Category: studio journal

Video, audio, patch notes

#30s Unplanned Drone

Un-recommended listening

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are various forms of distance, key among them spatial and temporal. A week or so ago, the rain had colluded with fires at key infrastructure outposts to turn off power across the city, especially in our immediate neighborhood, where outages planned and “unplanned” took a wrecking ball to holiday plans. The wind masked the rain, but nature couldn’t entirely overpower the sound of the generators put in place to temporarily serve the area while the nearest substation was out of order. Several of these massive portable machines appeared quite suddenly, and my phone’s meter registered the noise at close to 100 decibels when we walked by to investigate. That was what it was like at the time. Now that the time is at a distance, the generators, while still in place, have been turned off, and the neighborhood is back to quiet, or what passes for quiet in a city. I can summon up memory of the physical discomfort, while the recording manages to retain the sense of shock at what was unfolding.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, in San Francisco’s Richmond District near the corner of 24th Avenue and Balboa. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of a collection of field recordings that last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.

Jamuary 2026 01–02

Giving it another go

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The annual Jamuary — that isn’t a spelling error — event is a month-long, communal effort during which people (try to) commit to recording one piece of music a day. I’ve never made it all the way through the month, but that repeat failure hasn’t kept me from trying my hand at it again this year.

The calendar reads January 2 as I type this, with two more days of holiday break left before the start of the work-year, a year that looks to be plenty packed, between proper work and personal/professional creative efforts. We’ll see where 2026 goes. I don’t think I’ll post these Jamuary pieces here individually, more likely in small batches. Here are the first two days:

▰ 01\31 — “Retail Pneumat”: I’ve been experimenting with taking field recordings and reworking the material by repeating and layering small segments, as well as applying light effects, notably pitch-shifting. That’s what this is. I use various tools. In this case, I did it all just in Audacity. The source audio is something I recorded in an office supply store on my phone. (I also used this as my first track of the year in Weekly Beats, which is sort of like Jamuary, except aimed at one track a week for the year, rather than one track a day for a month.)

▰ 02\31 — “Cashier Seq”: Another go at transforming a field recording. This is based on the same source audio as my first Jamuary track of the year. This time around, I pulled out the ping of the cash register, and then created some melodic loops of it in VCV Rack, using pitch-shifting, and then imported those back into Audacity, where I did some subsequent editing.

▰ “Retail Phase”: And for reference, this is the source audio on which the above two are based. Working with field recordings as source material for musical manipulation and creation is a useful engagement for thinking about everyday sound. To listen closely to such audio is to find patterns both in the recordings and in everyday life. Once you start working, hands-on, with that raw material, you start to more readily hear the music inherent in quotidian experiences. The seeming lines between music and sound, between music and noise, and between sound and noise begin to disappear.

#30s Storm Breakers

With a dash of siren

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There was a break in the storm, a break between storms. A few days earlier, fire had taken out the city’s power, and now water threatened to do the same. The “atmospheric river,” the “Pineapple Express,” the potential “bomb cyclone” — so many colorful names for what amounted to endlessly grey days. An urban hike to the bay served as an unintentionally ironic way to spend the time when rain wasn’t prohibitively pouring — a walk between the raindrops, as the song goes. Being outside felt good, even as the gathering clouds encouraged a near-term retreat. At the water, the waves seemed more powerful than usual, a microcosm of the week’s weather: fierce pounding, followed by relative quiet, then more water-on-land violence. They’re called “breakers” for a reason. I raised my phone and hit the red record button, and almost instantly a distant emergency vehicle’s siren inserted itself, underlining the severity of current circumstances. Listening back to the recording, after I got home, I knew to expect that siren, and still I had to restart the track a few times, because I wasn’t certain if the siren I heard was coming out of my speakers or leaking in from outside, where clouds grew darker by the minute.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 3:56pm on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, at Baker Beach in San Francisco. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of a collection of field recordings that last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.

#30s Start Stop

Back to the fridge

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Most of the field recordings that I post are almost exactly as I receive them at the end of the recording process: I hit record, I hit stop, and most of what happens in between is what I share. Which isn’t to say the audio is “pure” by any means. The device I elect to use for the recording, the time and circumstances when I choose to record, the (usually) continuous clip of 30 seconds I select from within the longer recording — all of these elements, among others, are beyond the bounds of anything that might be self-described as purism. The editing process in particular lends an aspect of self-reflection (even, at times, of what George Eliot taught me to term self-rebuke). When recording the sound emitted inside my refrigerator, for example, I immediately chopped off both ends of the process: first, when I closed the door after placing my phone inside the fridge, and second, when I opened the door to extract my phone. In between those mirror-image poles was a minute or so of sound, from which I then extracted what seemed, to me, like prime climate-controlled droning. Later, however, I kept thinking about the recording process, and I returned to what hadn’t made the initial cut. I combined the two ends into one half-minute whole. The clunky percussion of the fridge drawer and door being shut and, then, opened has a industrial-grade vibrancy. While its jittery, stuttering aspect places it in stark contrast to the monotone of the internal hum of the fridge, these two sets of sounds share a welcome practical simplicity, the beauty of an everyday mechanism at various stages of its utilization.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 7:57am on Friday, December 19, 2025, in San Francisco’s Richmond District. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of a collection of field recordings that last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.

#30s Sound Bath(room)

On a mission in the Mission

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I go through these occasional spells of making frequent little field recordings of everyday sound. The word “spell” is appropriate, because the making of field recordings opens up the experience of listening in a way that is spellbinding. The more you record, the more you pay attention for things to record, and in turn the more sounds register with you, whether you elect to record them or not. Such was the case when I used the bathroom at a favorite Mexican restaurant after a fine meal of enchiladas, during which we were entertained by a fantastic mariachi trio performing on worn old instruments: an acoustic guitar, a massive guitarron (the six-string acoustic bass), and a trumpet. Each was battered from years of use, and the music sounded all the better for it — and so my ears were tuned to the opportunity afforded by beat-up machines when I locked the bathroom door behind me. The tiny, clean space was irradiated by this pummeling churn, the mix of hum and rattle that is the industrial-strength fan running at high speed. Only later, when listening back, did I even notice the clatter of dishes from the nearby kitchen, so lost was I in the hypnotic whir.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 7:57am on Sunday, December 21, 2025, in San Francisco’s Mission District. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of a collection of field recordings that last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.