net.
This is so great. Katie Argyle, the Australian music education specialist who helps music teachers understand and utilize technology at her midnightmusic.com.au website, has written a post recommending the Disquiet Junto for students. This really made my day.
The article is titled “600+ Songwriting Ideas for High School Music Students.” She writes, at the opening:
The Disquiet Junto project is an incredible resource if you’re looking for fresh and exciting ways to inspire your high school music students in their songwriting projects. Since 2012, Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet.com has curated over 600 unique composition challenges, each designed to push musicians out of their comfort zones.
These prompts aren’t your typical songwriting exercises. They encourage musicians to think beyond standard melodies and lyrics and incorporate sound design, chance operations, and environmental influences into their compositions.
And she proceeds to describe the Junto’s utility and to recommend 10 past Junto projects. Argyle also outlines four reasons she believes the Junto prompts are useful for teachers and students:
Encourages Creative Thinking – Students explore new approaches to composition.
Adaptable to All Skill Levels – Accessible for beginner to advanced music students.
Integrates Technology – Many prompts work well with DAWs and recording tools.
Cross-Curricular Connections – Involves science (acoustics), literature (storytelling), and film.
The full article is at midnightmusic.com.
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.
▰ There are days when I look at — and listen to — my inbox full of music press releases, and I find myself wondering if George Winston may be the most influential pianist of the second half of the 20th century.
▰ It’s quite sunny out but I can tell the temperature is still low because there have been no sirens from emergency vehicles rushing to handle incidents at the beach
▰ “Slow Children at Play”
“End”
“Quiet Zone”
“Duck Crossing”
— this is some of the signage that Disquiet Junto music community participants are willfully mis-interpreting as compositional prompts in this week’s project. Follow along, or maybe even join in.
▰ End of day. China Beach at dusk.
▰ Another slice of car voice-to-text weirdness: Once — just once, at least so far — I verbally responded “cool” to someone’s text message in the car, and the car replied, “No, you’re cool, Marc,” and there was a little pause between “cool” and “Marc” as the system stitched my name into the phrase.
▰ The car’s voice-to-text text messaging has funny quirks: like, if I reply “sounds good” to someone, the car mistakenly interprets that as me confirming its inquiry as to whether I want to respond, so I say “sounds good,” then it begins to record my outgoing message, and then I say “sounds good” all over again.
▰ It’s March now and we’re due in the Disquiet Junto music community for the trio project, likely not this week, but soon. The trio project goes like this: the first week, people record a third of a trio; the second, different people fill in a second slot of these trios; and in the third, the trios are completed by another person.
▰ Yeah, it’s been a minute, but a new free issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter went this week
▰ We’re willfully misinterpreting signs this time around. When I saw the sign pictured here — near Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where I live — I wondered why there were so many dangerous arrows in the water, and what we could do about them. Then I wondered what this same sign might mean if it were interpreted as a musical instruction. Choose your own sign and do just that. The project went live at disquiet.com/0688 on Thursday, March 6, at 12:10am Pacific Time. That’s Pacific like the ocean — the ocean full of dangerous dangerous arrows.
▰ These are the first four novels I finished reading this year. I never completed the C.S. Lewis as a kid. I think I’m more of a Philip Pullman reader, let’s say (though I love Lewis’ The Great Divorce). Kerr is a friend and fellow workmate from many years back, just pre-parenthood; if you want a fast-paced mystery set among the worst of San Francisco tech bros, this is your schadenthriller.
The final two were both re-reads. Cryptonomicon felt fresher than ever, a fantastic and rewarding book. As for The Good Soldier, there was much to appreciate, but I mostly felt like if these people had to work for a living, they’d have a lot less time to be this insufferable and self-centered.
And I finished reading zero books this past week. George Eliot’s Middlemarch will be in the works for many more weeks to come, I’m making progress in Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts, and I’ve been dipping into a bunch of other things, including various graphic novels. But right now my life is a slew of bookmarks: both physical slips of paper as well as virtual placeholders and percentage trackers.
15: Number of minutes an ice cream truck is allowed to be in one place (unless there is a line) in Coral Gables, Florida, if rules currently under discussion are enacted
55: Years of age after which, in a recent study, individuals with hearing loss who didn’t employ hearing aids had a measurable decline in cognitive function
26: Percent of UK residents who have reported receiving deepfake phone calls in the past 12 months
Sources: ice cream (miamiherald.com), cognitive (nature.com), and deepfake (msn.com).
▰ Coach Class:
The train's whistle, which twenty-four hours ago had lulled her to sleep, took on a new, urgent keening: repeated triple blasts radiating across the infinite prairie like smoke signals in the dark. It was, she well knew, a way of summoning medical help to the next whistle-stop. ... Those who lived in such places were accustomed to rolling over and going back to sleep after being wakened by the long blasts of the Empire Builder's whistle, and some could even identify the engineer by his signature. The triple blast, however, would visit their sleep as a nightmare and draw them toward the station in an unsettled frame of mind.That is from Polostan, the recent novel from Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon), and the first in a trilogy, though it reads more like he turned a characteristically monolith-size book, and someone finally convinced him to break it into thirds. And just as a side note, if you read Stephenson’s 2019 novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, then this moment serves as a conscious chronological premonition of the brutal futuristic road trip in that book: “This was the bad side of the high plains: communities so remote that people could get away with anything, and, lacking contact with settled places, could wander far down strange thoughtways from which there was no route back to sanity.”
. . .
▰ On Brand:
I wanted a day when the enemy would be so overwhelmed by the sound of my ancestors dragging their chains that they would be killed by the clamour.That is Canadian poet and novelist Dionne Brand, as excerpted in an appreciation by Andrea Brady in the London Review of Books. The same issue has Anne Carson writing about, in part, a friend “who wanted to compose an entire symphony out of the sound of people sighing,” and Frances Morgan surveying the work of Yoko Ono (“The liberating conceptual shift proposed by the Fluxus movement, which made a flushing toilet or a struck match a performance, is not unrelated to the process that puts an audiotape in a vitrine or transforms a dead musician’s clothes into an auction lot”). It’s quite the issue.
. . .
▰ By the Numbers:
So, then, silence it is, Cage's 4'33" on infinite repeat, which, basically, has been this place's playlist for the last year and a half, a soundtrack ambient in its absence.That is Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta) on the penultimate page of his recent novel, The Great When, which like the Stephenson one mentioned above is the first in a new series — and also like the Stephenson, is uncharacteristically brief for this author. Thanks to my friend Darko Macan, who read the book before I could get around to it, pointed out this but to me, and says “this epilogue is mostly about the coming attractions.”