String Quartet + Electronics + Room Tone (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The drone is a form, not an instrument. And even if oscilators and synthesizers have helped popularize it as a technique by bringing sine waves to the general public, it predates those technologies. Heck, it predates electricity. Zachary James Watkins reminds us of this in his serrated-ethereal Suite for String Quartet. Not only does it milk the trepidation of all those string vibrating at once to achieve a rich drone, but it adds signal processing and an attention to the acoustic properties of the room in which it was recorded (MP3).

[audio:http://www.touchshop.org/touchradio/Radio65.mp3|titles=”Suite for String Quartet”|artists=Zachary James Watkins]

It opens with car noise, water, and a thick industrial hum — not industrial like nihilist industrial music; it’s industrial like a heavy duty HVAC on its last legs. To hear that hum suddenly turn into, or reveal itself to be, a string section a little over a minute into the quartet is a wonderful thing, and reason enough to hang around for the nearly half hour it takes to cycle through the numerous brief movements that contribute to its suite structure. What’s remarkable about the digital processing is that the electronics are intended not to subdue the strings, but to draw a connection between their hum and the more common, contemporaneous hum of extended electric performance.

Watkins makes the most of those strings by altering their harmonic tendencies: “Each string of the quartet is retuned to an odd number partial of 60Hz,” he writes in a brief liner note that accompanies the MP3, and which may help explain the intense friction that at times occurs. The recording was made at the Second Annual May Day! New Music Marathon in Seattle on May 1 of this year. The performers are Brad Hawkins (cello), Eyvind Kang (viola), Paris Hurley (violin), and Brandon Vance (violin), with Watkins on unspecified electronics.

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on Watkins at zacharyjameswatkins.com. Previous disquiet.com coverage of Watkins focused on a mysterious, formless sound that challenged the ear by providing no proper context.

6 Things That Might Make the Great Soundcloud.com Even Greater

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Soundcloud.com provides one the strongest infrastructures, if not the strongest, for communities of musicians and their listeners on the Internet. It’s a place where people share music they’ve made, listen to other people’s music, comment, make purchases, and collaborate.

And the service keeps getting stronger. It recently teamed with Tumblr for a smooth means of presenting Soundcloud material on the microblogging service, and the Soundcloud “app gallery” features an expanding number of tools that make use of its generous API.

The efforts are apparently working, because Soundcloud is more popular than ever. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal last month, the service has over five million members, and fourth fifths of them signed up in the past year.

But bigger isn’t a sure thing. The recent sale of MySpace for a fraction of its highest market valuation is evidence that rapid growth even in a field as ubiquitous as music can go terribly wrong.

From a user-interface standpoint, nothing in particular is wrong with Soundcloud, certainly not yet, though there is a low-level sense of feature creep. Much like the personal-organization tool Evernote, Soundcloud is a device-spanning and software-spanning service (computer, phone, browser, app, etc.) that defined itself early on by its simplicity, but that has over time become more complicated, more rich in tools.

Despite which, below are suggestions for six additional things that could make the great Soundcloud even greater. Heck, there’s a chance that one or more of the ideas below already exist and I just haven’t come upon them because the Soundcloud interface’s sublime cleanness masks its underlying complexities — that is, because I didn’t look closely enough. But I write this as a heavy Soundcloud user, and one who if anything wants to use Soundcloud even more:

1. GROUPING GROUPIES: Let Soundcloud users create subsets of the users they follow.

Social Sorting: The Soundcloud following/followers interface already has a settings option (see upper right), so Grouping Groupies would be an iterative change

I follow 288 accounts on Soundcloud as of this writing, and the “Incoming tracks” feed in the site’s Dashboard is not the most effective way to experience them. It would be nice to be able to create subgroups so that I could observe the incoming tracks based on categories I myself create: close friends, people whom I correlate with certain genres (noise, field recordings, minimal techno), people who live in a particular area (Tokyo, San Francisco, etc.), fellow listeners (folks who rarely if ever actually post music), record labels, netlabels, etc. There are pros and cons to this suggestion. On Twitter, for example, it’s not uncommon for people to follow everyone who follows them and to then employ Twitter Lists as a means to keep track of the select few they actually want to keep tabs on. That approach undermines Twitter’s internal workings by muddying its ability to sense who is really communicating with whom. (Fully scaled, everyone would just follow everyone, and then use a List to sort, and that’s untenable.) But even if you stick to the social contract of only following people you’re interested in, groupings would simply let the listener organize his or her listening habits, rather than stick one’s ear in the direction of a fire hose. (There are precedents in Soundcloud for this: The Following/Followers interface has a settings option. There is a Contact Lists option under People. And there are Groups, which function like clubs of like-minded people.)

2. FEED SMARTER: Make the Dashboard’s “Incoming tracks” feed work algorithmically, rather than just chronologically.

For a service that is enjoyed by, and by all appearances coded by, people who use advanced computer systems as a platform for creativity, the main Soundcloud feed is somewhat antiquated. It just shows the most recent tracks by accounts you follow. There should be options to view the feed algorithmically, in addition to the standard “show me what’s new” approach. The algorithmic feed serves a similar role to the “Grouping Groupies” mode mentioned above, and they work together: the algorithmic feeds learn from the user-collated groups, as well as from user habits. (Facebook is, of course, a poster child for not employing algorithmic feeds, but the failures of Facebook’s feeds are a failure of implementation, not of the overall idea.)

3. BUSK DIGITALLY: Allow listeners to tip musicians.

Case Open: There’s already a tradition of the guitar case doubling as a tip jar. Soundcloud can provide its musician-users with a virtual guitar case.

Music commerce isn’t dead. It’s just found new places to do business. On Soundcloud, for example, people have the opportunity to pay to download tracks they have already been able to stream in full. There’s a lesson for Soundcloud to learn from Kickstarter.com, just on the far opposite end of the transaction chronology. The traditional record-buying mode was that the consumer purchased an album after it had been produced and manufactured. The Kickstarter mode varies from project to project, but generally speaking it involves the consumer participating as benefactor, contributing funds before the recording has been manufactured, often before it has even been recorded. There’s space on the other end of this continuum: Soundcloud could let users show their appreciation after hearing music by providing a “tip jar.” And the musicians could determine how this music would be spent. For example, a musician could use it, in a Kickstarter-like campaign mode, to gain funds to pay for a particular Soundcloud upgrade (somewhat modeled on the MMORPG system, in which gamers have the option to purchase items to help them make their way in a free gaming environment). Or it could be funneled into a bank account or PayPal account. Or into a Soundcloud account, that they could they use to re-disperse the funds to other Soundcloud users. Who knows, perhaps the funds could even — to come full circle — be used to start a Kickstarter project to pay for a collectively agreed upon development project based on the Soundcloud API.

4. GET PERSONAL: Facilitate visual individualization of user pages.

Spine Tingling: Dave Muller’s affectionate paintings of the narrowest portion of a vinyl LP cover show just how much information and personality can be packed into a small space.

Give users, especially those who post their own music, some opportunity to make their pages feel more like their personal pages. This needn’t get all MySpace/Geocities, not some out-of-control, custom-HTML visual nightmare. The utilitarian, orange-highlighted interface of Soundcloud stands in stark, willful contrast to MySpace’s mistakes, and rightly so. But a little personalization could go a long way. There are at least two reasons to do this. For musicians, it would make their pages feel even more like their home. For listeners, it would help orient them: Am I on a Soundcloud-generated list page, or am I on a page overseen by a human? If the answer is “human,” then let me, as a listener, feel it. It wouldn’t take much, perhaps just a thin bar, reminiscent of the spine from an album or CD. That would be more than sufficient to set the scene. (As shown above, Dave Muller’s affectionate paintings of worn LP spines were something of an inspiration to this idea.)

5. CHARGE ME: Give listeners a reason and an opportunity to pay a subscription fee.

Soundcloud doesn’t participate in “Pay to Play,” but sometimes it can feel that way. “Pay to Play” was, and perhaps remains, the means by which some live-music venues require acts to cough up a fee to play the stage, with the understanding the bands will get a slice of the door and the bar. Since Soundcloud primarily offers premium services aimed at musicians, it’s essentially charging musicians for the opportunity to reach an audience. That’s fine; the Internet has done a topsy-turvy with many industries, many former business norms. (At a highly scaled level, this would be along the lines of Hulu ditching its subscription fee and somehow charging the networks whose shows are its content.) However, there must be some means by which Soundcloud could provide additional services to listeners that listeners would be willing to pay for. And just to be clear: this isn’t a suggestion that Soundcloud take some currently free capabilities and turn them into paid-only features. It’s about coming up with new things listeners would appreciate. Perhaps a virtual hard drive for downloads? Perhaps a private MP3 player where one can upload ones own collection of recordings, along the lines of other recent cloud-based music lockers? Perhaps a blogging service, or the ability to host “radio stations” of material selected by the listener?

6. MOVE BEYOND: Staying true to your URL means expanding beyond music.

Soundcloud.com is called Soundcloud.com for a reason. It is not just about music. Music is, as the saying goes, just organized sound. There are already activities on Soundcloud that are not traditionally considered “music,” such as field recordings and spoken word. Tools should be developed to let people use Soundcloud readily for non-music purposes. For example, as a (private) audio journal, perhaps one that hooks up with Google for voice-recognition translation of those recordings into typed words.

(Photo of guitarist from flickr.com thanks to Creative Commons license.)

Tangents: Remixing/Rewording, Cellular Sculpture, Bitrate Guidelines, …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

Rewarding Rewording: The site Translation Telephone, at translation-telephone.com, pulls an Alvin Lucier / “I Am Sitting in a Room Listening” on words. In Lucier’s landmark work, the sound of a recording is heard to disintegrate as a phrase is read aloud in a room, and then a recording of that is played in the room, and then a recording of that recording is played, and so on. In Translation Telephone, you type in a phrase, and watch it cycle from one language to the next. For example, here’s a paragraph from a Disquiet post a few days ago:

The remix takes many forms. Music is remixed, but so too are videos, photographs, words, recipes, buildings, ideas. The remix is a means by which the past is made vibrant. It is the means by which the certitude of any form of documentation is probed and prodded until it loses its illusion of integrity.

And here is how it turned out, after going from English to Macedonian to Hebrew and back to English, with 18 additional languages at various stages in between:

Love is in many ways. The Sound of Music Mixer. But he added, video, photos, graphics, love the structure, how to live. This document is credibility

If a good mantra is a universal one, then Disquiet.com’s — “Just sitting here, listening” — holds up OK. After cycling through Bulgarian, Hindi, and 18 others languages, it came out “Just sit and listen,” which is, arguably, an improvement. Of course there are differences between Lucier’s piece and Translation Telephone, in particular that Lucier’s disintegration algorithm does double duty to provide a sense of the contours of the room in which it is recorded. If there were a parallel in Translation Telephone, what would it be? (Thanks to Paolo Salvagione for the tip. He called it an example of “rewording.”)

Bowl Alone: The intersection of physics and spirituality is a not uncommon one. This video accompanied a brief piece at io9.com that discussed how physicists were exploring the unique properties of Tibetan bowls, which are a popular tool for experimental musicians, especially those interested in the drone.

Max/R.I.P.: Belatedly, an excellent interview with famed computer-music legend Max Matthews done by Geeta Dayal just weeks before his death: frieze.com. Dayal is the author of the 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno‘s Another Green World. When she was prepping for the Matthews interview, she asked, via Twitter, if anyone had any questions for him. (Matthews is synonymous with electronic music, because his first name is part of the name of the popular software Max/MSP.) I’d seen him speak at CCRMA at Stanford several years ago, and had wanted to ask him about the multi-channel mixer he had reportedly built for John Cage‘s 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis with the New York Philharmonic, then under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. Dayal did indeed ask the question, for which I am eternally thankful. This is just an excerpt from her Frieze piece:

GD: Didn’t you build a 50-channel mixer in 1964, for the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein? For a performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis?

MM: [Laughs] Yes, it would have been in the 1960s, because Cage and Jim Tenney were the two conductors; they ran the mixer. The mixer did have roughly 50 input channels, one for each pair of musicians at a given music stand. It was an octopus of wires, and they all came into these two consoles with a lot of knobs to adjust the volumes, and to direct the sound to one or more of about a dozen loudspeakers which were positioned around Avery Fisher Hall. Cage wrote the music for the performers, and he and Tenney ran the mixer during the performance. Even by Cage’s fairly generous standards, it wasn’t what he had hoped for. He added a piano portion, and I forgot the name of his pianist to the piece [David Tudor], and my judgment was that Bernstein stayed as far away as he could get; he couldn’t stand it. And I was just as happy to have him stay away, to tell you the truth.

GD: Did you and Bernstein not get along?

MM: We didn’t get close enough to not get along. But if we had gotten any closer, I would have quit the project.

The instruments did not have contact microphones on them, and of course you don’t want to put a contact microphone on a Stradivarius. I’d encouraged the musicians to bring their second violins, or any old violin, instead of their best violins. I arranged the contact mics to be on parts of the instrument that aren’t permanent, like the bridge, and had gone through quite a bit of trouble to be sure that the contact microphones could be put on the instruments without damaging the instruments. I think most of the instrumentalists didn’t have any trouble with that. So I was really mad at Bernstein when he came in one morning and told the instrumentalists that if they didn’t want to use the mics, they didn’t have to. I think most of them went ahead and used the mics. And Bernstein didn’t come back again. It was a concert series, about four or five nights of this piece, that it was played. Anyhow, it was fun to work with Cage, and it was fun to work with the orchestra, and it was fun to build this rather large mixer.

Board Game: There is something really beautiful about motion frozen, like fast-frame stills of bats in flight and of water drops hitting solid surfaces. And then there are Jeff Cook‘s wood sculptures based on cellular automata, like those in John Conway‘s influential “Game of Life” (via boingboing.net‘s David Pescovitz):

They’re on display at the gallery Chalk (chalkla.com) in Los Angeles through July. More photos from the opening at the gallery’s facebook.com account.

Kick It? Yes You Can: Two worthy musical Kickstarter campaigns, both from New Orleans: There’s the new Chef Menteur album, and a musical house. On the latter: “A growing group of local and national sound artists are working towards interactive instruments that can be built into its walls and floorboards so that visitors can bring the house to life through their touch.”

The Sound of Pixels: During dinner with a friend recently, talk turned, as it occasionally does, to the process of taking one’s physical audio recordings and converting them to MP3s. We discussed various subjects: the reasonable legal right to download files of albums you have already purchased, those scary stickers on old promotional LPs you bought used that say they remain the property of the record company, and, inevitably, the proper bitrate. Certainly not 128kbps, but 192? 320? And should it be MP3? OGG? FLAC? I said I usually rip mine at 320, but I have this lingering fear that a decade from now standard audio equipment will be upgraded in a manner that will make our 320kbps MP3s sound the way that our old VHS cassettes look on fancy new HD TVs. The momentary look of anxiety on his face was straight out of a John Carpenter movie.

Navel Browsing: I need to do a better job of tracking comments I make on other people’s sites. Here are two from excellent newmusicbox.org: A piece by Colin Holter takes apart a quote widely attributed to Duke Ellington (that there are only two types of music: good and bad), and while Ellington did say it, he didn’t mean by it what Holter says it means, and I tried to correct the record. Also, in a separate piece, Frank J. Otieri asks, “What is the sound of music-less music?” and I suggest that the answer is held in a study of phonography, or the art of field recordings.

Archives Anonymous: The great ubu.com site now has a landing page for all its electronic-music goods: ubu.com/emr (via Chris Power, of twitter.com/chrisjohnpower)

App Swap: The remarkable app Reactable appears to be the first major port of a general-interest (i.e., not framed as a next-gen instrument) generative-sound app from iOS to Android: reactable.com.

Playing Defense: Reports on “sonic warfare” generally discuss snazzy new weaponry, but there is recent news of an “acoustic ‘cloaking device'”: bbc.co.uk.

Truly Representing: Diego Bernal is the new City Council member representing District 1 in San Antonio, Texas. This is, indeed, the same Diego Bernal who remixed the Atlanta-based Fourth Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra‘s “Ose Shalom” last December for the tabletmag.com Hanukkah remix compilation I produced. Major congrats, man. Do your city proud.

10 Seconds a Day for 6 Months (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are more one-thing-a-day series by creative individuals (photographers, poets, musicians) on the Internet than there are days in the year. And yet many if not all — at least the ones that go the distance, the ones that actually manage the 365 or even 366 entries — capture the pages-being-ripped-from-a-calendar momentum that old movies used to employ to represent the rapid passage of a considerable amount of time.

By editing together sonic snippets from six months of field recordings, Harold Shellinx not only has created a fitting milestone for the first half of a year-long habit, he’s also shown a way that these daily projects, when properly delineated at the outset, can collectively become more than the sum of their individual parts.

In fact, as it turns out, this half-hour document of 2011 thus far is the second means by which he has collated his efforts.

Schellinx records audio field recordings every day, and he collects 10-second snippets, which are then strung together as a single MP3 (streaming and freely downloadable). Ten seconds appears to be long enough to get momentarily lost in, but brief enough to yield something abstract, listenable to more for its textural contours than its documentary content. There is no signal that a clip has switched to the next, except when the contrast is self-evident. The great Radius radio show and podcast out of Chicago hosted the six-month file on a recent show:

Even before the work was collected into this 1,820-second-long listen, it appeared at a Dutch website each week, collecting the most recent 10 elements into something titled, naturally, “Seventy Seconds.” Most of those entries, such as the one from June 26 (at hardhoofd.com), include a complementary photo by Pieter van Wynsberge and, as the Radius staff explains, a short text in Dutch.

Originally posted at theradius.tumblr.com and soundcloud.com/theradiustheradius.

Silent TV & Not-So-Silent Movies

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There was a nice little scene on the TV show Leverage this past Sunday evening, a rare instance of “silent television.” The episode, titled “The 10 Li’l Grifters Job,” exemplified the playfulness that the series manages to achieve, in part as a counterbalance to the fact that Leverage clearly doesn’t have the biggest budget on television. The show is about a bunch of ex-criminals who take on corrupt big businesses, and it stars Timothy Hutton, who plays Nate, the ringleader, though the real standouts are a thief named Parker (Beth Riesgraf) and a fighter named Eliot (Christian Kane). (The latter’s ability to think, in advance, through a fight like it’s a chess game suggests his creation was maybe influenced by the character Midnighter from the comic series The Authority, which had been written for some time by Warren Ellis, whose series Global Frequency was almost turned into a TV series by Leverage co-creator John Rogers. [Update: apparently this is the case, thanks to a commenter’s citation.])

Anyhow, this past Sunday’s episode of Leverage, written by Geoffrey Thorne, involved a death that occurs during a costume-party murder mystery that is staged at the home of an exceedingly corrupt businessman. At one point, the Timothy Hutton character, who has dressed like Ellery Queen, and Parker, dolled up like Nancy Drew, find themselves at opposite ends of a stairway, needing to get by a guard. They have to remain silent, so they read each other’s lips. There are subtitles for us non-lip readers, but the whole thing already has the feel of a silent movie when a tinkling piano appears in the show’s score to seal the deal — not to mention that the guard is wearing a bowler hat, straight out of a Charlie Chaplin flick. (Hutton playing Queen is an in-joke, because his father, actor Jim Hutton, played the character in the 1970s TV series.)

True Grift: The characters Hardison and Parker dressed, respectively, as a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew in an episode of the series Leverage that briefly flirted with the concept of “silent television”

The sequence is one of the longest wordless non-action/non-sex/non-people-in-labs-with-colorful-test-tubes scenes on television in recent memory. TV musicals, as series and as standalone episodes, have been the rage for some time now, and despite being a huge admirer of the late Dennis Potter (whose The Singing Detective is the ur-text for most fourth-wall-breaking, singing-and-dancing television spectacles), I’d say it’s high time that silent TV episodes had their moment. Being an intimate medium watched generally in the privacy of one’s home, television lends itself to the silent treatment.

What’s sort of funny, as a side note, is that neither Ellery Queen nor Nancy Drew has ever been the subject of silent movie, at least to the best of my knowledge. The two earliest Ellery Queen are streaming online for free and are titled The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) and The Mandarin Mystery (1936). The first Nancy Drew movie appeared in 1938, more than a decade after The Jazz Singer (1927) popularized the “talkie.”

If the fun Leverage sequence brings to mind the ctheory.net essay on “silent television” by Robert Briggs that I wrote about last September, the quasi-anachronism is straight out of this great xkcd.com webcomic:

There’s an episode recap for “The 10 Li’l Grifters Job” at tnt.tv, and in the next week the full episode should stream there for free.

Shhh! It’s a Theater: Speaking of silents, as well as of history as viewed through the lens of the present: it’s pretty genius that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival teamed up with the local public library. Read about it at examiner.com. Truth be told, though, this is one of those situations when words in common suggest correlations where they don’t necessarily exist. For one thing, the projectors that played silent movies were notoriously loud. For another, live music performances were part of the experience, and the music was anything but silent, as part of its role was to cover up projector noise. The showings could, reportedly, get pretty rowdy. We only call them “silent” movies in retrospect. It’s an example, as debcha (in a message from her twitter.com/debcha account) recently reminded me, of what is called a “retronym”: Until the introduction of the talkie, silent movies were simply movies, just as until the introduction of the electric guitar, acoustic guitars were simply guitars.